Energy prognostications at this time of the year are as common as weather forecasts but often less accurate. In either case, the future becomes history more rapidly and painfully than we like, reminding us how myopic and ignorant we remain.
So it is for 2010 and its likely role in the evolution of energy sources to fuel global economic activity.
Not everyone agrees this activity and the human-derived carbon fuels that now run it are at fault for the current climate crisis—or even that such a crisis exists. This is not the place for that debate. For better or worse, consensus among world governments and scientists is pushing toward less dependence on carbon fuels.
It is possible that 2010 may stand in history a bit more brightly than other years, as a time when human efforts toward reducing carbon fuels turned a corner and thereby turned the world's climate away from disaster.
Certainly, the past year yielded examples of such efforts. And it's important for oil and gas companies that many of those efforts employed natural gas as the fuel to reduce carbon emissions.
Skies and roads
In October, a Qatar Airways Airbus A340-600 completed the first commercial passenger flight using a fuel made from natural gas. Flying from London to Doha in 6 hr, the aircraft used Rolls-Royce Trent 556 engines.
Shell developed and produced the equal blend of synthetic gas-to-liquids kerosine and conventional oil-based kerosine. The hybrid fuel burns with lower sulfur dioxide and particulates than conventional oil-based kerosine, says the company.
Prospects for a cleaner burning fuel should hearten ship owners and operators as well as airlines, given the pressures on ocean-trading vessels to reduce emissions.
Shell says Qatar will lead the world in producing GTL kerosine starting in 2012, when the first commercial quantities from Pearl GTL are to be produced. Pearl will produce about 1 million tonnes/year, "enough to power a typical commercial airliner for half a billion kilometers," the company says.
In the US in November, a joint venture of Waste Management Inc. and Linde North America began producing a clean motor-vehicle fuel at Waste Management's Altamont landfill near Livermore, Calif.
The process employs a scaled-down version of a mixed-refrigerant LNG technology Linde installed at Statoil's Snohvit 4.1-tpy LNG plant near Hammersmith off Norway. The Altamont plant converts landfill gas—mostly methane—to more transportable LNG that is then revaporized and burned in Waste Management's collection trucks.
Built and operated by Linde, the plant can produce up to 13,000 gpd of LNG, enough to fuel 300 of Waste Management's 485 LNG waste and recycling collection vehicles in 20 California communities, says Linde. Since commissioning in September, the plant had produced 200,000 gal of LNG by November.
Steve Eckhardt, head of business development, alternative energy, for Linde, told OGJ that the process eliminates the need for methane flaring at the landfill and reduces overall carbon emissions, compared with diesel fuel, by 20-30%/year. The site continues to operate a small carbon dioxide flare, he said.
Finally, last month AT&T awarded Clean Energy Fuels Corp. a contract to convert 463 Ford E-250 vans to run on CNG. Clean Energy's subsidiary BAF Technologies Inc. will do the work for delivery in second-quarter 2010. BAF was already converting 600 vans for AT&T that were to be delivered by Jan. 1.
In December, Clean Energy said AT&T had requested BAF to obtain CNG cylinders for 463 more conversions to be completed in third-quarter 2010, "although no formal order" had been made.
In addition to its CNG capacity, Clean Energy owns and operates two LNG production plants with combined capacities to produce 260,000 gpd of LNG with capacity to expand to 340,000 gpd.
The future?
Do projects such as these represent the future? That seems beyond question. More importantly, will they merge with a growing flood of similar projects to contribute to global reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions?
If they do and 2010 becomes the pivotal year for such a wave of cleaner fuels, OGJ editors stand in a unique and enviable position to observe this evolution. Their mission is to cover oil and gas operations in the context not only of the integrated industry segments but also the wider world.
Cleaner hydrocarbon fuels—such as those mentioned above—promise that industry has many decades of life left.
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