The demand pressures that are raising prices of oil and natural gas-and, therefore, the profits of oil and gas producers-also throw light on a range of paths for companies committed to supplying energy far into the future.
Some of those courses lead to more exploration for and production of conventional oil and gas. Others point to unconventional oil-such as oil sands and shale oil, as reported in the special report beginning on p. 22.
Other routes to future energy supply are, at this moment, less distinct. If demand continues to grow at recent rates, there will have to be many of them.
Who knows what the energy industry will look like 50 or 100 years from today? Many struggle to guess, but no one can be sure.
What seems certain at this point is that demand will grow beyond the capacity of oil and gas, including whatever supply emerges from unconventional sources, to keep up. The future is therefore bright for nonhydrocarbon energy sources.
Many proposals
OGJ receives more presses releases than it can use about proposals to produce energy other than oil and gas. Some of those proposals are commercial or nearly so now; some will develop into commercial energy schemes with time; some will fail; and some never will begin. Furthermore, some new energy schemes displace petroleum fuels in one application, usually transportation, but require increased consumption of oil products in their production.
What’s important is that, at a time of many questions about the ability of oil to meet growing demand, there are many proposals for alternatives.
Here are a few recent examples of projects not just proposed but under way to prove technologies for oil and gas substitutes:
Five fuel-cell cars, powered by hydrogen instead of gasoline, were delivered last month to Canada to be used in the first-of-its-kind Vancouver Fuel Cell Vehicle Program. The Canadian government collaborated with Ford Motor Co.-Ford of Canada, Fuel Cells Canada, and British Columbia on the 5-year, $9 million program, which is one of a number of hydrogen-related programs targeted for implementation before the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Vancouver and Whistler.
Also last month, a biodiesel production facility opened in Denton, Tex., that will help supply the city’s fleet. Denton formed a public-private partnership with Biodiesel Industries of Greater Dallas-Fort Worth to produce as much as 3 million gal/year of clean-burning biodiesel made from vegetable oils. The city will use the fuel for its diesel vehicle fleet with B20, an 80:20 diesel-biodiesel blend. The production facility itself is powered by another alternate fuel: landfill gas.
Cascades Fine Papers Group Inc.’s Rolland Division has joined forces with Waste Management Inc. of Canada unit Intersan and Gaz Métro to produce biogas from nonrecyclable waste for the production of fine papers. Saint-Jerome, Que.-based Cascades, through a $2 million (Can.) investment, reported that Intersan captures biogas made from the decomposition of waste buried at its Sainte-Sophie landfill. Gaz Métro then transports the gas through a 13-km pipeline to Cascades’s mill, where it supplements energy needed to power the paper production equipment.
Small steps
Whether they’re taken by oil and gas companies or newcomers to the energy business, small steps toward new and sustainable energy supplies are important. The commercial value of small steps may be marginal at this point.
But so was the commercial value of oil when it was first found oozing on the surface.✦
