Natural gas is rapidly becoming a strategic fuel of geopolitical importance.
Gas has grown from a marginal fuel, consumed in regionally disconnected markets,
to a fuel that is now being transported from remote sites across great distances.
Increasingly, natural gas is the fuel of choice for consumers seeking its
relatively low environmental impact, especially for electric power generation.
For example, the International Energy Agency predicts that the electric power
sector will account for 60% of the increase in future gas demand. As a result,
world gas consumption is projected to more than double over the next three
decades, rising from 23% to 28% of world total primary energy demand by 2030,
and surpassing coal as the world’s number two energy source. Eventually,
gas may even overtake oil’s number one position as a primary energy
source in many large industrialized economies.
The growing importance of
natural gas supply from remote regions to the world’s
modern economies will force new thinking about natural gas based energy supply
and energy security. This thinking will need to be backed with technology
improvements, reduced logistics costs, and international co-operation to
meet global long term demand for natural gas.
In this review, we discuss
the potential use of natural gas hydrates as an energy resource, followed
by an evaluation of the potential for use of a 780 mm scf/yr capacity natural
gas hydrates storage facility to supply distributed power generation and
small scale chemical manufacturing plants with natural gas supply during
short term pipeline supply disruptions. Results from this study show that
the technology and conceptual economics for the potential use of manufactured
natural gas hydrates as a new storage option for reliable natural gas supply
is competitively viable in places where natural gas pipeline infrastructure
exists for distributed consumption.
By Ron Smith
