Hello. We're continuing here with energy sources in Energy 101.
We've looked at coal, we've looked at oil, we've looked at natural gas, and now
we're going to look at natural gas liquids.
Natural gas liquids is not something you hear about very often, but they're
becoming increasingly important because of the increased production that we're
getting from natural gas liquids. What are natural gas liquids? Well,
natural gas liquids is a by-product of natural gas production.
And they come at the well. In other words, they come out of the
ground just like natural gas. As a matter of fact, they come with
natural gas -- that's the reason they're called natural gas liquids, and they are
receiving increased attention due to the increased natural gas production.
And so we increase natural gas production, you increase the, natural gas
liquids that come with them. So, what are the natural gas liquids?
Compared to, if we look at the molecular structure, compared first to natural gas
itself, natural gas is a methane molecule.
1 carbon and 4 hydrogens and at atmospheric temperature and pressure it
is a gas. And as a matter of fact, to get it to a
liquid, you have to actually cool it to -260 degrees farhenheit.
No matter how high you take the pressure, natural gas will not liquify.
That is not true with natural gas liquids.
Natural gas liquids are those gases and heavier hydro-carbons of CH4 that come
out with natural gas. and if you pressurize the natural gas.
With natural gas liquids together the, natural gas liquids will form liquid
droplets and you can separate it. So the liquids that come out with the
natural gas is ethane. C2H6.
Propane, C3H8, butane, C4H10. Isobutane, which turns out to have the
same chemical formula, C4H10, but it's isomer of butane we won't deal with the
chemistry of what an isomer is for now. And pentanes which are C5H12, and
pentanes actually come out at Atmospheric temperature and pressure as liquids.
All the rest of them are, they actually come out as gas and don't liquify until
you pressurize it. But you, you're familiar with propane or
butane because we use it in our grills, our home grills to barbecue and things.
And we also use it in tanks and a lot of homes to heat homes.
So, but they have to be pressurized. And when we reduce the pressure, to
atmospheric pressure, which we do when we use them, just like in a gas grill.
Is the pressure regulated that drops the pressure.
From 50 or 100 pounds per square inch. Down to atmospheric pressure.
The liquid that's in the tank turns back into the gas, as they were when they came
out of the ground. So that's why we call them natural gas
liquids. They're gasses, except for pentane that
come out of the ground with natural gas. production and they are hydrocarbons as,
as we see here. So why are, for what are their general
characteristics? Well as I've already commented, they come out of the ground
with natural gas in the gaseous state. And, we then pressurize the mixture.
And we separate the natural gas liquids. And so, they all liquify when you
pressurize them. Except pentane, which is liquid and
atmospheric. And it comes out of the ground.
And atmospheric pressure is already a liquid.
But counter to these natural gas liquids. Natural gas itself even though we
pressurize is going to comes out of the ground to separate the liquids, the
natural gas itself will not liquify. As a matter of fact, it will never
liquify at atmospheric temperature no matter to what pressure you take it to.
That's just the nature of methane. So, we will talk to later about natural
liquified natural gas, LNG, which is totally different from NGL's.
So we got confusing, nomenclature here, but natural gas liquids.
Are these things that we just mentioned. The ethanes, the butanes, the propanes,
or the pentanes. And but if we take natural gas and
refrigerate it to extremely cold temperatures minus 260 degrees
fahrenheit. Then natural gas li, itself will liquefy
and we call that liquefied natural gas. So the liquid is on the front end, for
the liquefied natural gas, rather than the tail end of natural gas liquid.
So don't get confused over that the, the nomenclature that is used commonly in the
industry. So what is the production of natural gas
liquids and what's the trend? Well you can see from this graph that over here on
the right out here at 2011. The production has gone up significantly.
And it was fairly level from 1981 at one and a half million barrels a day, until
it grows gradually up to about 1.8 million barrels a day in 2007.
And since then has increased to about 2002.
Barrels of oil equipped barrels of liquids a day that comes out here in the
US with the natural gas and is used and marketed and processed.
So, production has gone up as I mentioned and that's because of the.
Horizontal, well, natural gas, fracking, that has surged natural gas production.
because the production of natural gas, and the production of natural gas
liquids, go up together. So we have had a surge, and that's why,
people are talking them more now. but that's the trend.
it's not dramatic. But it's up from 1.7, 1.8, to 2.2.
So that's about a 20% increase. Which is a signifigant increase.
So, how much is, is that, compared to crude oil? Compared to crude oil in
barrels. You can hear the showing the two
together, stacked together. The dark blue is the production of oil in
million barrols a day and we see how it declined from 1981.
Down to 2008, where it hit about two thou--uh 5 million barrels a day and now
has increased up to about 6 million barrels a day.
So, out here. So it's 6 million barrels per day here,
and, and here it was down about 5.7 or, 5, point 5, so, oil production has
increased. And, and natural gas liquids have
increased also by this amount right here compared to this back in 2008.
So it hasn't, it, it, it does add to the liquified petroleum production in the US
and we'll get to the confusion over that and how Comparing these and adding
natural gas liquids to oil is sometimes appropriate and sometimes totally
inappropriate, and we'll see why that it might be inappropriate because they
don't, they don't totally trade off you can't.
