Table of Contents

Vol. 6, No. 3
3rd Quarter 2000

DOE Awards Nine Natural Gas Proposal

Recently, the DOE selected nine new projects from a wide-ranging competition to enhance future supply and use of natural gas. Pending completion of contract negotiations, the Energy Department plans to award more than $6 million to the following projects.

The winning organizations will add $1.7 million of their own funding to the federal share:

• University of Mississippi, University, MS, will establish a multi-sensor monitoring station in the Gulf of Mexico to increase understanding of the nature of natural gas hydrates beneath the ocean floor and the role hydrates may play in seafloor instabilities.
• Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, will work on developing a computational tool to design technologies capable of harvesting natural gas from hydrates beneath ocean floors and locked in permafrost. Computational models will be developed to predict the rate of natural gas pressure buildup during drilling and the way gas and water flows in a reservoir as the hydrates release their gas.
• University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, will team with the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, Travis County,TX, to pursue basic research—such as 3-dimensional structure and physical properties of a methane hydrate deposit on Blake Ridge, off the South Carolina coast. The research will build on observations showing a thick zone of natural gas beneath the hydrate formation.
• Gas Technology Institute, Chicago, IL, with the Colorado School of Mines and Argonne National Laboratory, are working to determine the feasibility of using a laser to drill natural gas wells.
• TerraTek, Inc., Salt Lake City, UT, will benchmark the performance of a fluid drilling hammer and recommend ways to improve its performance.
• Cementing Solutions Inc., Houston, TX, will develop an ultra-lightweight cement to improve efficiency and reduce costs of cementing operations associated with completing natural gas wells.
• Ramgen Power Systems, Inc., Bellevue, WA, will test Ramgen’s Brayton cycle-based power-generation system. Engineers will further develop Ramgen’s Mach 2 engine and design a second “Beta” engine that could use waste methane released from a coal mine during mining operations.
• Siemens Westinghouse Power Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA, will join Texas A&M University to study an in-situ reheat concept for gas turbines. Capturing and using the waste heat inside the turbine could improve the efficiency of new power plants by 2 to 4 percent, reduce fuel costs, lower nitrogen oxide emissions, and ultimately, reduce the cost of electricity.
• Rolls-Royce Allison Engine Co., Indianapolis, IN, will evaluate the market potential and conceptual design of small gas-fired turbines initially sized at approximately .5 megawatts but scalable to 5 megawatt turbines that could be integrated with a fuel cell in hybrid power systems up to 30 megawatts.

For more information, contact Donald W. Geiling, DOE NETL, phone 304-285-4784, email dgeili@netl.doe.gov. 

New Associate Director for Technology Management at NPTO

DOE’s National Petroleum Technology Office (NPTO) has named Dr. Dexter Sutterfield the new Associate Director for Technology Management.  A chemical engineer with a Ph.D. from the University of Tulsa, Sutterfield has been associated with NPTO and its predecessor organizations for 32 years.  In 1969, he joined the U.S. Bureau of Mines at the Bartlesville Energy Research Center in Oklahoma, which later became the Department of Energy’s National Institute for Petroleum and Energy Research (NIPER).  From 1983 to 1997, Dr. Sutterfield managed research programs at NIPER for IIT Research Institute and BDM-Oklahoma, Inc., directing contract research for public and private entities in exploration, drilling, production, processing and end use.  Dr. Sutterfield rejoined the Department of Energy at NPTO in 1997 as Technology Manager for Process Research.

For more information, contact DOE NPTO, phone 918-699-2005. 

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National Energy Technology Laboratory Awards Grant for Stripper Well Research

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has selected a proposal that, if successful, could sharply reduce the costs of disposing of waste-water from low-volume stripper wells. The DOE plans to award $132,000 to Western SynCoal LLC of Billings, Mont. to develop a spin-off application for an enhanced coal-based product it developed, SynCoal. 

SynCoal, a high quality, low-moisture coal material made by heating and physically cleaning low-rank subbituminous coal, has characteristics that researches believe will make it ideal for filtering contaminated waste water in ways similar to activated carbon, for less money. The product is so economical that, if successful, it could reduce water disposal costs from low volume gas wells by 70 percent. Moreover, the water produced by the SynCoal filtering process is clean enough for agricultural use. The new project will be managed by the Energy Department’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL).

For more information, contact: Hattie Wolfe, DOE FE, phone 202-586-6503, email hattie.wolfe@hq.doe.gov, or Otis Mills Jr., DOE NETL, phone 412-386-5890, email mills@netl.doe.gov.