Natural Gas     

      Below.

• Growth of natural gas supplies
• Different types of natural gas
• Safety issues
  
• The global scene
• Flaring                              

June 2010: An MIT report suggests natural gas will provide an increasing share of America's energy over the next several decades doubling it's share from 20% to 40%, mostly at the expense of coal. link

July 2012: Will gas become too expensive? With prices that are way below production costs a fiasco is playing out in the natural gas industry that doesn’t happen often in a free market, and when it does happen, it’s usually short and brutal for all involved. Producers, if at all possible, are switching to drilling for oil and natural gas liquids (priced like oil), still a profitable activity. Thus, capital is now being channeled to where it can make money. Drilling for dry natural gas will continue to decline as the long delayed sweep of creative destruction is scouring the industry. The largest producer, ExxonMobil, given its monumental size and worldwide focus on oil, will weather the fallout just fine. But the second largest producer, Chesapeake Energy, is struggling. It’s trying to dump assets to raise cash to deal with its mountain of decomposing debt. Other producers that haven’t diversified away from dry natural gas are in a similar quandary.  link
 
March 2010: The natural gas shale boom in North America has more than doubled discovered gas resources and can supply more than a century of consumption at current rates, an IHS CERA study said. However the study said uncertainties about shale gas include stringency of future carbon legislation and viability of carbon capture and storage technology, and concerns about how hydraulic fracturing might affect underground water tables has prompted Congress to consider increased regulation. link

According to the Energy Information Administration, energy from natural gas accounts for 24% of total energy consumed in the United States. Natural gas burns more cleanly than other fossil fuels. It has fewer emissions of sulfur, carbon, and nitrogen than coal or oil, and when it is burned it leaves almost no ash particles. Being a cleaner fuel is one reason that the use of natural gas, especially for electricity generation, has grown so much and is expected to grow even more in the future because of increasing world supply. For both power stations and transport of course, there are environmental concerns: as with any fossil fuel, burning natural gas produces carbon dioxide which is a significant greenhouse gas. For an equivalent amount of heat, burning natural gas produces about 30% less CO2 than burning petroleum and about 45% less than burning coal.  

The process of turning natural gas into a liquid removes most of the water vapor, butane, propane, and other gases that are typically found in regular natural gas, leaving predominantly methane. There are differences between Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and Compressed Natural Gas (CNG). more  
However, in absolute terms it does contribute substantially to global emissions, and this contribution is projected to grow. According to the Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition, there are currently 150,000 Natural Gas Vehicles (NGVs) on the road in the United States today, and more than 5 million NGVs worldwide. In fact, the transportation sector accounts for 3% of all natural gas used in the United States. link

Curbing climate change by sealing gas leaks: Because of leaks at oil storage tanks, gas fields etc. some three trillion cubic feet of methane leak into the air every year, with Russia and the U.S.the leading sources according to the EPA's official estimate. (This amount has the warming power of emissions from over half the coal plants in the United States.) Unless monitoring is greatly expanded, they say, such emissions could soar as global production of natural gas increases over the next few decades. EnCana, the Canadian gas producer, using infra-red cameras detects leaks and says fixing them is relatively easy, saving energy and money. It is also a cheap, effective way of blunting climate change that could potentially be replicated thousands of times over, from Wyoming to Siberia,  energy experts say. link

August 2012: Leakage control leads to less methane in the air. A team of atmospheric chemists report there’s a lot less methane leaking from oil and gas wells than there used to be. Methane is a major component of natural gas, and, said lead author Isobel Simpson, of the University of California-Irvine, in an interview, “as natural gas has become more valuable, it’s being captured rather than vented or flared.” However, an increase may occur due to the e3xpansion in fracking. link (See more under "Flaring at bottom of page.) No longer a waste gas - link

