Slide Presentation
Alternative Energy, It's A Puzzle
Presented by David O Trahan at the LIDEA Spring Conference, April 6, 2011, Lafayette Hilton Towers, Lafayette, Louisiana.
Alternative Energy, It's A Puzzle
The number of alternative energy ideas and concepts are flooding the market. What's really an "alternative" and what's not? When we consider the overall magnitude of our energy puzzle we must respect the fact there are few if any real alternatives able to produce a reduction in our dependency on fossil and nuclear within the next 25 to 50 years.
As a direct result of shale-gas development the growing inventory in natural gas resources has elevated natural gas to the role of a true alternative. In the U.S. it is estimated potential resources could be as high as 1700 trillion cubic feet, this would be a greater amount of energy than the combined reserves of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela combined.
With oil development comes flare gas. Flaring the gas is the only option many oil producers have at their disposal to deal with co-produced natural gas. In the U.S. in 2010 it is reported we flared over 165 billion cubic feet of natural gas. The WTO has reported a Global flare volume of 5 trillion cubic feet annually. By recovering these valuable energy resources in a distributed manner we can harvest the energy value in the form of methanol.
The concept is to provide a "scale-out" model versus a "scale-up" model. Rather than build elaborate networks of large pipelines to gather the natural gas, systems are deployed into the field. This eliminates the high cost of compressing gas over great distances to a centralized methanol production center. This is exactly what R3 Sciences has developed. A modular, transportable process system able to capture the smaller volumes of natural gas that otherwise go up in flames, approximately 200,000 standard cubic feet per day of natural gas. The modular system allows operators to locate in-field gas gathering systems and harvest even the smallest volume of potentially flared natural gas, converting it into a very easily handled fuel. Methanol is a liquid and stored and transported in the same way crude oil is stored and transported.
Natural gas is our next-generation alternative energy fuel and natural gas to methanol fills the need for a liquid, easily dispatched fuel compound.
Thank you to the staff and members at LIDEA (Louisiana Industrial Development Executives Association) for providing a opportunity to present this presentation on Alternative Energy.