The Crestone Eagle, November 2007:

Future gas or past gas?
Natural gas, propane & biogas
by Nicholas Chambers

We all use gas. Propane, natural gas, or the products derived from them. Fossil-derived gas is about as American as cherry pie and gasoline. Some would even tout its benefits for being cleaner burning than other hydrocarbons, and available domestically in profitable quantities. The trouble is that a big company wants to extract it from our backyard, the Baca National Wildlife Refuge. It is indeed a subject for consternation and stout resistance, as our community has well demonstrated. Hats off to these efforts.

To further the cause, informed solutions could go a long way to accompany the protest. Solutions like innovative design, so we use less and yet do more; and conservation, so we are living within our means, as the rest of the world already is or will need to be.

We also need to ask ourselves: do we, in fact, want to bring our energy liability closer to home where we can keep an eye on it, or to continue to import the resources we currently use from somebody else’s backyard?

The fact of the matter is this: if nobody bought the products derived from Lexam’s business practices, they wouldn’t be drilling. It just so happens that, well, we all use gas. And if they don’t drill here, where? Everywhere in the American west is feeling the pressure, and we don’t need any more offshore fossil purchases. If not natural gas, what? What are the future feedstocks from which we’ll derive methanol for biodiesel production, propane, and many of the hardware products that we buy from the Crestone Mart?

It is a conundrum we are probably becoming accustomed to: Damn, how come our habits of society are all of a sudden so environmentally, politically, and economically problematic?

To illustrate the natural resource potential within our region, here is a brief synopsis of the domestic fuel gases currently employed by the global market.

Natural gas and propane: the fossil gases
Natural gas is methane (CH4) that formed from the anaerobic decomposition of plant and animal matter that lived millions of years ago. Like coal and oil, natural gas remained trapped in the earth until tool-using hominids figured out how to access and make use of it. A nuisance at the burgeoning of oil well-heads, it was simply flared off until a market developed for it. It is odorless (distributors add a scenting compound called mercaptan), costly to liquefy, and carries about 1,000BTUs per cubic foot—in other words one cubic foot of gas can raise the temperature of 125 gallons of water 1° Fahrenheit.

Natural gas is very important to industry, not only for heating, but also as the feedstock for many products such as paints, plastics, antifreeze, medicines, and methanol, to name a few. Together with residential domestic use and electricity generation, natural gas use accounts for about 22% of America’s energy portfolio and is present within 61% of American homes. Our neighbor, the San Juan basin, has produced 25 trillion cubic feet of natural gas thus far. This is almost as much as America consumed in 2006.

Natural gas is mostly used where consumers can hook directly into a pipeline such as in cities and infrastructure corridors, which are extensive. It is said that if you put all of America’s interstate natural gas pipelines together end to end, it would stretch 12 times around the Earth!

The sister of natural gas is propane. Rural communities are more familiar with this gas, as propane liquefies much more easily than natural gas, and thus it is possible to store 270 times more gas in liquid form in our backyard storage tanks, barbeque grill tanks, and delivery trucks.

Propane is actually a by-product of natural gas drilling, where it is separated out from natural gas along with the likes of ethane and butane. In fact, in the early days of natural gas pipelines, propane and these other gases were quite problematic because they would condense into liquid form at low points in the pipe where it would run under a stream, for example, and plug the flow of natural gas.

As much propane is sourced from natural gas drilling as is derived from oil drilling and refining. It is a more complex gas (C3H8), with two and a half times the BTUs of natural gas. It is also odorless and colorless, with mercaptan also added. It accounts for only 2% of America’s energy usage, but much more actually goes into industry and petrochemical manufacturing.

Biogas: non-fossil methane
The irony of methane is that it doesn’t have to be fossilized to be of fuel value. Anytime air (oxygen) is excluded from an environment where there is organic matter, natural bacteria develop that are specifically suited to digest it while releasing methane as a by-product. The primary sources of contemporary biogas production are swamps, landfills, the digestive tracts of animals, melting offshore methane-hydrates, and closed loop human-made digesters.

More appropriately called biogas, this gas is 60-70% methane and 30-40% carbon dioxide, with smaller amounts of other trace gases. Corrosive hydrogen sulfide is a naturally occurring smelling agent (useful to detect leaks) and only needs to be simply scrubbed out before running the gas to an internal combustion engine.

Biogas can be produced from the resources and waste streams right under our noses. It is already being released as a greenhouse gas from the organic garbage that is dumped in our valley landfills. Municipal sewer systems, farms, and integrated communities can also be producers of gas. Utilizing conventional building materials in alternate design systems, communities can treat “wastes,” produce methane and high-grade organic fertilizer, all the while displacing their present demand for fossil resources.

Naturally, this gas can be used for high-temperature uses such as cooking and heating water, but also for creating electricity (via fuel cells or internal combustion engines), hydrogen production (it’s one of the most hydrogen-rich fuel sources), or for manufacturing. On the horizon is solar disassociation of methane into hydrogen and carbon, where the hydrogen goes into fuel applications and the carbon goes into extremely lightweight and strong manufacturing applications for automobile frames and bridges, etc.

After a secondary aerobic treatment of the organic biomass (the aforementioned waste) using Chlorella algae, the resulting fertilizer effluent is uniquely superior compared to aerobic compost. Almost all of its nitrogen is transformed into stable nitrates that plants can actually use, and zero emissions of ammonia, nitrogen, or nitrous oxides are released into the atmosphere. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 60% of the emissions of nitrous oxide (a greenhouse gas 270 times more powerful than carbon dioxide) “comes from conventional agriculture,” probably feedlots in general but also wherever livestock is raised where by-products are not treated as they could be. Integrated biogas systems can harness these emissions and transform them into valuable soil building amendments.

This aspect of biogas production, where two products (gas and fertilizer) are produced from one waste stream, can be useful for human communities that want to nvest in long term and de-centralized sustenance. For Asian cultures that were using firewood and animal dung for fuel, biogas digesters were a win-win solution because they could keep the forests on the hillsides, the fertility of animal manures in their soils, and provide fuel for the hearth. They also improved living conditions, created job opportunities, and kept more expenditures within communities. In the more industrialized countries such as ours, where fossil fuels have been artificially subsidized and ever-too-accessible, small community-scale biogas (ie. anaerobic septic systems) never quite caught on.

In order to curb the present thrust for new gas exploration around the West, there needs to be a demand for new sources of gas for fuel and industry. A current law of the present global system, whether we like it or not, is that supply follows demand. Unless we have an insurgence of radical Luddites taking over the American consumer market, the coming generations will need options and diversity for the New Energy Economy. As the counsel of wise men said to the king who demanded they find the meaning of everything for him, there is no free lunch.

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