FARGO, N.D. — The glow from Sylvan Melroe’s neck of the woods can be seen from space, and that hasn’t sat well with the agricultural machinery inventor for some time.
North Dakota’s Bakken energy fields flare off eight billion cubic feet of natural gas a month, producing 4.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2012.
The 6,292 flares in the United States burn off 10.65 billion cubic metres of natural gas annually.
According to Scientific American, the industry typically flares off about a third of the natural gas coming out of the ground, most of which is methane, a greenhouse gas about 86 times as potent as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
Methane contributes more to global warming than carbon dioxide over a span of decades.
Melroe, who is known to prairie farmers as the man who invented the Melroe Bobcat and then flipped Bobcat to buy Steiger tractor, thinks this is terrible waste.
He has now turned his entrepreneurial attentions to dealing with the energy waste and ozone depleting practice of flaring natural gas in the drilling fields.
He works as a consultant with Maryland-based LPP Combustion, which is delving into how to use local low-cost fuels for generating low-cost electricity.
It has a corporate commitment to eliminate gas flaring by the year 2030.
Melroe was at the Big Iron farm show in Fargo earlier this year to explain how the work LPP is doing will have long-term benefits for his home state of North Dakota and the global environment.
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“When they started fracking, they were burning an equivalent of $60 to $70 million worth of energy per month,” Melroe said.
“I don’t know what their numbers are today. There’s 10,000 or 12,000 oil wells out there, so how do you measure how much gas is being burned off? Whatever the governor wants, that’s the number we’re doing today. It’s just a number they pull out of the sky.”
Flaring prompts three areas of concern: ozone depletion, real time energy waste and the fact that the energy being burned and exhausted into the atmosphere is gone for good and unavailable for future generations.
Melroe said LPP is developing small-scale generation stations that capture gas at the wellhead and immediately turn it into electrical power.
There are six gas classes, he added: methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane and hexane. Each has a different combination of carbon molecules and hydrogen. The lower end gases, methane and ethane, are considered to be waste gas, although the plastic industry does use some ethane.
“We take gas right off the wellhead — no need to go through any cleaner or processor,” he said.
“We capture that gas and re-vaporize it. After we’ve burned it running turbine generators, all that’s left is a little bit of CO2 and water. We clean up the environment while we’re making a lot of electricity.
“We take the lower end gases to generate electricity, or we take waste gas from pharmaceutical plants or other sources and turn that into electricity, although I understand some companies are now capturing low end gas and selling it as liquid natural gas.”
Melroe said it’s more practical to burn the low-end gases on site for electricity than to pipe it out or truck it out. He said it’s easier to move wires around the state than to move a pipeline. He estimates a high line costs about US$75,000 per mile, while a pipeline is more like $2 million per mile.
“Now they’re putting 15 or 20 wells together on the same pad,” he said.
“They’re not very big, maybe 400 feet square. Each well is down to a different depth. If we put one LPP generator collecting gas from all those wells on a single pad, we could produce five to 10 megawatts of power on a single pad, but the oil companies don’t want to change and don’t seem to be interested.
“A few years ago we were all concerned about the world running out of oil; we wouldn’t be able to drive our cars. Well, now it seems we’ve got an abundance. That’s what technology does. They say these wells will give us oil and gas for decades. That means we can also have cheap electricity for decades.”
Melroe said in a perfect world governments would use their legitimate regulatory authority to stop petroleum energy companies from wasting energy and destroying ozone.
“But oil companies pay a lot of taxes to the governments. Governments don’t want to annoy some of their best friends. If you’re the one writing the cheques, you can have it your way. Unfortunately, that’s business and politics.”
For more information, contact Melroe at smelroe@cableone.net.
