Fuel Freedom co-founder and chairman Yossie Hollander and board of directors member John Hofmeister appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show on Wednesday, April 18, to promote domestically produced natural gas as a way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
In our quest for energy independence, we’ve run across quite a few different terms with abbreviations. So many, in fact, sometimes it’s hard to keep track. That’s why we’ve decided to organize them all in one place. Read up, bookmark the page, and become an expert.
Just in time for the Fourth of July weekend: Our very own John Hofmeister speaking words of wisdom about the need for the United States to wean itself off oil as its dominant transportation fuel.
“It’s incumbent upon the United States of America to become more oil independent,” Hofmeister said at a security conference in Israel in June. “Because it still relies on nearly 7 million barrels a day of imports, and in a nation that uses 18 and a half to 19 million barrels of oil per day, the loss or the risk of 7 million barrels a day of imports puts that nation at about two-thirds of independence, and that’s not enough for the world’s largest economy.
“So there remains an interdependence, until the U.S. can find independence, and it has every right and every responsibility to pursue independence. As does every other nation.”
Watch Hofmeister’s full talk at the Herzliya Conference in Tel Aviv:
Hofmeister knows of what he speaks: He was the president of Shell Oil Co., the American subsidiary of oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, from 2005 to 2008. The author of “Why We Hate the Oil Companies” now travels the world talking about the need for alternatives to oil. He’s not only on the board of directors and advisors at Fuel Freedom, he founded a nonprofit called Citizens for Affordable Energy.
U.S. crude prices closed at $56.96 a barrel Wednesday, down $2.51 or 4 percent, the biggest one-day drop since April 8. Compare that to last summer, when the price was above $100. But the market remains volatile, and Hofmeister said having oil at an affordable price long-term is necessary for national security.
“If you’re not taking care of yourself, no one else will,” Hofmeister said. “And so nations should look to their security — not just to their defense forces, but to their energy supplies — which in the United States, is why I’m almost entirely focused now on transitioning natural gas to transportation fuels, as well as biofuels, as well as electricity for transportation. Because the future of oil is simply limited. We’re not running out. It won’t disappear. But it simply won’t be available at this price for an indefinite future.”
Hofmeister expanded on another of his major themes: that natural gas, which is cheap and plentiful in the United States, could help the U.S. and other nations reduce oil consumption. Natural gas is used as a fuel in its gaseous, compressed form — as CNG and LNG — and it can also be processed into liquid alcohol fuel, ethanol or methanol.
“Over the next decade, nations like the United States, or like Israel, or like much of Europe if not the whole of Europe, that are not transitioning at least a third of their oil demand away from oil and toward natural gas will only look back in regret.”
(Photo credit: Poet Biorefining plant in Macon, Missouri. From FarmProgress.com)
You can thank Hernando de Soto for bacon and pork chops.
The Spanish explorer gets credit for introducing the pig to America, having brought 13 of them to Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1539. By the time of de Soto’s death, three years later, that passel of piggies had grown to more than 700. Yes, pigs grow quickly. They also poop, 24 hours a day, in great quantities.
That manure can be transformed into fuel for vehicles. So even though we’ve let all that pig poop — and cow poop, for that matter — go to waste all these centuries, more of it is being processed to extract methane, the principal component of natural gas.
All over the country, this renewable form of methane is being collected and fed into the nation’s natural-gas pipelines, and then transported to fueling stations to be used as compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG). The fuel is not only much cheaper than petroleum-based vehicle fuels, it burns cleaner: It contains about 23 percent less in greenhouse-gas emissions than diesel and 30 percent less than gasoline. Capturing all that methane instead of letting it float away from farms is also important, since the gas is more than 20 times worse for the environment than carbon dioxide.
There are some 191 renewable-methane projects on farms in the United States. These farms use anaerobic digesters, which involve storing the manure in tanks or ponds. The fecal matter, as well as food scraps and other farm waste, is broken down into smaller molecules, and the material usually is covered, to help elevate the temperature inside. That allows anaerobic bacteria (which don’t take in oxygen) to go to work on them. Methane is made as a result, and machines vacuum off the gas, cleanse it of impurities (like CO2) and ship it off to be used as fuel.
A renewable-methane plant outside of Memphis run by Clean Energy Fuels.
