The station, located approximately 30 miles northeast of Denver on County Road 22 in Fort Lupton, Colorado, will serve the fueling needs of the company's DJ Basin natural gas fleet. Encana Natural Gas Inc. will own the station that will fuel the local fleet of field vehicles. The station is located at the Kerr-McGee Platt Valley Plant, which is owned by a subsidiary of Anadarko Petroleum Corporation.
"This new station represents another significant step toward converting the U.S. fleet to run on cleaner-burning natural gas," said Eric Marsh, Encana's Executive Vice-President & Senior Vice-President, USA Division. In addition to serving the local fueling needs, the station will supply fuel to Anadarko's and Noble Energy, Inc.'s expanding natural gas vehicle fleets in the DJ Basin. The growing needs of these three companies is expected to quickly take daily natural gas throughput to the station's capacity of 500 gasoline gallon equivalent (GGE) - fuel for about 50 vehicles per day.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Encana Opens First Natural Gas Fleet Fueling Station in DJ Basin, Colorado
Link here. From PennEnergy:
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Here in Minneapolis, MN we have had at least one natural gas "station" operating since the early 1970's.
ReplyDeleteNote the article saying that this new operation will have a capacity equal to "five hundred gallons of gasoline per day". That is the equivalent of 25 fill-ups of 20 gallons of gasoline each or around an hour and a half at one gasoline pump.
Natural gas is a gas compressed to 3000 PSI. Like diving SCUBA tanks or oxygen tanks used for medical or welding you get substantail heat from the compression of the gas during "filling" of the tank. One solution is a slow overnight fill of any high pressure gaseous tank.
The fill coupling is the area most prone to leakage so you want to do this in a well ventilated outdoor area. Same with storage of natural gas vehicles. The gas containment system is pretty good but you probably wouldn't want to park them in an unventilated garage.
None of these problems are insurmountable but there is a big "hassle factor".
Another factor to consider is the "rent seeking" or subsidies. Subsidies can "prime the pump" when a technology is new and needs infrastructure and numbers for mass production but we risk a "cargo cult" phenomena where you don't buy more if you believe there will be a future "rebate". UPS seems ideal for natural gas but they have only bought token and rebated vehicles so far. Let's say they order a large number and them the government offers a rebate. Would they get it for the pre-rebate purchase? It's rather like us seeing something on sale a lot but when we want to buy it we wait because we believe it will go on sale again.
I want natural gas to succeed, but the "inconvenience factor" is going to be a huge obstacle.
ReplyDeleteRecharging electric vehicles is also a huge obstacle.
UPS should easily be able to handle the "hassle factor" and they have the capability to order a large enough number of their "package cars" to get mass production standardization of natural gas related equipment.
ReplyDeleteThis is a spinoff business opportunity for UPS if they are the vanguard of urban natural gas vehicles. What I wonder about is the "cargo cult" aspect of this. If the government gives a big subsidy for these "alternative energy" things we might wait for this this rather than just develop it.
A personal example: This spring Menards had a propane "week wacker" type device for $50 after rebate. I considered it, but figured the small "propane torch" type tanks would be too expensive. Unspoken, is that these hand held tanks can be refilled from a regular propane tank (20 pounds or larger) with a $18 adapter that I have but borrowed to my brother for exterior paint stripping. It works so I could hit my brother up for propane refills. That said, I have a "cargo cult" mentality where I am waiting for this to go on sale again for $50 with rebate.
The following is a "work in progress" but over a few beers I did a rough draft on a natural gas powered locomotive. One option is a switcher or short line and the other option is unit trains where you have a mix of diesel and natural gas engines in a common "electrical grid" like a "slug/drone/slave". uses (actually, fairly easy to do). Basically, a unit train, which usually has three or four engines needs only one to "cruise". Weight and traction is needed to accelerate and for uphill climbs. With a "grid"
you can use the natural gas engine generator for primary and have the diesel along as a backup and for long uphill climbs. Final delivery of natural gas is relatively low pressure so rail cars that can be coupled could be easily replaced.
Enjoy this "sneak peak". Keep in mind that I am assuming rather old helium cars with steel tanks. Modern steel might bring down th weight some and increase capacity a bit with standard railroad wheel-sets.
Fun with BTU's.
With natural gas a “therm” is 100,000 BTU and around 100 cubic feet of natural gas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therm So to use “short math” one cubic foot of natural gas is 1,000 BTU.
Consumers getting their natural gas “heating” bill find it it therms but the standard commercial quantity is in One-thousand cubic feet or one million BTU. Thus, if the Henry Hub wholesale rate is $4 that translate to forty cents per therm direct cost.
That said, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_fuel#Fuel_value_and_price the BTU equivalent of diesel fuel or fuel oil is around fifty cents per gallon if we use the forty cents per therm, $4 per million cubic foot market price for natural gas. A lot of “dancing” before we get drive-shaft power but hard to argue with fifty cents per gallon.
For compressed natural gas the best I can come up with is quarter million pound compressed helium rail cars. These are overweight and have triple axles on each wheel bogie. I don't understand why they
didn't build smaller rail-cars. They compress helium to 3,000 PSI. The empty weight is only 3,000 pounds less but with natural gas add 12,000 pounds.
Basically if you built rail-cars to standard weight they would hold around 200,000 cubic feet of natural gas. In terms of energy this is the equivalent around 1,750 gallons of diesel fuel determined by BTU.
Take off 10% for lost diesel efficiency and you are at 1,600 gallons diesel equivalent in a rail-car with pressurized natural gas. Compare that to a tanker rail-car that might hold 25,000 gallons.
This is why natural gas non-pipeline transport is economically but one or two tanker cars might be enough to power a unit train. It's a hassle but one sixth the BTU fuel cost.