Gas Usage & Value: The Technology and Economics of Natural Gas Use in the Process Industries [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This is another handy book from the good folks at PennWell that proved itself most beneficial and useful over the course of one of my extended projects at work. The book works equally well as an introduction to the topic of natural gas and as a good reference for those that have recurring dealings with one or more aspects of the natural gas industry.

Chief among the book's many merits is its currency. Published in 2006, it is both recent and timely, given the explosion of interest in the topic of natural gas. It also happens to be one of the few more current books on the natural gas supply chain on the market. Speaking specifically about the natural gas (NG) supply chain, the book gives the reader adequate introductory coverage of some of the different parts of the NG supply chain, from sources to end-uses. The actual book itself is not very long, coming in at a little under three hundred pages, and is organized around thirteen chapters, not including the preface, six appendices and the list of references. The text includes a lot of easy-to-understand graphs, charts and schematics that may prove to be of limited use to the more technically inclined but potentially misleading to the business person or environmental scientist. The book's basic format turns on presenting the technology for the NG use in question first, and then delves into its economics. This format, which is supplemented extensively with very accessible charts and graphs, also makes the book easy to read. Additionally, for those that are time-pressed, each topic is generally compact enough to stand on its own, making it easy for the reader to dip into the book for specific nuggets of information at any point. Finally, all of its references are within the last decade or so, again speaking to currency.

The book begins with an introduction which briefly covers units, common conversions, the basics of economic analysis (for the math-phobic, the text thankfully uses straight-line approximation for pricing and costing) and data sources emphasizing all of the heavy-hitting publications of the oil and gas industry, such as the Oil & Gas Journal and Hydrocarbon Processing, among others. The second chapter provides a good overview of global natural gas reserves, emphasizing the yawning disparity between NG demand and NG supply the world over, and does an adequate job of describing the different types of gas deposits (conventional versus unconventional) given its publication date. With regard to the various gas deposits, a lot more information has become available since the time of this book's publication, especially in the case of the unconventional, shale gas deposits. After going into the ins and outs of natural gas composition in the third chapter, the rest of the book focuses almost exclusively on uses of natural gas. Chapter four presents an energetic and economic comparison of the various fossil resources/fuels with which NG competes for uses. Chapter five focuses on the long-distance transportation of NG, and gives the reader a quick run-down on the three major options- pipeline transport, maritime transport (principally as liquefied natural gas (LNG), but an extremely brief treatment of shipping via compressed natural gas (CNG) is also presented in Chapter 11) and chemical conversion. Chapters six through ten emphasize the fundamentals of various uses of NG, from thermo-electric (Ch. 6) to various chemical conversions and production processes involving NG, like hydrogen (Ch. 7), methanol (Ch. 8), value-added chemicals using methanol as a feedstock (Ch. 9) and synthetic diesel production (Ch. 10). Chapter eleven, which talks about LNG and CNG, almost exclusively focuses on LNG, with scant treatment on its greenhouse gas and other environmental impacts. The extensive coverage of LNG can be explained from a historical standpoint, given that LNG was once in fashion until recently (circa 2008 thereabouts). Chapters twelve and thirteen round out the book with discussions on ammonia production and ore processing, respectively.

That said, and strictly from a process engineering standpoint, the book suffers from a number of key demerits. First, notably absent from the book is a detailed treatment of NG production methods, as well as some remarks, even at a cursory level, on the topic of natural gas distribution. However, the author can be forgiven for this relatively minor oversight, as after all the book focuses mainly on processes involving natural gas as a feedstock. Still, some treatment of each would have been nice, as it would have rounded out the NG supply chain and avoided the need to consult other books on the topic. Second, given the sudden prominence of hydraulic fracturing of impermeable gas and oil shales (the so-called 'fracking' in the press of late), more technical readers may find the book to be a bit dated. Third, the economic work-up for each NG process depends on a few very select and specific examples culled from the published literature, making it difficult to extract generalized formulas that can be applied to similar processes. Those with a business/economic background may end up being misled if this is overlooked; however, those readers with a serious number-crunching bent may find the economic analyses presented throughout the book to be too simplistic and a bit under-done. Fourth, the book provides the reader with little insight into the environmental impacts of processes incorporating NG, over and above the concerns about greenhouse gas emissions (or other pollutants, for that matter) and of late, water usage and pollution that is now in fashion. Finally, while the book is good at framing particular processes, which without a doubt is a great help to those that are new to the NG industry, engineers looking for solutions to design problems (over and above the basics of modeling an idealized process and recovery rates) will have to consult the heavy-duty technical tomes for this (UGH!).

In sum, this book provides a good overall treatment of most of the activities involving natural gas, pitched moreso to a layman's and businessperson's perspective than to an engineering perspective. As an aside, I would have liked to see the supply discussed first, which in my mind would be the first part of the book, and then in the second part the reader would get detailed treatments of the processes using NG, with a bit more elaboration on resource requirements, material and energy balances, and environmental impacts. Still, I found it very good at helping me to frame various processes, develop basic models on the technical side and determining the relevant engineering questions to ask, but I had to overlook the economic analyses due for a number of unrelated reasons. Overall, while is a great, one-stop book for the businessperson or scientist, engineers will have to treat it as an entry point and read it in conjunction with other, more challenging texts.