Livestock is uniquely suited to be a renewable fuel source, because cows and pigs are prolific producers of manure. According to the USDA, dairy cows account for about 80 pounds per day (per 1,000 pounds of animal weight). The equivalent in hogs accounts for 63.1 pounds per day.
At Circle Four Farms near Milford, Utah (about halfway between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas), a million and a half hogs are raised and taken to market each year. It’s the largest pig farm in the western United States, and every day those hogs produce a million gallons of manure.
Three years ago, a Provo firm called Alpental Energy Partners, which finances alternative-energy projects, noticed the potential of the massive farm. (How could one not notice? The odor from the facility can be smelled for miles.) Alpental built anaerobic digesters that turn all that poop into electricity that powers more than 3,000 homes in a town hundreds of miles away.
Such a project could easily provide the same benefits, but for drivers of cars, trucks and SUVs that run on natural gas, which also happens to be a “feedstock” for alcohol fuels that can run in flex-fuel vehicles.
Paul Stephan, managing partner at Alpental, said various incentives, including carbon credits and investment tax credits, which enhanced the revenue stream from the pig project. But those were complicated to secure. “If we didn’t have one of those [revenue] attributes, it would probably be more profitable for us to sell it as transportation fuel,” he said. “I think if I was going to go look at doing another project in the United States off of pig manure and methane, I’d probably sell it as transportation fuel.”
“I’m not proud of it, but I’m a reformed diesel guy,” said Andrew Douglas, senior VP of sales and marketing at Agility Fuel Systems of Santa Ana, California.
Douglas was among the dozens of attendees at the L-NGV2015 conference in San Diego last week, a gathering mostly aimed at the compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry. Agility retrofits tractor-trailers to run on CNG, and has produced 25,000 such vehicles since it was founded in 1996.
More and more companies are converting to CNG: In the early years the customers were mostly city transit buses and garbage trucks, but the shipping sector is taking advantage of systems that can stash more fuel on board and propel the big trucks longer distances. On the company’s new Saddle Creek Gen 5 model, four cylinders of CNG totaling 160-gallon diesel equivalent are stacked up behind the driver’s cab. The setup weighs more than 3,000 pounds, but it can travel 750 to 850 miles without refueling.
But the industry has challenges: Douglas said the goal is to get 10 percent of the nation’s heavy-duty trucks running on natural gas by 2020. The cost of such vehicles is steep, although Agility says companies can make that money back within 2 years.
“Eighty years ago there was a transition to an alternative fuel going — diesel,” he told a conference room of about 40 people. The industry is seeing a migration to a “new alternative fuel,” natural gas. Just as decades ago, price is the motivator.
Diesel is averaging about $2.86 a gallon, compared with $2.11 for CNG.
“I think we’re seeing an evolution to a cheaper fuel source, in this case, natural gas,” he said.
Later, showing off one of Agility’s behind-the-cab systems on a Frito-Lay truck in a cavernous room of the San Diego Convention Center, Douglas talked about being a trucking guy at heart, trying to convince trucking companies to switch away from a fuel that has been synonymous with big trucks for decades.
“Sometimes you have moments of doubt. And whenever I go there, I think to myself, No matter what the obstacles are, it’s about the price of fuel — or the differential (between NG and diesel). That’s what’s going to drive this.”
Fuel Freedom Foundation co-founder and chairman Yossie Hollander presented on the same panel as Douglas and Greg Roche from Applied LNG of Westlake Village, California. Hollander praised CNG and LNG, saying it’s going to be a “sustainable business for a long time.” But he reminded the panelists that the market for light-duty vehicles is 3.5 times bigger than the market for larger vehicles. “That’s the larger market here.”
One solution is to make liquid alcohol fuels, like ethanol and methanol, out of natural gas. Those fuels can run in many of the vehicles Americans drive already, without the need to buy a new vehicle or undertake an expensive conversion.
Fuel Freedom seeks to open the fuels market so all fuels, including CNG, LNG and alcohol fuels, are available to the consumer, not just gasoline. “We don’t have favorites,” Hollander said. “What we want is a supermarket.”
We’re headed to the L-NGV2015 conference in San Diego, where natural gas will be in the spotlight.
