Low prices for abundant natural gas, along with smoother regulations and volatile gasoline and diesel prices, are driving operators of fleets to increase their consideration of both compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquid natural gas (LNG) as a fuel.  Additionally, the impending launch of the Cummins Westport ISX12 G engine is generating real excitement in the natural gas truck market.  This 400 hp engine slots between Cummins Westport’s ISL 8.9L and Westport’s 15L engines.  The result is a vehicle market that is expected to grow at a rate of 14% this year in North America (compared to a global rate of about half a percent).

The two forms of natural gas vehicle fuels are both growing, but although CNG systems are more compact and cheaper to install on trucks, LNG systems give longer vehicle range.  The result, as The New York Times reports, is that the long distance trucking industry is increasingly looking toward LNG as an option to replace diesel.

But that’s only half the story.  The number of LNG stations is set to grow significantly in the next couple of years.  Navigant Research forecasts that about 200 new LNG stations will be open in the United States by 2015, with more in the works.  This expansion is critical to sustain sales growth in the vehicle market.  At the moment, in answering the chicken-and-egg question of whether vehicles or refueling stations have to come first, the answer is clearly that vehicles are ahead of the stations.

Rising Demand, Rising Prices

At the same time, there are new concerns about the price of natural gas.  The Henry Hub gulf coast spot price is $3.81/million BTUs, its highest point since September 2011, and well above the low of $1.95 seen last April.  Demand for natural gas is on the rise for electricity production as well as vehicles, but supply continues to outstrip demand.  At the moment, natural gas cannot be exported to countries without free trade agreements with the United States, but that may change.  President Obama’s new Department of Energy nominee, Ernest Moniz has stated that he supports LNG exports to non-free trade agreement countries, which could have a greater impact on demand.  Charles Ebinger of the Brookings Institute, however, testified that the price of electricity would not be significantly affected by wider LNG exports.

Does that mean the price of CNG and LNG as a vehicle fuel will also be relatively unaffected?  This question is challenging to answer, because prices for CNG and LNG will not going be influenced in the same ways.  In looking at CNG, Navigant Research estimates that about 17% of the gasoline gallon equivalent (GGE) price at the nozzle is related to the price of natural gas (about $0.35 to $0.40).  The remaining 83% of the price is determined by the cost to compress and cool the gas, profit margins, taxes, and so on.  So, even if the price of natural gas does eventually hit the $8/MBTUs that Forbes contributor Richard Finger expects, CNG will see a about a $1.40 GGE increase but will likely still be priced below gas and diesel.  According to America’s Natural Gas Alliance, the natural gas price component of LNG, on the other hand, consists of about 45% the diesel gallon equivalent (DGE), so an increase in the cost of natural gas has a bigger impact on the LNG price.

The result is the price of natural gas has to remain low in order to help grow the LNG truck market.  The incremental costs for an LNG truck can run between 60% and 80% more than a diesel truck.  The result is that the combination of government vehicle purchase incentives and the fuel incentive ($0.50 per GGE) become even more critical to keeping the payback on the LNG trucks attractive as the price of natural gas climbs.

The discovery of extensive shale oil reserves in North America has led to heightened expectations for using the domestic energy source as a transportation fuel. While environmental challenges exist for extracting and distributing fuel (safe fracking, pipeline expansion, and so on), the biggest hurdles to expanding natural gas as a fuel for passenger vehicles are related to pumping the gas into a tank and keeping it there safely. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been focusing on these challenges by providing funding to several basic research projects, which were a significant topic of discussion at this spring’s ARPA-E Summit meeting in Washington, D.C.

Natural gas vehicles (NGVs) typically require multiple cylinder tanks in order to store enough fuel to provide a range similar to that of a gasoline car.  In larger vans and trucks, this may require three or four tanks. Ford Motor Company has described the current state of storage tanks as “too large, heavy, shape limited and expensive to properly facilitate the widespread adoption of natural gas vehicles.” Through an ARPA-E grant, Ford is working on a 3-year project to develop an adsorption tank system that would increase the energy density of compressed natural gas at lower pressures. The system would enable natural gas to be stored at lower pressure while providing a driving range comparable to that of gasoline car.

Fill ‘Er Up, at Home

The DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, located in Richland, Washington, is addressing the cost and efficiency of storage tanks with its ARPA-E grant. The lab is working on developing a ball-shaped tank that would increase the storage efficiency over current rectangular tanks by 90% while using less expensive materials.

Meanwhile, General Electric (GE) is resurrecting the concept of home refueling of natural gas (which was unsuccessfully pitched previously by makers of the Phill) with a low-cost natural gas system that is also being developed thanks to an ARPA-E grant. The system chills the gas to a very low temperature (-50°C) to separate water from gas, which otherwise requires a complicated multistep process. GE hopes to reduce the cost of a home refueling station to less than $500.

As detailed in Navigant Research’s 2012 Light Duty Natural Gas Vehicles report, attempts at popularizing home refueling have failed in both Europe and North America due to the cost of the equipment and limited availability of vehicles. Nevertheless, sales of NGVs in the United States are expected to surpass 30,000 vehicles annually by 2019.

Annual Light Duty NGV Sales, North America: 2012-2019

 (Source: Navigant Research)

Electricity generation from coal has plummeted from favor in the last few years.  A majority of Americans now favor stricter regulations on coal plants, even if it means higher energy prices.  In Europe public opinion has tilted away from coal even more sharply: a recent survey showed that 80% of Germans want to end coal-fired generation altogether.  The anti-coal movement has also gained steam, so to speak, in some unlikely places.

That doesn’t mean King Coal will be dethroned any time soon.  In confirmation hearings before the Senate, Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s nomination for the director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, struck a conciliatory tone when asked about the future of the U.S. coal industry.

