[John_A]

Nobody wants to bother with NG ICE conversions.

Sure...just use the NG.

[John_A]

, I requested on numerous occasions for demonstration of significant growth in NG conversions or new-car purchases that suggest a trend. There has been none in all your years of trolling here.

Then you shouldn't have made the statement that "Nobody wants to bother with NG ICE conversions." when it isn't required, because folks who know how to run a business have skipped doing conversions and gone right to NG powered vehicles.

Good for them, using plentiful and cheap domestic fuels rather than contributing to the trade imbalance or worse yet, funding jihadists.

[Surf]

Do you know that much of your life is dependent on natural gas outside its use as an energy source?

Natural gas is a raw material in many of our products we depend on.

Almost all the helium we produce comes from natural gas.

Propane, synthetic fertilizers, ammonia?

They are totally dependent on natural gas.

Our population boom was fueled by synthetic fertilizers made from natural; gas. Once the gas dries up so does the fertilizer and a shortage of fertilizer equals a shortage of food.

Natural; gas is also used as an energy source to produce steel, glass, paper, clothing, brick, electricity

Ammonia was first made from electricity and water, both of which came from hydroelectric dams. Ammonia is now made from gas because it is cheep. Synthetic fertilizers are made by reacting minerals such as surfer, potassium, and phosphorus with ammonia. Synthetic fertilizer can easily be made from electricity made from renewable power sources.

Scrap metal is often melted down with electricity in electric arc furnaces to make new steel. solar furnaces have achieved temperatures over 2000C which is more than hot enough to melt the materials used to make glass. An electric arc furnace can also be used. Natural gas is commonly used to evaporate water in pulp used to make paper. Same for clothing. same for brick. renewable Electric heat can be used instead of natural gas.

Helium is created by radioactive decay and is concentrated underground in the same rock formations that trap natural gas. Earthquakes and volcanoes release it into the air. The concentration in air is constant and has been constant for billions of years on earth. Other inert gases such as Argon, Neon, krypton, and Xenon are produced by liquefying air. Helium can be extracted from air using the same method or it can be extracted from nuclear reactor waste.

Just because we make something with a cheep none renewable resource (natural gas) today does not mean natural gas is essential.

How many of our homes are set up for efficient heating with natural methods such as wood, pellet, passive solar?

My house is not.

I never gave this subject any thought until I learned about peak natural gas. And by then it was too late.

It is never too late to add insulation and take other steps to reduce energy consumption. Adding insulation, reducing air leakage through walls, and installing energy efficient appliances and lighting may not reduce your energy usage to full passive house standards, but it can get you very close. All it takes sis effort and commitment. You can do much of the work yourself at a much lower cost than work done by contractors. Efficient pellet and wood stoves can be installed in most homes. And you don't need to make major costly changes to your house to take advantage of natural methods.

[TheAntiDoomer]

Chasing the Dream of Half-Price Gasoline from Natural Gas


http://www.technologyreview.com/news/52 ... t=20140115

At a pilot plant in Menlo Park, California, a technician pours white pellets into a steel tube and then taps it with a wrench to make sure they settle together. He closes the tube, and oxygen and methane—the main ingredient of natural gas—flow in. Seconds later, water and ethylene, the world’s largest commodity chemical, flow out. Another simple step converts the ethylene into gasoline.

[RobertInget]

Still, GTL is based on an extra step(s) process. Instead why not forget the middle step by fueling directly with natural gas.
Wikipedia:
"17.8 million natural gas vehicles as of December 2012, led by Iran with 3.30 million, followed by Pakistan (2.79 million), Argentina (2.29 million), Brazil (1.75 million), China (1.58 million) and India (1.5 million).[9]"

Fuel cells can use natural gas as feedstock.
(Device used to generate hydrogen from fuels such as natural gas, propane, gasoline, methanol, and ethanol, for use in fuel cells.)

The first steps along the way to energy efficiency should not follow old worn out models (like ethanol) . KISS

[Tanada]

The hope for finding more valuable uses for natural gas—and making natural gas a large-scale alternative to oil—doesn’t rest on Siluria alone. The abundance of cheap natural gas has fueled a number of startups with other approaches. Given the challenges that such efforts have faced, there’s good reason to be skeptical that they will succeed, says David Victor, director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California at San Diego. But should some of them break through, he says, “that would be seismic.”

