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Welcome back. Module eight covers natural gas. This is the third of five modules on fossil fuels. In this
lecture, we'll look at the different forms and uses of natural gas. So let's get started.
Now that we've talked about coal, let's talk about natural gas, another one of the most important fossil
fuels. Natural gas has several uses and several retail forms. We use it in primary form for cooking and
heating, electricity production as well as feed stock for different materials. We have different retail
forms.
You could sell it as natural gas, compressed natural gas, CNG, or liquefied natural gas, which is LNG.
And it's compatible with pipelines or cylinders or ships. So we have a variety of uses and a variety of
forms and a variety of methods for shipping it around. Natural gas, just like coal, just like everything else
has its merits and drawbacks.
The good news in natural gas, it's relatively clean, compared with coal and petroleum. When you burn
it, it emits less pollution. It's domestically abundant, at least we think of that today. A few years ago, we
thought we were running out of natural gas.
But that story changes. It's relatively affordable today. It used to be more expensive, but today, it's
abundant and affordable. And it's flexible for use in many sectors. So this is good news about natural
gas. The drawbacks are even though it's relatively clean, it has nonzero environmental impacts. It still
has this impact on the environment.
There are significant problems with flaring at the sites of production, where we produce gas and we
have excess and we burn it. And there's safety concerns from leaks. And its historically had price
volatility. So there's some good news with gas and some bad news with gas.
If we look at the natural gas flow, it's a much more complicated diagram, compared to coal. That's one
thing to keep in mind. We get gas from more places, and we use it for more purposes. On the left are
the sources of the fuels, and on the right are the end use of the natural gas fuels. We get a lot of
natural gas from natural gas wells, as it makes sense.
But we also get a lot of natural gas from crude oil wells. These numbers are listed in TCF, or Trillion
Cubic Feet, of production per year. And we get about 22 TCF of gas from gas wells and about six TCF
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of gas from crude oil wells. So our total withdrawal is about 28 and 1/2 TCF per year.
We put a lot of that gas back the ground to re-pressurize We store a lot of it for several months in
underground caverns. We import some gas. We withdraw from storage each year to kind of balance it
out.
And we have a certain amount that we lose along the way, a certain amount that we vent and flare.
Some we add to storage. We have a balancing item, which is sort of an error term, where we don't
know what happened to that gas. We don't know what that is.
And in the end, we consume about 24 TCF of natural gas each year for these different sectors, about
4.7 TCF for residential, 3.2 for commercial, 8.2 for industrial, 0.7, less than one TCF, for transportation,
and 7.6 TCF for electric power. So we use gas for a lot of purposes, and we get it from a variety of
places.
Now, just to keep the energy in mind, one TCF is about the same as one quad of energy. Just like
1,000 cubic feet is about a million BTU, one TCF is about a quadrillion BTU of energy. So this whole
flow, we use about 24 TCF of natural gas. That's about 24 quads of energy.
So you can replace all these numbers with quads, and it will work just as well. Natural gas imports have
shrunk recently, while domestic production has increased. This is a good news story. We've always
produced as much gas that we needed. Until about three or four decades ago, we had separation. We
started to consume more than we produce.
We made up for the difference with imports, mostly by pipeline from Canada, but also by ship from a
different places. However, in the last few years, our imports have dropped, our production has
increased to maintain pace with our consumption. Our consumption and production have both
increased.
We produced more, which made prices lower, which meant we used more natural gas in other places
where it was price competitive with coal, for example. So this has been a story of shifting dynamics in
our energy production and consumption. This growth for natural gas has primarily been for electricity
generation.
We use natural gas in industry. That's gone up and down over the decades with our recessions and
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growth periods. We've used in residential sector for cooking and heating and climate control. We use it
in the commercial sector and also for transportation.
The natural gas for transportation is primarily for natural gas pipelines. We use natural gas
compressors to move the gas through the pipelines. That's not really much for gas trucks or buses yet,
but that will grow with time. And then there's real growth over the last few decades in natural gas use
for electric power. Because natural gas is so easy and clean and convenient at the power plant, it has a
cost and performance advantage over coal in the markets.
Natural gas has multiple sources, as we discussed. There's associated gas, which is co-located with oil
reserves. And for many decades, gas was flared off as a waste product. That died down but is coming
back, as we've had oil boom in the United States. But there's non-associated gas, which are reserves of
gas that are independent from oil.
And places like Qatar and Trinidad and Tobago are famous for having a lot of gas, independent gas or
non-associated gas. They don't produce oil, but they do have gas. Sometimes people call that stranded
if that gas is isolated from markets. There's also shale gas, which is gas trapped in cracks and pores of
shale, coal gas, which is a gas associated with coal deposits.
Some people call that coal bed methane or coal seam gas or town gas. That's been used in the United
States since the 1800s. And then there's a growing segment, renewable natural gas, which is like
biogas or bio-methane, where we make natural gas from organic material. Natural gas composition is
not pure. A lot of the fuels that I think of I think of are pure, but they're actually not.