Utilize 1 for the other and displace oil, for instance, with natural gas liquids on
a 1 to 1 basis, well why is that? What are some of the uses for natural gas
liquids? The natural gas liquids is dominated by the ethane, we mentioned
before the chemical content and the different.
components of natural gas liquids. And here they are listed again, ethane,
propane, butane, isobutane and pentane. and but, you can see the largest
percentage of natural gas liquids comes out as Ethane.
Well how, how do we use ethane and how valuable is it to us? Well, it's made to
make plastics and, and antifreeze. And the primary manufacturing sector that
uses this is the manufacturing. For our plastics.
So it's valuable to us and we're, we're using it in this case for the molecule.
We're not burning that, that chemical molecule ethane, it's we're using the
chemical, the module for the characteristics of the molecule.
That allow us to make plastic, which of course is growing, and has grown for
many, many, years. Propane as I already mentioned is comes
from methane, is another component and it's used for home heating and gas
grills,and is called, and liquified petroleum gas.
Liquified petroleum gas here, the LPG that you hear a lot of the times, is
generally a mixture of propane and butane, together but is dominated by
building heating, most of the propane is used for heating of buildings.
And also some for transportation. But you, we can run cars off of liquid,
off of propane. just have tanks in the trunk, just like
the tanks are a different shape and different size than we use in home
grills. But we put them in cars and, and the car
can run with a fairly inexpensive conversion off of propane.
Butane is about 7% of the natural gas liquid production, issues for synthetic
rubber, lighter fluids. And LBG again.
Because LBG is a mixture of these 2. So those are used for magnets.
Butane is used for manufacturing LBG. And again, some for transportation.
In the colder climates, butane is a problem.
Because when it gets cold, the pressure of the.
the tank in the, of the butane liquid tank goes down.
And in very cold weather it becomes atmospheric pressure of less, and you
can't get it out. So, butane is mostly useful in the warmer
climates. not the colder climates.
The propane can be used in the colder climates as well as the warmer climates.
Isobutane, what's its utilization? It's used in the chem, for chemicals, making
chemicals and used in the gasoline refining process.
And so, but the. Primary sector is manufacturing.
And also some transportation there. But mostly manufacturing.
pentanes. Pentanes, by the way, is, is different
from the rest of these liquids. In that, it is liquid at, at atmospheric
temperature and pressure. But it makes up about 14%.
and. It's used in gasolines and polyn,
polystyrene blowing, which is the foam. And it's used primarily for, for
transportation because it's used in the, production and refinery of gasoline.
So this gives us some clue about What some of the trade-offs and displacement
might occur of liquid, natural gas liquids with crude oil.
So if we produce an extra barrel of natural gas liquids, will it decrease and
substitute for a barrel of oil? Well, probably not.
Because, about at least, number 1 the ethane is not used in, in crude oil type
of applications. so, and that's the biggest chunk.
propane is used very little, it supplies maybe a tenth of a percent or maybe less
of the transportation fuel. so right there you've got the dominant,
the dominant, components of natural gas liquids.
So you really can't displace, if you produce a extra Barrel of natural gas
liquids, it doesn't displace and save a barrel of oil.
they can't be done on a one-to-one basis. So, in many cases they shouldn't be
lumped together. And yet, because natural gas liquids are
up and the common term used for petroleum liquids, that includes natural gas
liquids and crude oil, and by the way ethanol which we'll talk about later, is
a more common term. And a lot of times, the production of,
of, petroleum liquids will be reported. But, sometimes it can be a little bit
like adding pounds of gold to pounds of silver.
you can say, well I've got 20 pounds of gold and silver.
But that doesn't really tell you anything about.
The value of that 20 pounds. If you have to know the components then
you have to know what each one's worth. So the value of the natural gas liquids
relative to oil. Which is the one that we have an import
problem with, which we've seen a little bit already.
Is not nessesarily solved with. natural gas, liquids.
But if you approximate it, somewhere maybe one barrel of natural gas liquids
will displace about a third of the barrel of oil.
Because their use in the gasoline refinery processes, etc.
Matter of facts, I've read some articles lately thee in the chemical industries
and the, the fossil fuel industries, little worried about how they're going to
use these natural gas liquids, with all this increased production.
Because the, the demand in the market place may not be there for continuing
increased natural gas liquids. So all fossil fuels are not made the
same. Obviously we can't for instance throw a
chunk of coal into our car. And run our car with it.
So coal and oil is not equivalent, natural gas liquids and oil is not
equivalent either. So, but if we add, excuse me, if we add
petroleum liquid, excuse me US liquid petroleum and we look at the percent
imported. Then we come up with a different number.
Crude oil plus natural gas liquids. we won't look at this slide too much,
we'll call all talk more about this issue more later.
But you hear different. different numbers about what percent of
our energy and oil da, do we import versus produce here.
And if you add natural gas liquids to oil, which this one does, where we,
whereas we got about 60% before, it's about 55% or a little less.
This, in the case of, you, liquid petroleum.
what's the other use, shorts of the other transportation fuels? I mentioned natural
gas liquid as transportation fuel. the, gasoline of course is the big one at
72%, diesel at 23% but the other one is ethanol Which is 5%.
We're going to look at this in the next lecture.
And you can see compressed natural gas, bio-diesel and propane.
When you round them off, it's less than half percent of the total transportation
fuel. So natural gas liquids are not real
important, significantly important in our transportation days.
Thank you.