“Coal has been and will continue to be a significant source of energy in the United States, and I take my job seriously when developing those standards to provide flexibility in the rules,” McCarthy told lawmakers.  “Flexibility,” in this context, means “exceptions to the forthcoming rules on carbon emissions from power plants.”

German environmental minister Peter Altmaier was more blunt last year, speaking of the black fuel’s future on the continent: Coal-fired plants will be needed “for decades to come” to ensure reliable supplies of power.

In fact, coal consumption is rising, both in the United States and in Europe, to say nothing of China.  The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects power generation from coal to increase by nearly 8% in 2013, bringing coal’s portion of total U.S. generation back to 40%, from 37.4% in 2012.  The cause, according to the EIA: “the increasing cost of natural gas relative to coal.”

(Source: Energy Information Administration)

High prices for natural gas are also driving a coal resurgence in Europe; carbon emissions in Germany, for example, increased by 2% in 2012, according to a feature in Nature, largely as a result of increased power generation from cheap coal.

Developments in Germany reflect the larger paradox facing nations attempting to move toward clean energy production: under the Energiewende, Germany’s national program to shift 35% of its power generation to clean sources by 2020, the country is investing €1.5 billion in renewable energy per year.  However, economic forces continue to push power production to fossil fuels.  Generation from solar photovoltaic installations actually decreased by 500 GWh in 2012, and Germany is currently building some 11 GW of coal-fired capacity (though a substantial portion of that will be so-called “clean coal,” replacing older plants with more efficient, lower-emissions technology).  Germany’s decision to shut down its nuclear power plants after the Fukushima nuclear accident is driving the country to coal for baseload power.

“One of Europe’s biggest energy providers, E.ON based in Düsseldorf, announced in January that it plans to close several gas-fired power stations across Europe that were operating at a loss,” Nature reported, “even though they are far less polluting than coal-fired plants.”

Eventually, coal will be phased out.  However, everyone anticipating a rapid changeover from the fuel that powered the Industrial Revolution has a long wait ahead.

Ernest Moniz, President Obama’s nominee to become Secretary of Energy, encountered a minor tempest this week when environmentalists unearthed a 2011 MIT study on natural gas production and fracking, which Moniz led as the head of MIT’s Energy Institute.  The study, which concluded that the potential environmental damage from fracking is “challenging, but manageable,” was conducted by a team that included two researchers with ties to the oil and gas industry.  The White House quickly defended Moniz as an independent scientist, and the controversy is unlikely to keep Moniz from succeeding Stephen Chu atop the Energy Department.

Independent or not, the MIT report now rests on a shelf that groans under the weight of fracking studies and reports that multiply almost as fast as the natural gas wells themselves.  The latest version, which heavily favors the natural gas rush, comes from the University of Southern California and the Communications Institute, an L.A. think tank, and was “funded in part by a grant from the Western States Petroleum Assn.,” reports The Los Angeles Times.

There are plenty of examples of counter-studies detailing the horrors of fracking.  The granddaddy of anti-fracking reports was produced by Robert Howarth of Cornell in 2011, and concluded that over the long term, “shale gas is worse than conventional gas and is, in fact, worse than coal and worse than oil.”

Howarth’s gloomy findings have been disputed by studies from “the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Resources Defense Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Energy Department and numerous independent university teams, including a Carnegie Mellon study partly financed by the Sierra Club,” noted Forbes contributor Jon Entine.

Another 5 Years

In New York, a highly touted report from the Geisinger Health System is “likely years away,” the project’s leader acknowledged recently.  New York lawmakers and Governor Andrew Cuomo are in a struggle over limitations – or an outright ban – on fracking in the state, which overlies parts of the vast Marcellus Shale formation, which some geologists believe holds enough shale gas to provide U.S. electricity needs for a century or more.  New York’s review of the social and environmental effects of fracking is now in its fifth year, with no end in sight.

So proliferative is the research on fracking that the industry is in danger of being “entombed” by endless “iterative studies,” wrote a commenter on The Motley Fool, a stock-trading website.  Some supporters have had enough: University of Oklahoma professor David Deming, who has a rich history of provocative statements dismissing the concepts of peak oil and renewable energy, declared recently in a Wall Street Journal editorial that the oil and gas industry needs to man up and emulate the NRA by forcefully confronting its critics and “seizing the moral high ground.”

“The fossil-fuel industry—which could be the most powerful lobby in Washington—is hopelessly ineffective and self-defeating,” Deming moaned.

No Stopping

That is manifestly false – Steve Coll’s book on Exxon Mobil, Private Empire, provides 600 pages of evidence that the oil majors are among the most powerful entities on earth, often functioning as quasi-governments, for both good and ill, in the countries in which they operate.

At any rate, the thousands of pages of research on the effects of fracking scatter, for now, like confetti on the tracks as the locomotive of the natural gas boom thunders past.  That train is not slowing down soon.  Rather than taking an adversarial stance to regulators and environmental groups, natural gas producers could reduce their costs and risks by cooperating with regulators, being transparent about the chemicals they inject underground, and sharing infrastructure in areas with multiple producers.  Those are the conclusions of, you guessed it, a study by Accenture.

There are efforts afoot to do just that.  The Pittsburgh-based Center for Sustainable Shale Development is working on a new set of standards for the industry that would include a certification process to verify that producers are operating in environmentally safe and socially responsible ways.  As my colleague Dave Hurst reports, the Center has been set up by a group of organizations across the energy spectrum, including Chevron, Shell, the Clean Air Task Force, Consol Energy, the Environmental Defense Fund, Group Against Smog and Pollution, Heinz Endowments, and the William Penn Foundation. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is helping to develop the technical standards.  Such cooperation offers a much more productive approach than burying your opponents in a blizzard of conflicting studies.