NEWSLETTER

NGI in the News

PROFESSOR BENSON GOES TO WASHINGTON

NGI ON ENERGY SWITCH

Switch Energy Alliance (SEA) Announces Energy Switch Topics and Guests

Now is the time for Energy Switch, a high energy, beautifully produced, nonpartisan public television and streaming show, where viewers hear from America’s leading experts with different and sometimes conflicting viewpoints. Produced in affiliation with KLRU in Austin, Energy Switch breaks down the most important topics in energy to make them accessible, digestible and entertaining, and will be hosted by renowned global energy expert, Dr. Scott Tinker.

Episode to Watch: WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF NATURAL GAS?

Guests:

• Dr. Naomi Boness, Ph.D.: Managing Director of the Natural Gas Initiative, Stanford University

• Rachel Fakhry: Analyst, Climate & Clean Air, National Resources Defense Council

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LEARN MORE ABOUT ENERGY SWITCH

NGI ON MARKETPLACE TECH

Got to fly like an eagle (by which we mean, have an insignificant carbon footprint)

Marketplace Tech spoke with Evan Sherwin, a postdoctoral researcher in energy and resources engineering at Stanford University, about the kinds of sustainable jet fuels out there.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

NGI ON NPR

How natural gas has taken the place of coal in America's energy portfolio

NPR Host Peter O'Dowd talks with Mark Thurber, associate director of the program on energy and sustainable development at Stanford University, about America's reliance on natural gas.

Listen or Read the Interview Transcripts Now

Stanford Global Energy Dialogues

NGI Research

Turning stranded methane into fish food

Methane is emitted and flared across the United States because it is uneconomical to capture, clean and use. However, a new study by NGI-affiliated researchers finds that it is economically favorable to use stranded gas to support sustainable food production. This is achieved through use of methanotrophic bacteria—microorganisms which grow on methane to produce a high-quality, protein-rich biomass that is used as a feed in aquaculture. Importantly, the resulting feed product can offset the need for fishmeal, unsustainably harvested from the world’s oceans. This study finds that methanotrophic protein is economically competitive with fishmeal, and that using stranded methane from the United States alone could offset 14% of the global fishmeal market. Published in Nature Sustainability, this research was a collaboration between Dr. Sahar El Abbadi, Dr. Evan Sherwin, and Professors Craig Criddle, Stephen Luby, and Adam Brandt. A Nature Sustainability Behind the Paper blog piece further details the motivation and implications of the study.

VIEW ALL RESEARCH BRIEFS

A framework for a hydrogen economy

Hydrogen (H₂) that is free of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is emerging as a prime candidate for these purposes. Hydrogen and its derivatives such as ammonia¹ are receiving significant attention and resources in Europe² and Japan;³ the possibility of a “hydrogen economy” is being revisited in the United States.⁴ Designations such as gray, green, blue, and turquoise hydrogen are entering the lexicon, often evoking strong sentiments and opinions. But rarely do the public discussions offer a systems view of a hydrogen infrastructure that includes production, transport, storage, and use—and, most importantly, its economic viability.

VideoGasNet: Deep learning for natural gas methane leak classification using an infrared camera

Mitigating methane leakage from the natural gas system has become an increasing concern for climate change. Efficacious methane leak detection and classification can make mitigation more efficient and cost effective. Optical gas imaging (OGI) is widely used for the purpose of leak detection, but it does not directly provide quantitative detection results and leak sizes. In this study, we consider methane leak size classification as a video classification problem and develop deep learning models to classify the videos by leak volume

Designing reliable future energy systems by iteratively including extreme periods in time-series aggregation

Generation Capacity Expansion Planning (GCEP) requires high temporal resolution to account for the volatility of renewable energy supply. Because the GCEP optimization problem is often computationally intractable, time-series input data are often aggregated to representative periods using clustering. However, clustering removes extreme events, which are important to achieve reliable system designs. We present a method to include extreme periods into time-series aggregation for GCEP that guarantees reliable system designs on the full input data even though only the reduced data set is used for system design. Our method iteratively adds extreme periods to the set of representative periods based on information from the optimization problem itself until the energy system provides power reliably.

Estimating global oilfield-specific flaring with uncertainty using a detailed geographic database of oil and gas fields

Associated gas flaring during crude oil production is an important contributor to global warming. Satellite technology has made global flaring monitoring possible with high spatial resolution. In this study, we construct a granular database to geographically match global oil and gas fields with remote sensing flaring data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) from 2012 to 2019. The GIS database contains over 50,000 oil and gas fields and around 4,700 infrastructure sites (e.g., refineries, terminals) in 51 countries and regions, representing 96% of global oil production and 89% of natural gas production. Over 2,900 fields and 140 infrastructure sites in 47 countries contain matching flares.

Carbon implications of marginal oils from market-derived demand shocks

Expanded use of novel oil extraction technologies has increased the variability of petroleum resources and diversified the carbon footprint of the global oil supply 1. Past life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies overlooked upstream emission heterogeneity by assuming that a decline in oil demand will displace average crude oil 2. We explore the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions impacts of marginal crude sources, identifying the upstream carbon intensity (CI) of the producers most sensitive to an oil demand decline (for example, due to a shift to alternative vehicles). We link econometric models of production profitability of 1,933 oilfields (~ 90% of the 2015 world supply) with their production CI. Then, we examine their response to a decline in demand under three oil market structures.

Predicting Variations of Least Principal Stress with Depth in Unconventional Reservoirs from Laboratory Data Using the Concept of Viscoelastic Stress Relaxation

Variations of minimum horizontal stress (S hmin) with depth and geological layering are observed frequently in unconventional hydrocarbon reservoirs through field stress measurements. In this study, we show that these variations can be predicted by laboratory creep experiments performed on rock samples from representative geological layers utilizing the concept of viscoelastic stress relaxation. We present a modified viscoelastic stress relaxation power law framework that can be applied for normal and strike-slip faulting environments and show its application to a case study in a prolific unconventional oil & gas formation located in the northeastern United States.

Prior oil and gas production can limit the occurrence of injection-induced seismicity: A case study in the Delaware Basin of western Texas and southeastern New Mexico, USA

We demonstrate that pore pressure and stress changes resulting from several decades of oil and gas production significantly affect the likelihood of injection-related induced seismicity. We illustrate this process in the Delaware Basin (western Texas and southeastern New Mexico, USA), in which hydraulic fracturing and waste-water injection have been inducing numerous earthquakes in the southernmost part of the basin where there has been no prior oil and gas production from the formations in which the earthquakes are now occurring. In the seismically quiescent part of the basin, we show that pore-pressure and poroelastic-stress changes associated with prior oil and gas production make induced seismicity less likely. The findings of this study have important implications for the feasibility of large-scale carbon storage in depleted oil and gas reservoirs.

Steam-created grain boundaries for methane C–H activation in palladium catalysts

Defects may display high reactivity because the specific arrangement of atoms differs from crystalline surfaces. We demonstrate that high-temperature steam pretreatment of palladium catalysts provides a 12-fold increase in the mass-specific reaction rate for carbon-hydrogen (C–H) activation in methane oxidation compared with conventional pretreatments. Through a combination of experimental and theoretical methods, we demonstrate that an increase in the grain boundary density through crystal twinning is achieved during the steam pretreatment and oxidation and is responsible for the increased reactivity. The grain boundaries are highly stable during reaction and show specific rates at least two orders of magnitude higher than other sites on the palladium on alumina (Pd/Al₂O₃) catalysts.