Bakken Shale Flaring Burns Nearly One-Third Of Natural Gas Drilled, New Study Finds [View all]

[Bill USA]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/bakken-shale-flaring_n_3669649.html

NEW YORK, July 29 (Reuters) - Oil drillers in North Dakota's Bakken shale fields are allowing nearly a third of the natural gas they drill to burn off into the air, with a value of more than $100 million per month, according to a study to be released on Monday.

Remote well locations, combined with historically low natural gas prices and the extensive time needed to develop pipeline networks, have fueled the controversial practice, commonly known as flaring. While oil can be stored in tanks indefinitely after drilling, natural gas must be immediately piped to a processing facility.

Flaring has tripled in the past three years, according to the report from Ceres, a nonprofit group that tracks environmental records of public companies.

"There's a lot of shareholder value going up in flames due to flaring," said Ryan Salmon, who wrote the report for Ceres. "Investors want companies to have a more aggressive reaction to flaring and disclose clear steps to fix the problem."

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R3 Sciences Begins Construction on Micro Plant Gas To Methanol Process
http://www.prweb.com/releases/gas_to_liquid/methanol/prweb3660304.htm
(emphases my own)

R3 Sciences announced today that they are building a commercial scale, skid mounted gas process system capable of producing up to 500,000 gallons per year of methanol. The R3 Sciences methanol production system is the first of its kind to employ several key advancements in micro-plant and gas-to-liquid technology. This gas-to-methanol micro plant represents the culmination of several years' work by both internal as well as external research team at R3 Sciences.

A world bank review states that "over 5.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are wasted annually" which equals about 25% of the United States total gas consumption. This gas flaring releases over 400 million tons of greenhouse gases as carbon dioxide annually.

Methanol is considered an essential chemical intermediate for many consumer products and fuel components. It is a building block for biodiesel and fuel cells are now using methanol as a hydrogen source worldwide to generate electricity. Here in the U.S. methanol production moved offshore years ago, taking advantage of cheap natural gas feedstock in other parts of the world. Methanol can serve as a valuable energy storage resource, allowing stranded natural gas to be converted into a more easily transportable liquid. Today, very little methanol is produced in North America, with most methanol produced in other regions around the world where large volumes of natural gas are stranded. In North America and in other regions, considerable volumes of smaller gas sources are simply flared releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The R3 Sciences gas to methanol micro plant process offers an alternative to simply wasting natural gas by burning it in a flare.

Until now, the predominant method for producing methanol has involved feeding large natural gas volumes into refinery scale, Fischer-Tropsch systems to produce methanol. These systems typically operate at high pressures and high temperatures. The R3 Sciences gas-to-methanol micro-plant will operate at much lower pressures and temperatures, which lower the cost and complexity of operations.
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The methanol could be added to ethanol being blended with gasoline and reduce our imports of petroleum. In addition, of course, we should be making methanol from biomass sources to replace gasoline. We could make enough methanol to replace about ALL the gasoline we burn in cars and light trucks today.