As it becomes a major international commodity, for Russia it has become a geopolitical weapon by turning on and then off a pipeline to Ukraine and Western Europe. The great advantage of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is that it can be traded over huge distances and is no longer fixed by the length and geography of pipelines. Many environmentalists and energy analysts view natural gas as a natural bridge fuel between the dominant fossil fuels of today and the renewable fuels of tomorrow. This gas is now being piped and shipped around the world.  Six giant plants capable of cooling and liquefying gas for export are due to come on line in 2009. Countries such as Qatar, Russia, Indonesia and Yemen are investing $48 billion, and a seventh plant in Malaysia is being upgraded.  Even though there is a gas glut in the USA, gas industry executives expect that liquefied gas imports into the United States will at least triple in the second half of this year. Until the last few years, LNG was a high-priced necessity for countries that did not produce their own gas supplies or have access to piped reserves; but it now has become a cheap economic driver for countries like Japan with few energy resources.  link

August 2010: Major expansion in Australia by Shell. Royal Dutch Shell looks to invest $30- $50 billion by 2020. Because of improving technologies and increasing demand in Asia for cheaper-burning fuel, Shell plans more than 12 liquefied natural gas projects in Australia as it sees gas providing more than 50% of its production by 2012.   link
Update – May 2013 -Shell has already invested about $US40 billion in liquefied natural gas production plants, storage terminals and related systems, and it plans to continue pumping money into that business.  link   

November 2009: Gas reserves soar. "If Europe was to convert all coal-fired power stations to gas they would reduce emissions by 40%," claims Rune Bjornson who heads the gas division at Norwegian energy giant Statoil, pointing to how gas power stations emit about a third less than modern coal-fired power stations and about two-thirds less than old ones. link

Flaring and venting of natural gas is a means of safely disposing of waste gases through the use of combustion. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) in 2007 oil producers torched from 150 to 170 billion cubic meters (5,200 to 6,000 billion cubic feet) of natural gas per year. This amounts to more than five percent of global natural-gas production. If the gas were sold in the United States it would have a market value of around $40 billion. According to Bent Svensson, head of the Global Gas Flaring Reduction Initiative at the World Bank, gas flaring also harms the climate. Their report says that flaring produces around 400 million tons of carbon dioxide per year - equivalent to 30% of the European Union’s gas consumption - and amounts to 13% of all greenhouse gases that industrial countries need to cut by 2012, according to the Kyoto Protocol. The World Bank's Global Gas Flaring Reduction Initiative is meant to ease the earth's atmosphere of 32 million tons of CO2 by the year 2012. link 

May 9 2013: Fracking flares coming to British countryside.The British countryside could be dotted with hundreds of naked flames several metres high after the head of Britain's biggest fracking company warned that any production of shale gas would involve “flaring off” leakages. Green campaigners argue that flaring is nonetheless environmentally hazardous, producing carbon dioxide, as well as noise and light pollution. Industry argues it is far better to flare leaked gas than to let it vent into the atmosphere. The British government banned fracking for just over a year, after the first hydraulic fracturing in the UK was quickly found to have caused two significant earth tremors in the Lancashire.  However, the moratorium was lifted recently after the government concluded it was safe to continue the practice, as long as it was under close supervision. link

October 2012: Gas flaring target of London conference. Flaring mostly happens in remote areas where gas at the surface as an oil by-product cannot be brought to consumers. The London conference aims to press oil firms to reduce gas flaring. The World Bank says $50bn in fuel goes up in polluting smoke yearly although there have been substantial improvements, with a 40% cut in flaring volume in Russia, and a 29% reduction in Nigeria. But it says flaring still wastes 140 billion cubic metres of gas a year - equivalent to a third of the annual gas consumption in the European Union. The practice emits around 400 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Environmentalists have called for all flaring to be banned. link  

November 2009: Russia takes steps to reduce gas flaring. Moscow last week ordered oil companies to use "up to 95%" of the gases associated with petroleum extraction in a move designed to bank on the "billions of roubles" of gas wasted every year, the Kremlin announced. President Dmitry Medvedev said, "This pollutes the environment and sends tens of billions of roubles up in smoke."  link