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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (21450)	5/4/2008 12:58:06 AM
From: Snowshoe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

Natural gas liquids (propane, butane, etc) are extremely useful. I used to drive a propane-powered forklift truck, and propane can no doubt be used to power a small car. But propane is NOT oil, so if the CIBC analysis is credible then the shift away from oil may have begun. Here are excerpts from the CIBC report: While the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates continue to peg current oil production at around 86 mn bbl/day, over 9% of this daily production is not oil at all but rather, natural gas liquids (NGL). While natural gas liquids such as propane and butane are valuable hydrocarbons in their own right, they are not a viable substitute for oil. Neither can be economically used as a feedstock for gasoline, or diesel. Propane is used as a transport fuel, but in less than 2% of all the motor vehicles in the world. Hence, increases in the production of natural gas liquids cannot satisfy steadily growing global demand for gasoline and diesel, as car ownership rates in BRIC countries, and other parts of the developing world take off. The inability of existing supply sources to meet that demand growth has been highlighted recently by the fact that virtually all of the increase in so-called oil has been in these other hydrocarbons, which come largely from natural gas and are ill-suited for gasoline and diesel production. The ratio of natural gas liquids to total “oil” production has been rising steadily and is likely to continue to rise for the foreseeable future. Whereas these hydrocarbons represented only about 4% of total oil production back in the 1970s, they are likely to account for over 10% of total production by 2012. The increasing ratio is coincident with accelerating depletion rates in many of the world’s largest and most mature oil fields. Beyond methane which is what the home consumer burns, natural gas at the wellhead contains a range of readily liquefiable gases, which agencies like the IEA have traditionally included in total oil supply. These products—propane and butane, along with smaller amounts of pentanes, hexanes and heptanes—are removed at specialized upstream processing facilities, in part to expedite movement of the treated gas through the pipeline distribution network. While natural gas can occur on its own, much of the world’s natural gas is “associated” gas—found together with oil. As an oil field matures, the resulting loss of reservoir pressure releases dissolved natural gas. The released gas forms an expanding cap over many mature oil fields, resulting in a rising ratio of natural gas to oil and hence, a rising ratio of natural gas liquids to oil production. This is precisely what is occurring in rapidly depleting fields like Mexico’s Cantarell. research.cibcwm.com