Mobility, electricity, industrial heat and even spaceflight are beginning to converge on the same unfashionably practical molecule.
The Methanopreneurs Are Coming
So, what will the new breed of methanopreneurs be hatching under their wings?
Short answer: I don’t know.
Yes, folks, even I don’t know the future. Not even one second into it. A humbling admission, I realise, but there it is.
Yet even if we cannot predict the force and direction of the wind, we can at least become better at setting our sails.
And we can certainly speculate a fair bit about where things might turn in the years ahead. It is New Year’s Day, after all. If there is ever a day designed for confidently pretending that we have some idea what the future holds, surely this is it.
I hope none of you fell asleep during that somewhat lame introduction. I simply could not resist it.
Ready?
The big, obvious one is mobility, so let’s enter that race.
Methane Takes to the Road — and the Sea
2020 and beyond is going to see LNG as a marine fuel go mainstream. It is the obvious fuelling solution for any newly built ship.
When I worked at OMV, I was involved in the GATE project. “Involved” does not really do it justice. I restructured the entire contractual landscape. The other side hated me for it. They called me the Bomber because I reliably bombed their clause suggestions whenever I knew they would not work in the future world.
I had been thinking about LNG bunkering, LNG truck loading, LNG for rail and similar applications long before those notions became real. It was simply logical to me. So I wanted to make sure the capacity agreements were ready for a world that had not quite arrived yet.
Ten years ago, adopting LNG as the fuel for a newly built vessel was regarded as taking a chance. It worsened the risk assessment of the investment. It was considered an expensive addition, introducing technological risk without any guarantee that it would ever become mainstream — let alone necessary.
Today, not going for LNG as the fuel of a newly built vessel is increasingly seen as the unacceptable risk.
There are many marine fuelling solutions competing for the title of “next big thing”, but LNG has persevered. While most of the others are still, in one form or another, laboratory animals, LNG has quietly transformed itself into the solution that complies with environmental regulations while remaining economically and technologically safe.
Price matters too. Marine Gas Oil is more expensive than LNG. And in time, only the use of LNG and MGO will comply with the air-emissions rules being enforced by most countries.
Don’t count on hydrogen and electric ships. They are expensive pipedreams. In other words, they are child-disease-riddled lab rats that have somehow been promoted into wonder drugs.
But now the long-dreaded air-emissions regulations are in force. It is the real world now, rather than the comfortable realm of wishful thinking and PowerPoint possibilities.
And in the real world, things have to work.
Reality has very little patience with fluffy ideas, technological daydreams and temper tantrums.
2020 will also see massive new investment in LNG as a trucking fuel. Haulage companies have started to understand that the limitations being imposed on diesel can be circumvented with LNG. More importantly, companies are beginning to understand that this is not another laboratory rat. It is a cost-effective solution that is ready for action right now.
Just look at what has happened over the last eighteen months in Europe alone.
Once there are more and more LNG fuelling stations, other operators will start experimenting with new possibilities. Germany has introduced toll breaks for LNG trucks. Italy has expanded its LNG refuelling network into virtually every corner of the country. You can go from the south of Italy to Amsterdam and refuel along the way.
It has even started creeping eastwards into the deeper parts of Central Europe.
And it will not be only trucking.
Coach companies may follow. Perhaps even construction companies. The filtering technology required for modern diesel engines places quite a financial burden on them. And the diesel scandal has more or less killed the warm and fuzzy feelings people once had about this particular fuel.
LNG gives them a realistic alternative to play with.
The threat of no-diesel zones and ever-tightening emissions regulations is beginning to hurt. Transport companies carry much of the burden. I spoke with a transport company executive months ago about why they were considering LNG for their trucks.
He told me it was not really about the money.
It was about territory.
The use of diesel was increasingly placing territorial limitations upon them. Some areas had already become difficult to access with diesel, and he expected things to get considerably worse.
So something had to be done.
Let’s face it: anything that can be done with diesel can be done with LNG just as well. Cleaner and, soon, even cheaper.
The remaining price premium for new LNG vehicles will erode. During the 2020s, it will reverse.
Ever-mounting filtering obligations imposed on diesel will make that technology increasingly onerous. Hardly any solution other than LNG will remain on the table for those who live in the real world and have to move actual things through it.
