BP Amoco executive sees natural gas-powered future

Petroleum News Alaska Staff

Many factors now in place are leading to the emergence of a preeminent gas economy in the early decades of this century, BP Amoco Gas & Power Chief Executive Richard Flury told the world’s first on-line energy e-conference and exhibition, held in May and sponsored by the World Energy Council and BP Amoco.

Flury said this gas economy would be supplied from a global market of large gas reservoirs geographically spread but linked to consumers by low-cost pipelines and/or cheap and scaleable liquefied natural gas facilities. Or through long distance high-voltage electricity conduits or large tankers carrying liquid products manufactured from gas.

Gas would be the principal fuel for electricity generation in high-efficiency combined cycle gas turbines, he said, and the chemicals industry would in large part be based upon feedstock using gas-to-liquids and/or gas-to-chemicals process technology. Gas could also power the transport sector — first as compressed natural gas in buses and taxes and later as feedstock for onboard fuel cells.

Flury said technologies for delivering this vision of the gas economy have now largely been invented. While not all have been demonstrated at scale and many technical issues remain to be solved, implementation of the vision has already started and the rate of gas market share growth will likely progress from heat and power generation, to gas-to-chemicals and last to gas for transport fuels.

Both static power and transport applications of fuel cells are likely to appear sooner than people think, Flury said, with distributed power applications already happening, and commercially viable cars and buses on the road in 2004 from many major motor manufacturers.