Pay special attention to the last line. So far this is an interesting lab experiment but two key factors remain. 1) will it scale up to an industrial level of production, say 5 MMbbl/d in the USA? 2) how high will the price of Natural Gas go if this technology is widely used? IOW does it really matter if we get gasoline from Petroleum or Natural Gas if it costs too much for our economy to work as we expect it to work?

[ROCKMAN]

A simple question for folks seeing " Half-Price Gasoline from Natural Gas": is that based on the $14/mcf price we paid for NG during the winter of 2005 or the $4/mcf we paid just a few years later? Or based on the $2/mcf we paid in 2012? Or is it based upon the 200% increase in NG prices we've seen since 2012? IOW are those economic based on the low price of NG we had in 2001 or the 700% increase we saw just 3 years later? That would seem to be a critical question to be asked by folks who would have to spend $billions in a 3+ year process to build out a GTL plant.

A well designed economic model will always deliver a correct computation. Just sometimes the assumptions used in a model are a load of crap. LOL. IOW if frogs had wings they would have to pay $6/gallon for unleaded.

[rollin]

Ah, chemistry. Can't live with it and after you learn enough about it you wish you could live without it. Shades of Edison.
So now there is a low energy way to convert natural gas to liquid fuel. In order to supply the US with natural gas derived fuels for transport, the production output would have to be doubled. Since that will not happen, the penetration into the market might hit 5 percent before the price starts to rise and the further it goes the higher the price. The prices will level out and there will not be much saving, plus there will be more CO2 output into the atmosphere and more fracking (if the price keeps going up).
I wonder if the natural gas used to produce tar sands fuel would be better put to direct use through this process. More than likely the process will merely shift the export of bitumen to Asia.
Unlike the technology that used a low temperature organic catalyst to convert CO2 into methanol, this one will be used since it feeds the fossil fuel producers.

[TheAntiDoomer]

MORE:

Petrochemical alchemy: Cheap gasoline and plastics, produced from cheap and abundant natural gas, is almost here

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1747 ... lmost-here

Siluria, after five years of research, seems to have finally stumbled across a cheap method of converting natural gas into gasoline. Because natural gas is much more abundant and less in demand than crude oil, it’s only one fifth of the price — about $20 for the natural gas equivalent of a $100 barrel of crude. After Siluria’s conversion process, it may be possible to halve the price of gasoline and other oil-derived products (commodity chemicals, plastics).

[ROCKMAN]

rollin - "I wonder if the natural gas used to produce tar sands fuel would be better put to direct use through this process." But that's the beauty of the oil sands: the price of the NG Btu's is so much less then the price of the oil sands Btu's. Even if it took 1.1 Btu of NG (taking in all the cost factors) it would still be profitable to use it to make 1 Btu of oil. Of course, those economics would degrade as the price of NG rose or the price of oil decreased. And no...I would try to guess where the balance point might be.

[ROCKMAN]

"...about $20 for the natural gas equivalent of a $100 barrel of crude." On what basis: Btu equivalent? $ equivalent? Does that number factor in the conversion cost of NG to motor fuel? And lastly no one in the country runs their vehicle on oil...they use gasoline or diesel. So now one has to figure out that relationship. Just as one has to figure out how much the $billions in GTL plant costs would affect the final cost of the product. After all it isn't only just the actual operations cost to convert to a liquid that matters but has to include amortization of those huge plant costs. After all why haven't we seen a huge number of GTL projects started since oil prices boomed and NG prices crashed. Even if this new technique can greatly reduce the operational costs what would it cost to build a commercial size GTL plant...the same as existing technology or would it be less...or more?. Have they even bothered to estimate what a commercial size plant that used this new method would cost? Making a few gallons of motor fuel on a work bench doesn't prove anything regardless of what it cost to do it IMHO. And even if that production cost is lower than existing technology the cost of building a new plant based on this technology has to be factored in.
Without those details a $20 NG = $100 oil is rather meaningless IMHO.

