Oil and gas companies often hear that consumers want them to be “energy” companies. This seems to mean generating electricity, heating homes and businesses, and moving cars and trucks with something other than fossil fuels.
Some companies have certainly heard that message and have decided—if you believe their advertisements—to go beyond petroleum. Their planned expenditures, however, often reveal other priorities.
Turns out, most oil and gas companies prefer to remain just that: hydrocarbon finders, producers, processors, transporters, and marketers and those that serve and supply this process. They know too well that, for the immediate future, burning hydrocarbons is how the world must meet its energy demand, however unpopular among some that approach might be.
Nonetheless, trickling out with greater frequency in the last several months have come stories about industry companies—service companies, in two cases cited below—that illustrate some of the “greener” projects in which parts of the industry are getting involved.
Nature’s other gases
In late April came news that New Jersey-based Linde North America and Houston-based Waste Management would join forces to convert landfill gas into clean vehicle fuel.
The venture plans to build an LNG production plant at the Altamont Landfill near Livermore, Calif., to convert landfill gas into a clean vehicle fuel. The announcement touted the project for offering a “unique opportunity to ‘close the loop’ by fueling hundreds of collection trucks with clean fuel produced from garbage.”
The companies will install systems to purify and liquefy landfill gas that Waste Management collects from the natural decomposition of organic waste in landfill. When it begins operating next year, said the announcement, it will produce up to 13,000 gpd of LNG.
‘One small step for a man…’
The US Department of Energy website states that 1.5 gal of LNG is about 1 gal equivalent of gasoline. Not much conservation there. But, the attraction of natural gas as a vehicle fuel in any form has always been its clean-burning nature: less CO2 going into the atmosphere. But what about the energy needed to keep it refrigerated to –260° F.? Details; details.
Linde North America Pres. Pat Murphy said the companies’ efforts are “capturing and reusing landfill gas for vehicle fueling, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions” by more than 30,000 tons/year. The announcement doesn’t reveal how reaching that level is calculated.
In Europe, gas from another biological source appears to hold some promise.
GE Energy’s Jenbacher gas engine is powering an Italian farm’s first biogas plant, the Baita del Latte farm’s plant in Limena, in the north of Italy near Venice. According to the GE energy announcement earlier this month, the power plant uses biogas created by the digestion of a wet mixture of animal waste and “agricultural biomass” materials, such as corn and rye.
The Jenbacher type J320 GS cogeneration has an installed electric-generation capacity of 1.06 Mw, with an efficiency of 40.8%, according to GE Energy. The power plant is equipped with a heat-recovery system that uses waste heat from the jacket water.
The electricity produced is supplied to the Italian power distribution network, while thermal energy is recovered and used to power the biomass digestion process, the farm’s housing facilities, and cattle sheds. The Jenbacher engine is fueled by biogas created from 20 cu m of cattle effluent and about 50 tons of biomass each day.
By using biogas instead of fossil fuels to generate power, said the company, the project will reduce the equivalent of about 5,000 tons/year of CO2. That’s what 257 US residents emit in a year, according to latest figures from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (www.mnp.nl).
Another small step.
Giant leap?
It remains to be seen if such projects can form sufficient critical mass with other small steps to generate a “giant leap for mankind” (Sorry, Neil). “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t ….” Some leaps are easier than others.
Whether these isolated and often curious projects really hold the promise for efficient use of waste and significant reduction of greenhouse gases, their proliferation is encouraging. Human ingenuity never ceases to amaze.
One larger fact seems abundantly clear, however: We need all sources and forms of fuel to meet global energy demand, no matter how esoteric the technology or smelly the source.