Oil & Gas, Renewables, and Water

Conventional thinking is that hydrocarbons are ‘fossil’ fuels, and that the only way to get them is via extraction. Renewable energy is viewed as an ‘arms length’ alternative - one either does oil and gas or one does renewables. From a pure technology standpoint, such distinctions are meaningless. The economics are fast catching up - the situation is sufficiently complicated that the entire situation needs rethinking.

The first group of interested parties are policy makers - at present sovereign leaders, governors, and trading blocs are facing collapsing prices, correspondingly collapsing tax receipts, employment reductions, investment shrinkage, and in some cases remediation and clean up costs. For some this is great, for others a disaster, and increasingly it can be both. The US and UK, with big industrial interests and huge extraction industries, are merely moving pieces around on the board. Countries that are dependent mostly on extraction are in big trouble.

The second group are the industry players. This includes the majors and independents, but it also means in particular the various suppliers - geophysical analysts, pipeline operators, energy traders, etc. A huge amount of knowledge applies to the process of finding, extracting, and transporting hydrocarbons - much of this is just as useful in dealing with electric power transmission and water management.

Oil, Gas, and Wind Power

One of the original reasons for construction of massive wind turbines in West Texas was to power oil wells. In the early 2000s, power companies were in no mood to build 200Mw power stations ‘out in the middle of nowhere’. Wind turbines could be installed quickly, and scaled appropriately - if you needed 50 megawatts you put in as many turbines as did the job. Of course, in the middle of the night when the wind is howling, such turbines are producing more than anyone can use, but so what?

Offshore wind turbines are proving to be attractive for a number of reasons. The main one is NIMBY - people think that turbines ‘tear up the landscape’. When a platform already exists, as one finds in various parts of the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea, one suspects that plopping a turbine on top helps one avoid an expensive decommissioning process. Power consumers are left to enjoy their ‘viewshed’.

Someone who drives a truck for collecting oil or disposing of water wouldn’t think twice of hauling around turbine blades. The people putting up refineries and long distance electric towers are the same people putting up wind turbine pylons. Roughnecks might find that the pay for maintaining turbines and transmission lines is closer to average, however it is also predictable.

Long Distance Pipelines and Water

People are predicting that awful things will happen as the US ‘runs out of water’. What this means more particularly is that aquifers are depleted and/or that urban expansion will outgrow existing reservoirs. There is enormous infrastructure for long distance transmission of natural gas, oil, and refined products, however it is relatively uncommon to move water over such distances. Water is, in comparison to petroleum products, ‘cheap’, however it is also essential. Creating long distance water transmission networks is likely to need government involvement - such infrastructure will be used largely to insure supplies during droughts.

One of the side products of oil extraction is water - often brackish (salty). This is usually injected back in the ground, in some cases in such a way as to enhance oil production. Desalination processes have become more effective and efficient. In situations where the energy to drive the desalination is renewable, this water might as well be used to augment municipal or agricultural supplies.

Methane, Garbage, and Sewage

Methane is one of the decay products of organic waste (others are carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide). ‘Landfill gas’ is collected and used to generate power or is combined with other sources and piped to municipal users. Methane is the primary constituent of natural gas. To this degree natural gas is ‘renewable’ - breaking the link between ‘fossil’ and ‘hydrocarbon’. Sewers have similar decomposition outputs. As water becomes more valuable and the processes for cleaning it up more economical, sewage becomes increasingly simply a feedstock for producing pure water, natural gas, and various other chemicals.

Many organic waste products can be decomposed in ‘digesters’ - basically tanks full of (for example) the residues left over from brewing beer, where microbes break down the organic matter further, producing methane and CO2 as byproducts. In some cases such infrastructure is described as a ‘biorefinery’ - in short an ‘oil refinery’ that uses organic matter instead of oil as its input.

Energy Storage in Flow Batteries

Flow batteries have tanks with separate reactants, which are situated between electrodes where they chemically react to product electricity. The reaction product flows ‘out’ and is stored in a third tank. When the process is reversed, the chemical product of the electricity generation ‘flows backwards’ through the electrodes, where it is converted back to the original reactants. Companies are starting to commercialize these. While their viability isn’t yet clear, it’s worth noting that the ‘power storage’ situation is close to solution at the municipal scale.

People that build and maintain oil tanks probably wouldn’t give one of these a second thought. In short, another tank, another project, another contract. Often these would be built either in the area of, or to replace, oil storage tanks.

One side effect of such chemical reactions is heat (regardless of reaction direction). Such heat could be used to heat green houses, pools, or public buildings such as schools or airport terminals.

Sequestration and Security

CO2 in the atmosphere is eventually going to be taken up by organisms, and is ‘sequestered’ in plant mass. The current conventional wisdom is that if we stopped emitting CO2, it would take 100 years to return to preindustrial norms. When one has wells and coal mines, one already has the plumbing and repository for various forms of carbon. As renewable energy gets cheaper, at some point it becomes viable to simply convert CO2 back into either coal or oil (or something analogous, such as middleweight alkanes and/or anthracene). These would be pumped or deposited into ‘strategic reserves’. This would be a means for ‘managing’ levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. Such reserves would be situated in ways to make them useful near major markets - thus they would be near refineries and/or power plants.

Resources and Resolution

At present, ‘energy resources’ are viewed as reservoirs of oil, gas, coal, or other minerals (uranium, for instance). However, increasingly ‘resources’ are a mix of infrastructure and engineering talent - wind farms, solar plants, pipelines, and skills to build and maintain energy gathering infrastructure. A county’s ‘energy security’ is just as much a matter of knowing how to acquire and deploy renewable energy as it is having control over hydrocarbon deposits. Businesses should focus on maintaining a diversified portfolio of both natural and human energy resources - oil, gas, biomass, and turbines; but also engineering talent, patents, demand management, and refining/conversion plants. The focus should be on making sure that consumers have reliable access to power, water, and fuel; and that the resource portfolio be periodically rebalanced to exploit lower costs and greater efficiencies.

* post is from open source