Methane Goes to Space
2020 is also scheduled to see the launch of the first Starship — at least on a trial basis. What is particularly exciting is that it uses LNG-derived methane as the fuel for its Raptor engines.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn also aims to use methane-fuelled engines, so this appears to be the chosen path of the future.
And that will take methane to space.
In time, it may make methane the preferred fuel for launching anything there. The stated reason for choosing it is particularly interesting: methane can be synthesised from CO₂ and water on other heavenly bodies.
Nobody, it seems, wants to establish a Mars base and then discover that they have voluntarily chosen to spend their lives dealing with fickle and dangerous hydrogen.
But it is not only Mars bases.
It is orbit as well.
Fuel depots will come into existence in orbit, as well as at points between Earth and the Moon and eventually on the Moon itself.
Hydrogen is a known hazard. It embrittles materials and has an uncanny ability to leak through almost anything it encounters. It is also exceptionally difficult to liquefy and therefore a difficult fuel to handle.
LNG is much, much friendlier.
And then there is kerosene and oxygen — Kerolox.
Kerolox is a problem when you are serious about reusable engines. The middle distillates leave soot and grime behind. Engines using Kerolox require extensive refurbishment after every use.
That does not exactly chime with the idea of rapid reuse.
The only domain of mobility that is not yet seriously planning for a lot more LNG use as a fuel is aviation.
But even that might change.
Boeing’s SUGAR Freeze project has not made a great deal of news lately. That said, after its airliner disaster and increasing flight-shaming, the company might reconsider its options.
It might even discover LNG as a clean-fuel solution for aviation and a way to reverse its fortunes.
Just speculating, of course.
But that is what we have been doing all day, isn’t it?
There is no place in mobility that could not, in principle, be efficiently and competitively run by methane — whether LNG or CNG.
Being cheaper and cleaner than diesel while remaining just as reliable and technologically mature means that methane will slowly mop up the market.
OPEC, this is me talking to you.
This is the biggest threat you have faced yet.
And you have faced quite something over the last few years.
Then There Is Power
Let’s come to power production.
The current drive towards wind and solar is pushing the grids of developed economies towards the limits of their capabilities. Some of them are already beyond what could reasonably be called sensible.
They are beginning to feel the effects of too much flickering power in the grid.
Coal is being taken down at a rapid clip. Nuclear still has a bad reputation. The vital backup provided by rotating masses, which help prevent the grid from collapsing, is taking quite a punishment.
Eventually, people will experience their first cold and dark winter.
And when they do, their minds will change.
They will want solutions.
Not slogans. Not promises. Solutions that work — and solutions that work quickly.
Unfortunately, it takes time to build a new nuclear plant or a coal block. Especially with all the surplus regulation we have managed to pile on top of the process.
And when you are in dire straits, time is precisely the one thing you do not have.
The fastest solution is gas turbines.
Many of them.
This will also transform electricity production from something predominantly large and centralised towards something considerably more distributed. It will take a substantial burden off the grid because gas is easier to store than electricity.
Even LNG tanks are cheaper to build and operate than batteries.
And they provide a host of additional benefits, including cold energy that can be put to productive use.
We must be realistic, though.
In the long run, we will need new baseload power to do the heavy lifting. Gas can certainly do that too, but nuclear provides considerably better energy density.
That will not happen for some time, however.
And once it does, we will need all the methane we have for mobility anyway.
And Then There Is Heat
Which leaves us with heat generation.
This is hard to do with wind and solar.
Sure, you can produce heat with electricity. But the wastage involved is enormous.
It turns out that a good old-fashioned flame still holds the keys to this particular process.
So the same thing that holds true for electricity generation also holds true for process heat.
We are stuck in a rut.
The alarmist script dictates that we eliminate everything fossil. But in doing so, we eliminate the working parts of our energy system.
And those working parts are not easily replaced.
Except, of course, by natural gas.
It sets in motion a rather nice Perpetuum Mobile.
And that will be difficult to break.
But worry not.
Natural gas is the one thing that will save the day.
At least, that is the story so far.
But aren’t we wasting the planet by burning all that non-renewable methane?
Turns out we might be wrong about renewables altogether.
