A new way to get rid of those scenic oil field flares

Everyone seems to be looking at ways to exploit stranded methane these days. Pacific Gas & Electic and Microgy are in separate experiments extracting methane, or natural gas, from cow manure in large-scale digesters. Large waste companies are capturing the gas generated by rotting garbage at the dump and transporting it.

And now the Pacific Northwest National Labs has completed the first part of a project that could allow refiners to capture methane that gets expelled in oil fields. Right now, the methane that bubbles up from underground oil wells gets flared off. It looks cool in pictures: nothing gives that end-of-the-world ambience like a smoky oil flare. But burning methane adds greenhouse gases into the air. Besides, with methane prices climbing, that’s just money up in smoke.

Researchers at the lab have identified the structure of a catalyst that can convert methane into an easier-to-transport liquid. The catalyst—molybdenum oxide sitting on a zeolite mineral—has been known since the 1930s, but the exact structure and mechanics of the reaction were not. The recent breakthrough in understanding the reaction opens the possibility of coming up with a cheap, commercially viable way of converting methane.

In some ways, the effort is similar to the gas-to-liquid plant operated by Shell in Qatar. There, Shell has taken a stranded methane field, i.e. one that’s not connected to a pipeline, and created a plant that can convert it to a car fuel. The fuel is expensive, but it burns fairly clean.