WorldOil

Gas monetization technologies remain tantalizingly on the brink

Despite being one of the most abundant energy sources on the planet, more than one-third of global natural gas reserves remain stranded so that they cannot be economically delivered to market.1 About 70% of internationally traded gas is exported by pipeline, and the remaining 30% by Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). Over the last two decades, several other technologies have been evaluated and proposed for monetizing previously remote gas reserves, Fig. 1. These include Gas-To-Liquid (GTL), gas-to-wire, Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) and gas-to-solid technologies. The latter two technologies are in the research and development stage and, although the potential of these options has been explored in the past decade, no commercial projects exploiting them have been sanctioned. This article reviews the status of these technologies and identifies the hurdles preventing them from being commercialized on a wider scale.