We recently had a personal meeting with T. Boone Pickens followed by a conference call with the plan’s marketing staff. I am intrigued by this plan, which has good points, bad points, and more importantly a tremendous amount of marketing muscle and public visibility behind it.
We’re going to go piece by piece through it, discussing the implications, and today’s topic is the natural gas aspect of the plan.
Natural gas or methane is a colorless, odorless hydrocarbon that forms when organic material is buried a bit deeper than oil formation depths, with the longer/hotter "cooking" reducing carbon chain length and creating gasses rather than liquids. Natural gas wells generally produce methane and NGLs or natural gas liquids, which might also be referred to as condensates in certain petroleum industry reporting on production.
Oil wells producing mostly liquid very likely have a "gas cap", too, which is left in place to maintain the pressure of the well. Wells can also be pressurized with nitrogen, like the giant Mexican Cantarell field, and some wells in the United States are pressurized with carbon dioxide that is extracted from reservoirs in the American Southwest. For the sake of completeness I’ll mention that some oil fields get pressurized with sea water, like Saudia Arabia’s Ghawar
Natural gas is at once an easier and a harder fossil fuel to handle. The production of the gas is simpler – just get the hydrogen sulfide and other sulfur compounds out of the mix, use fractional distillation to separate the various specific gravities of fluids, and away you go. This is much simpler than all of the gymnastics required to handle a heavy (thick) sour(sulfur and/or metal contaminated) crude oil. The harder part comes in the transport of natural gas. If you don’t have a pipeline network then you have what is known as "stranded gas", which must be used locally or simply left in place.
So, natural gas is already used as a transportation fuel, but here in the United States it gets used in fleet vehicles in certain situations. City busses where particulates where a problem, airports use it in the little tugs that move baggage, but otherwise it isn’t terribly common.
Mr. Pickens says this is a good idea and in one regard I totally and completely agree with him; it is far better for America if we spend energy dollars on resources available here rather than transferring our wealth to the Persian Gulf states. This and this fact alone means we have to consider this idea carefully, even if we disagree with Mr. Pickens politics, even if we’re deeply concerned about CO2 emissions, and even if we have some alternative idea that pleases us immensely. The Pickens Plan has penetrated to the level of the NASCAR fan, while battery powered this or rail electrification that are the realms of the educated, and dare I say it? Yup, liberals.
I’m concerned about how much gas is really available. The large supplies Mr. Pickens references are based on shale fracture recovery. A well is drilled down for a ways, then the bore turns horizontally for a mile or more. The drilling gear is withdrawn and then water mixed with sand is pumped in under great pressure to fracture the rock and force the sand into the cracks, allowing a path for the natural gas. The sand used comes from Nebraska, where wind drive deposits from glaciers provide tiny grains of uniform size in very large quantities. These fractured fields produce quite a lot of gas for twelve to eighteen months, paying for the drilling operation, then they promptly turn to what the industry calls a stripper well; a slow producer that just barely earns its keep.
Production by these means is not a well understood quantity. I worry that we’re going to be raiding our balance sheet in one area to build a lot of wells that are going to produce a bit and keep us moving that direction, then slow dramatically. We could envision a hundred year strategy, plunge in, and end up with just a decade of transportation fuel and then we’re right back in the same boat only with another massive investment of time and money wasted. And we haven’t even begun to talk CO2 emissions.
I also really like a gaseous fuel because I think it’ll benefit the Ammonia Fuel Network’s plan to get us using ammonia, the only renewable hydrogen carrier we can actually handle, as a transport fuel. A manifold that can handle natural gas doesn’t need much in the way of changes to handle ammonia. I’ve solicited an opinion on this from Dr. John Holbrook of the Ammonia Fuel Network and he hasn’t responded yet ... but it’s a complex issue.
As I mentioned in the previous diaries on the Pickens Plan I think that a way to reduce that complexity into an analytical thing rather than an exercise in marketing and politics would be best for us as a nation. The modeling work of the Millennium Institute does just that. Alan Drake chose to use them for his work in rail electrification and the funds came from ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, a group who certainly understands the energy industry and the threat that peak oil presents to our civilization.
(UPDATE: OK, the last of the three is out - please discuss:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
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