Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on October 15, 2012
What Should We Do With All This New Natural Gas Supply?
Maybe, just maybe, you can turn it into a true alternative to oil.
It wasn’t all that long ago — the 1970s — when American natural gas production was waning. If you look at the graph above, production of natural gas hit a peak in the early ’70s that it did not reach again until the late ’90s or supersede by a great margin until just the past few years. Almost all of the recent production bump has come from unconventional sources — shale gas, most prominently. And, if the projections of Energy Information Administration are to be believed (a subject of legitimate debate), the United States, China, and Canada are about to experience an explosion of natural-gas production.
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal in conversation with industry entrepreneurs shaping our future. See full coverage
On the political level, natural gas is a winner on the right and (most of) the left as a domestic fuel that also (with some disputes) generates less CO2 when burned. So, let’s take this bounty at face value and say that we’re going to be awash in natural over the next few decades at a time when oil production — especially in the US — is in a slowish, long-term decline.
Given that context, it’d make a lot of sense to see if you could make some things that are currently made with crude oil with natural gas. You’d have steady (or even declining?) feedstock costs while your crude competitors were getting killed.
That’s the basic idea behind Siluria. Their basic technology can take natural gas and convert it into ethylene. Three interesting things about ethylene. First, it’s the most widely produced organic compound; more than 110 million tons of the stuff were made in 2011. It ends up in stuff like plastic bags and antifreeze. Second, it’s actually a very simple compound. Methane, i.e. natural gas, is one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms. Ethylene is two carbon atoms bonded to four hydrogen atoms. Third, once you’ve got ethylene, you can build the mix of hydrocarbons that we call oil.
“The investment proposition behind what we’re going after is making natural gas into an economically advantaged and abundant competitive replacement to oil,” Siluria’s president Alex Tkachenko tells me in the video below.
But it’s not easy to string together a bunch of natural gas molecules. And that’s where their core technology — a new kind of catalyst — comes into play. It’s based on the work of MIT’s Angela Belcher, who uses different organisms (literally, living things) to build complex new materials. She has figured out how to play with the DNA of these organisms so that they produce different (and previously very difficult to manufacture) materials like the catalyst used in Siluria’s technology. The best analogy I can think of is coral: biological creatures build a structure that can then be repurposed for other things. That’s basically what’s going on but at much, much smaller scales.
Returning to our original question, there have been several plans about what to do with the natural gas bounty. The most prominent idea is to stick methane into the transportation sector, which runs almost exclusively on oil. Natural gas cars already exist, though the fueling infrastructure remains sparse. Some people think you should put the U.S. truck fleet on natural gas and concentrate the fuel infrastructure spend on the nation’s trucking corridors (i.e. highways).
Siluria’s answer to the question, however, is more interesting than rebuilding the entire nation’s transportation fuel system. They want to make use of that infrastructure by solving the scientific and technical challenges in turning methane the gas into ethylene.
In a post next week, I’ll try to handicap their chances of success. The short version: Things certainly are going well, but there’s a long way to go.
6 Comments on "What Should We Do With All This New Natural Gas Supply?"
Plantagenet on Mon, 15th Oct 2012 10:45 pm
Potential good news on the NG front. Ethylene is a major product of oil refineries and the biggest component of the chemical industry—-being able to make it from methane would be wonderful.
DC on Tue, 16th Oct 2012 12:36 am
A lot effort being expended in order to keep the status-quo rolling.
Like he says here;
Q/“The investment proposition behind what we’re going after is making natural gas into an economically advantaged and abundant competitive replacement to oil,” Siluria’s president Alex Tkachenko tells me in the video below.
IoW, the as long as the ‘replacement’ is somehow derived from fossil-fuels, is a heavy clumsy liquid, is toxic, and can be poured into the same vehicles using the current equipment used to dispense gaz-o-line,then game on! But, if it were for example, to be an electric train, a bike, tram, well, then, thats not even up for discussion is it? Left un-stated is, if such a magical combination of properties hes hoping to bundle were possible previously, think weda looked into by now? Nor does he discuss just who would control the supply and distribution of such a magical fuel if it ever came about(doubtful) Him and his company? Somehow I doubt it. You see the current system of gas-burning 18wheelers and passanger cars does not exist because its remotely efficent, but because its extremely profitable, and gives it owners near blanket control over most, if not all world govts. I just cant see the bio-tech\chemical industries becoming the new energy cartel. Theyll simply sell it to the current oil cartel and then *they* will decide to use it.
…or not
BillT on Tue, 16th Oct 2012 1:07 am
Best to just leave it where it is and force the change now rather than after we have destroyed the ecosystem we need to live. If we try to burn the last of the carbon fuels, we will turn the world into a planet that does not support human or maybe any life above microbes and virus’.
DMyers on Tue, 16th Oct 2012 1:54 am
Okay, I’ll say it again. Natural gas has a history of failing to live up to its promises. When you throw in the unconventional aspect, sure you attract a little unconventional interest, but it’s likely to be a big disappointment.
Look at those gold bars in the above graphic. They look huge. It would take centuries to run that dry. There’s so much, we have to ask the question, what to do with it.
The sense and suggestion of such abundance seems to be the real hooker with this thing. There’s so much, we can go wild with it and try all kinds of things.
When I hear the mention of tight oil or gas, I must admit I undergo a brief moment of arousal. Tremendous subliminal potential. I like things tight. Tight is good.
The good thing about tight is that it isn’t loose. But loose is a preferable condition in oil or gas extraction. It takes the same energy to make loose, as it did to make tight. Where does that energy come from?
Let’s not treat this unconventional bull as a promise of revival. It should remain in its rightful position as the option of last resort.
Bill on Tue, 16th Oct 2012 3:19 am
If we run transportation on natural gas then we will quicky deplete that resource also. When would peak gas occur?
The next generation is screwed anyway.
Sharpie on Tue, 16th Oct 2012 4:55 am
“What Should We Do With All This New Natural Gas Supply?”
We’ll do what we’ve always done…deplete it as quickly as possible.