Natural gas is primarily comprised of methane, which is CH4. However, it has many other constituents.
Those constituents include things like ethane and propane and butane-- different hydrocarbons. They
might have some contaminants or heteroatoms like sulfur and other things. So it's not a pure mix. It is
more a balance of different items.
And there's a certain energy target that people look for before it's ready for the gas grid. It also has no
natural smell, which is a safety concern, since gas is highly combustible. And so a smell is actually
added. It's a form of mercaptan, or SH4, that is added to help identify leaks with your nose.
SH4 has a similar chemical structure as CH4, but the S, the sulfur, is very easy to smell, because it's
got a very strong odor. So we can be trained to recognize that as a natural gas smell. Natural gas has
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different characteristics. We could think of gas as being wet or dry.
Wet gas has higher fractions of liquid, such as ethane, butane, and propane. Dry gas has higher
fractions of methane and less of those other liquids. There's also dirty and clean gas. Dirty gas has high
fractions of CO2. Some people call that acid gas.
The CO2 is not useful as a fuel. So that's why it's dirty. It's like contaminating the quality of your fuel.
And there's sweet and sour gas. Sour gas has high concentrations of sulfur. Sweet gas has low
concentrations of sulfur.
So we could think in terms of our gas being wet, dry, clean, dirty, sweet, or sour. We have an extensive
pipeline infrastructure in the United States, one of the greatest pipeline infrastructures in the world for
natural gas. It's a huge market in places like Oklahoma, along the Gulf Coast in Texas, and some
pockets in the Northeast. We can move gas around the country, which is a useful advantage.
As extensive as this is, however, there are major pockets of area that are not covered by natural gas
infrastructure. A lot of the Mountain West is not covered, and there are parts of the Carolinas that just
don't have much gas. So as extensive as our pipeline infrastructure is, it still doesn't quite reach every
corner of the nation. One of the recent stories of natural gas has been its displacement of coal in the
power sector, which has helped reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Our carbon dioxide emissions have grown for decades, as a part of our story of our energy
consumption. As energy consumption has gone up, so have our CO2 emissions. However, in the last
two years, the story changed. We reduced our energy consumption and therefore our CO2 emissions
because of the recession.
As we have come out of the recession, our energy consumption has gone back up, but our CO2
emissions continue to drop, primarily because of fuel switching in the power sector from coal to gas,
because gas has less carbon emissions than coal per unit of energy, and from efficiency at our power
plants, our vehicles, and on our appliances.
So natural gas displacement has been part of the evolving story of carbon dioxide emissions in the
United States. One of the downside risks of natural gas is the flaring problem. We have a lot of natural
gas flaring going on. This is actually unusual in democracies. It's more typical places like Iran and
Kazakhstan.
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It's an emerging problem in North Dakota, where up to one third of the gas has actually flared. It's
become a big public interest story, because that gas that's flared is a wasted resource. It's also a
source of pollution. It's a source a light and a source of noise.
These are huge flames, dozens of feet tall, you can hear and see and smell. And so it's all the
environmental impact but without the economic value, because that resource isn't being harvested that
way. And part of the challenge is, pipelines are expensive. And gas is cheap, so the economics don't
work out very well to prevent that flaring.
That's a looming issue to keep track of, because this is one of the downsides of gas. Natural gas leaks
are another problem. These side by side pictures show what a methane storage tank or a natural gas
storage tank looks like in the visible and the infrared. The visible picture is on the left, and the infrared
picture is on the right.
And to the visible eye, you can't see any leaks coming out of the left picture. But on the right, in the
infrared, we can see the methane leaking. And the reason we can see it in the infrared is because
methane absorbs infrared radiation. It is infrared active, which means it's a very active climate change
gas.
So if we wish to deal with climate change, reducing emissions of CO2 overall is a good thing by
switching from coal to natural gas. But if we have leaks of that methane in the process, it might undo
the good of displacing the coal. This is a major environmental problem to keep track.
Gas leaks are also a safety problem, not just an environmental problem. If you have build-up of gas, it's
combustible. It can actually become very dangerous, because all you need is a spark or some other
trigger to cause a flame and therefore an explosion. And these types of explosions happen too often.
Homes will disappear because of build-up of gas. Someone goes off for a walk. They come back, and
their home is gone. And there's been many examples over the years, as aging gas infrastructure has
started to crumble and leak some gas. So this is another challenge.
Gas is clean. We like it. It's domestic. However, it burns well. That's one of the reasons why we like it.
But because it's not a solid like coal, where you can see where the coal is, you can't see the gas, it can
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build up in dangerous quantities and cause a risk. Don't forget to do the online exercises to help
reinforce what you learned in this module. I look forward to seeing you at the lecture.
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