Natural gas has been getting a lot of attention lately, because the United States is producing so much of it. As Jude Clemente wrote in Forbes earlier this month:
U.S. proven natural gas reserves continue to soar to record highs. We now have some 360 Tcf [trillion cubic feet] of proven gas in the ground, recoverable under current market conditions, experiencing increases of 5-8% per year. Driven by the Marcellus shale play in the Appalachian Basin, Pennsylvania and West Virginia have registered the largest gains, with both state reserve totals more than quadrupling since 2010. In fact, Pennsylvania and West Virginia have accounted for about 60% of new U.S. gas reserves since 2008, although mighty Texas continues to plug along, upping its reserves by 20% since then.
The surge has occurred despite a steady decline in prices. Henry Hub spot prices are about $2.80 per million British Thermal Units, down from an average of $8.86 per MMBtu in 2008, as Clemente notes.
NG is running about 70 percent lower in price than the equivalent amount of oil, even with oil’s precipitous drop from last summer. That’s what makes natural gas an attractive alternative for transportation fuel.
Much of the discussion at L-NGV2015 will center on compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is being used in municipal fleets (official vehicles and transit buses) and industrial trucking (delivery, garbage-hauling) around the country. These fuels not only cost less than gasoline and diesel, they burn much cleaner, which is better for air quality and the environment.
Natural gas can also be converted into alcohol fuels to run in the cars, trucks and SUVs driven by the rest of us.
NG is “very, very cheap, and we need to take advantage of that,” Fuel Freedom co-founder and chairman Yossie Hollander said recently during a discussion about energy in Israel. “The greatest opportunity is a transportation one. Using a natural-gas product, whether compressed natural gas, liquid natural gas, ethanol from natural gas – you can make ethanol from natural gas, and another fuel called methanol – if we use all of them in transportation to replace oil, this will replace a $3 trillion industry around the world.”
We’ll be presenting more about this topic at L-NGV2015. Check out our Twitter feed (@fuelfreedomnow) for regular updates.
The natural-gas industry and people who promote gas as a cleaner fuel alternative need to “manage” environmental concerns about fracking, a key economist said at the fourth annual Governor’s Utah Energy Development Summit.
Dan North, chief economist for the credit-insurance company Euler Hermes North America, said Wednesday that despite the abundance and cheapness of natural gas compared with oil, only 3 percent of natural gas is used in transportation.
He said there are 17 million passenger vehicles around the world that run on natural gas (primarily CNG and LNG), but only 100,000 such vehicles in the United States. “This is an enormous opportunity going forward,” North said. “It’s terrific that we have this cheap natural gas.”
But, he added, “WE do have to manage one thing, which is the environmental concerns about fracking.” After listing all the countries, states and municipalities that have banned the oil-and-gas drilling technique also known as hydraulic fracturing, North said: “Environmental concerns have not been addressed well enough.”
President Obama’s latest effort to mitigate the effects of climate change will be to crack down on methane leakage from oil and gas wells, The New York Times reported.
The EPA will announce new regulations this week aimed at reducing methane emissions by 45 percent by 2025, compared with 2012 levels. Final rules will be set by 2016, the newspaper reported, citing anonymous sources.
Obama, stymied by Republican opposition that stands to become more solidified now that the party controls the Senate as well as the House, has increasingly turned to executive action, skirting Congress, to deal with climate change. The administration says the Clean Air Act gives it the green light to issue such mandates.
Methane, the primary component of natural gas, sometimes escapes from oil and gas wells, in addition to pipelines. Although the gas accounts for only 9 percent of overall greenhouse-gas emissions, it’s 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, another GHG that accounts for the majority of emissions.
The Natural Resources Defense Council applauded the proposed regulations, but the oil and gas industry said they’re unnecessary, since they’re already motivated to capture methane instead of allowing it to escape into the atmosphere. If it’s captured, it can be burned in power plants to generate electricity, making it a cleaner alternative to coal. Methane can also be used to fuel cars and trucks, as compressed (CNG) or liquefied (LNG) natural gas. It can also be converted into two types of inexpensive liquid alcohol fuels, ethanol or methanol.
Howard Feldman, director of regulatory affairs for the American Petroleum Institute, said:
“We don’t need regulation to capture it, because we are incentivized to do it. We want to bring it to market.”
