NG Advantage lands contracts for trucked natural gas
25 August 2012
NG Advantage LLC, a provider of trucked compressed natural gas (CNG) to enterprises not connected to a pipeline, has secured multi-year contracts with Pike Industries, a subsidiary of Oldcastle Materials, the North American arm of CRH; and Putney Paper, a subsidiary of APC Paper Group. NG Advantage will begin deliveries in early 2013.
NG Advantage believes this is the first announcement of contracts for compressed natural gas delivered to enterprises beyond the pipeline in the United States.
NG Advantage compresses natural gas off of existing transmission pipelines into specialized composite trailers. Customers use natural gas directly from the trailers eliminating the need for onsite storage. Proprietary routing and monitoring technology assures customer supply regardless of usage fluctuations and efficient use of tractors, trailers, and compressors.
NG Advantage’s first compressor station will serve enterprise customers in Vermont and adjacent New York and New Hampshire. The company plans rapid expansion throughout the northern New England region and beyond.
Compressed natural gas delivered by truck is a low cost alternative to oil products for sites which use more than 150,000 gallons of oil or the equivalent each year or 100,000 gallons seasonally. Unlike liquefied natural gas (LNG), CNG is practical for medium sized industrial and institutional customers since it does not require expensive cryogenic storage at customer sites and 7x24 monitoring, the company says.
This looks like arbitrage between LPG and NG prices.
Posted by: Engineer-Poet | 26 August 2012 at 10:23 AM
There is good reason to consider the use of compressed natural gas as a fuel to be transported in tanks to where it is not available by pipeline.
The main area to consider this is in moving vehicles such as automobiles, but a large portion of the diesel fuel now used in railroad locomotives can be replaced by the use of compressed methane with great ease. The cost of transporting the fuel in tank cars on railroads is low and a slight modification only is required of the fuel system to allow a large portion, up to 90 percent, of the energy needed by the locomotive to be produced from methane.
Methane may be injected directly into the intake air of diesel engines, and many stationary diesel emergency generators are equiped with this feature to reduce the need for liquid fuel transport during emergencies when natural gas is available.
High pressure tanks can be of any convenient size that can be factory produced at low cost. It takes about the same amount of metal or other material to have two 5 litre as it does to have one 10 litre high pressure tanks. In the US the small torch tanks for LPG have much thinner walls than the twenty pound grill tanks as an example of this.
Buried welded ductile cast iron pipes can now be proposed as very long life high pressure tanks with this modern metal technology.
The delivery vehicle can bring the fuel in the form of LNG; Stirling machine coolers can keep the LNG liquid during transport; and a measured amount of LNG can be expanded to the required pressure of the CNG tank. Both the delivery vehicle and the Stirling cooler can be powered by methane. Energy can be recovered from the expansion of both the LNG when filling the CNG tank and the CNG when used as fuel. With Stirling coolers there is no reason why safe small LNG storage units cannot be built. Small micro-turbines, now from Capstone and others and from Bladon in the future, can burn boil off from LNG to power the cooling or to feed energy into the grid or the transport vehicles.
For most purposes, gasified LPG mixed with air or other gases can be substituted for natural gas when CNG delivery fails.
Ethane can be stored as a liquid at room temperatures in very high pressure tanks, but is highly ignored as a fuel where cooler temperatures prevail or cooling can be provided easily. There is little reason to flare natural gas at crude oil wells anymore since Linde invented his air liquification process and Philips invented the Stirling air liquifiers.
Cheap engines or more expensive microturbines can burn well head gas for the required energy. AMTEC, Alkali Metal Thermo-Electric Converter, devices can convert the heat from high temperature gas burners to electricity with relative high efficiency and no moving parts. AMTEC devices should not be so much ignored in the developing world or China. ..HG..
Posted by: Henry Gibson | 26 August 2012 at 08:56 PM
LNG should not be ignored by the Railroads either. Microprocessor controllers and high power electronics also makes the use of LNG possible for large motorway vehicles. ..HG..
Posted by: Henry Gibson | 26 August 2012 at 09:01 PM