[RobertInget]

Despite all predictions, we really don't know how much gas we can produce.
I suspect when most if not all flaring stops in the US, that might be an indicator.
(as long as flaring, on and off shore, continues, we have too much gas, IMO)

Brazil in the 1970's out of desperation, converted enough vehicles to run on sugar cane
alcohol to avoid disaster. Six years ago ultra deepwater 'pre-salt' promised Brazilians
a now familiar refrain "(insert country) will be energy independent by 20XX"
"Brazilians, like Americans today were arguing back and forth should Brazil become an
oil exporting nation or use the bounty at home"? In fact all that pre-salt oil did not live up to expectations.. not as yet, anyway.
This same tale is currently being repeated in South America's Argentina with tight shale.

I suspect technology will not stand still and while not limitless, gas production will continue to grow long enough to either kill us all or help prepare for a world coping
with hunger, population displacement, sever flooding, massive storms, tidal surges,
methane blowouts. political and sectarian wars.

"With no money to be made at the end of civilization, there is still plenty to be had leading up to those years".

[Pops]

Notice the location of the blue line




157BCF below last year - 15% less, and 10% less than the 5 year average.

Fill-er up! LOL

[TheDude]

Even if this new technique can greatly reduce the operational costs what would it cost to build a commercial size GTL plant...the same as existing technology or would it be less...or more?

Pearl GTL cranks out 140 kb/d, final cost was ca. $24 billion. Not cheap. And that's tapping into the world's largest NG field, too.

[seahorse3]

I had high hopes for Boone Pickens NG push and wind energy push and the wind energy tanked and he is still losing money on NG

[Plantagenet]

100 Years of Natural Gas

In his 2012 state of the union address, Obama said, “We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy.”

Given the huge amount of NG ---a 100 year supply!----it's almost inevitable that GTL and CNG and LG and electricity from NG are going to play an increasingly important role in US transportation.

[Simon_R]

Like all things I suspect that when the cost of oil starts to rise again, at a certain point the large GTL plants will be economical and then will be built, and at that point we will all be told that there is a virtually unlimited supply of oil due to this new technological wonder.

[ROCKMAN]

First, that 100 year supply BS is based upon what: a major switch to NG to power our vehicles? A complete switch to NG by eliminating all coal fired plants in the US? No…it’s some made up number of how much NG someone thinks we’ll produce compared to how much we are using TODAY when almost no NG is being utilized for vehicle transport and we still burn a lot of coal to make electricity. Today the US has enough oil RESERVES to power every vehicle in the country. The problem is we can’t produce it as fast as we burn it. And if we switch to NG to run most of our cars are we going to be in the same situation: lots of NG RESERVES but we can’t get it out of the ground faster then we’re burning it? So do we then start importing a huge % of that NG just as we are doing today with oil?

“…when the cost of oil starts to rise again, at a certain point the large GTL plants will be economical and then will be built,”. Here’s the problem with that supposition: the last time oil prices climbed that high the world economy crashed and the price of oil/motor fuel collapsed along with it. That obvious fact isn’t lost for the folks who would have to invest 100’s of billions needed to expand GTL plants to any significant level. And then there’s the obvious relationship between the price of oil and NG: when oil prices boomed around ’08 NG prices also boomed to levels about 3X what they are today. So what prices do the GTL investors use to estimate the cost of their feedstock: the $2/mcf we had just a couple of years ago, the $4.25/mcf we have today or the $12/mcf we had just 5 years ago? One needs to have a very certain estimate of that cost to consider investments that could require 5+ years just to recover the initial capex let alone start making a profit.

These are essentially the same questions I posed before. I’m still waiting for the equally detailed answers.

[TheAntiDoomer]

More effort by ROCKMAN to pump prices for his own interest, meanwhile:

Energy Outlook: Natural Gas Plentiful, Inexpensive

http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/2014/01/0 ... expensive/

The darkest days of domestic energy production weren’t that long ago. But key shifts in energy policy in recent years paved the way for entrepreneurial drilling companies to begin tapping into vast underground reserves of oil and gas from coast to coast. Today, natural gas is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel, opening huge supplies of tight gas, coalbed methane, and — led by advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — shale gas, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistics arm of the U.S. Department of Energy. Natural gas production also has benefited from a ready-made infrastructure from long-established pipeline transportation networks, gas treatment facilities, refineries, and supply chains, according to research firm IHS.

[Simon_R]

Hi Rockman

Point taken. To make GTL profitable would require quite a specific set of circumstances, or government guarantees.

Simon