That market would grow if the infrastructure for transportation fuels were expanded, creating more of an incentive to capture methane. The price of natural gas stood at $12.68 per million metric British Thermal Units (MmBTU) in June 2008, only to crash to $1.95 by April 2012. Last month the average was $3.43 at the Henry Hub terminal in Louisiana. Profit margins are still so low that oil drillers flare off much of it.
Let’s apply a bit of Talmudic dialect to the visible dialogue now going on in the nation concerning decisions to drill for more natural gas and related considerations concerning the effect that using natural gas as a transportation fuel will have on the environment.
Now on the one hand, the price of natural gas, like gasoline, has significantly decreased over the past months and some producers seem to be abandoning or limiting production at least for a time. To many, drilling in shale seems too costly for so little revenue per thousands of cubic feet. Besides, they say there is now too much natural gas on the market for too little demand and available infrastructure to get it where it’s supposed to be. “After so much hype and billions of dollars of investment, the nation is deluged with gas and not enough pipelines…One energy company after another, year after year, has written down its investments in Arkansas and in Texas and Louisiana,” said Clifford Kraus in The New York Times.
So far, the Times’ description of the gas market is relatively similar to the analyses of most experts. But don’t despair; lately, the definition of “expert” has taken a beating in light of the lack of confidence in the stability and the almost weekly amendments to projections of natural gas supply and demand. However, because the national unemployment rate will go up significantly if we abandon experts, let’s not abandon them, for the time being. Let’s, however, not grant them grace, adoration and pedestal-like obedience. They need to do better concerning use of data and methodologies. Our knowledge concerning the natural gas profile is at best uneven and at worst…well, you insert the word.
Try looking on the other hand of iconoclast Steven Mueller, CEO of Southwestern Energy. Mueller does not believe that current data concerning the relatively depressed condition of the natural gas market should predetermine his own and his company’s decisions. His actions, some time ago, in buying shale fields cheap and in discovering new fields have turned Southwestern Energy into one of the top natural gas producers.
Mueller shares the view that the natural gas market is now down and that some companies are pulling out, at least temporarily, or reducing production. But where other producers and analysts see problems, he sees opportunities. According to The Times, Southwestern just put $5 billion down to develop 413,000 acres of reserves in the Marcellus and Utica shale fields of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Similarly, he acquired another gas play in Pennsylvania for $300 million.
According to Mueller, gas will soon be moving up in price because of demand. He notes, “The situation is not as bad as the industry thinks it is….I am looking at it from a different angle and I think the odds are in my favor.”
Mueller seems like he is out of place using the other hand in the oil and gasoline industry. While his company’s activities are not without environmental problems and critics, he is unusual in that he has taken the lead among companies in searching for international and national solutions to methane leakage as well as extensive water usage with respect to fracking. Significantly, he has also seen benefits, where other natural gas industry titans have stayed mum, concerning the long-term use of natural gas for fueling hydrogen-fuel cars and for other transportation fuels. Additionally, Mueller views the continued conversion of coal-fired electric plants to natural gas as a done deal and a deal that will help sustain the industry and the environment.
Checking Google for recent stories about Mueller and other CEOs in the natural gas industry suggests that Mueller, contrary to most of the others, will soon be ripe either for sainthood or tenure at Mad Magazine. What? Me worry?
Sure, he has some critics who indicate his bet on natural gas is risky and a few, implicitly, suggest he will fail (some pundits and competitors no doubt would not be too sad if he does). Most Google entries, however, view him as somewhat of an outlier in the industry, whose commitment to growth has saved his company. They grant him the benefit of their respective doubts about his imperialism concerning acquisition of natural gas plays. Some view his environmental and GHG sensitivities as necessary in helping the industry move forward as a good or reasonably good citizen. Whatever he is or will be, Mueller will not be one to devote lots of time to the thought processes associated with on the one hand, on the other hand. He seems to like being a permanent on the other hand.
A new report released by the Canadian Pembina Institute and the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions looks at British Columbia’s (B.C.) liquefied natural gas (LNG) strategy to serve the lucrative Asian gas market through the prism of global climate change in a carbon-constrained world. “Natural gas is often described as a bridge fuel. The question is, how long should that bridge be?” says Josha MacNab, B.C. Regional Director for the Pembina Institute.
Read more at: Breaking Energy
