http://thetimes-tribune.com/news/business/ugi-proposes-lng-plant-in-wyoming-county-1.1882344
The plant could supply a variety of industries, spokesman Matt Dutzman said. Natural gas peaker plants, smaller generating stations only run during high demand periods, are one target market.
Others include oil and gas drilling rigs, truck fleets and remote industrial users not well connected to pipeline grids.
Displacing diesel
“It’s using local Pennsylvania gas,” Mr. Dutzman said. “The LNG that we’re going to be producing is going to be used largely to displace diesel fuel.”
Nationally, LNG prices are highly competitive with diesel, said Tom Kloza, Oil Price Information Service’s global head of energy analysis, in an email on Friday.
LNG has been priced at a fraction of diesel prices for the last four years.
But that difference was more substantial from 2010 to 2014, when oil was above $100 per barrel. “I believe prices of $40 to $75 a barrel are more likely for the next few years, but one never knows,”Mr. Kloza said.
LNG is the “new fuel” that will power industry and road transportation well into the 22nd Century. Compact, clean-burning, and one of the most easily extracted of “fossil fuels” (as natural gas), it is a matter of developing the specialized technology to handle the product quickly and safely.
The energy component required to cool and liquify natural gas could be recovered by using waste heat from the burn process to volatilize the LNG, resulting in less waste heat getting out into the environment, a sort of regeneration effect.
Good engineering practice, in fact, should be directed at reclaiming the maximum amount of heat from any industrial process, and putting it to effective use.
Now if a fuel cell that could use methane completely in its process could be developed, that would solve SO many problems.
Get busy, engineers.
RE: “... one never knows.”
LNG/CNG powered truck fleet power vs diesel makes so much sense for many reasons, yet the leading companies like WPRT and CLNE in the field have struggled for many years to show even a profitable quarter, let alone a profitable year. Electric power for heavy over-the-road truck transportation is vaporware at best. Now with the over-supply of oil coupled with a sputtering world economy, the future of NatGas as a transportation fuel is even more of a gamble.
T.B. Pickens has been the lone big voice promoting the concept and was met with failure to lobby Congress to pass Federal subsidies. However, there has been some activity among municipally owned bus and truck operations to contract with private enterprises to operate them, somewhat like the municipal electric power and phone companies of the early 20th century. What do you think of this approach?