Petroleum energy production from

Included in the gaseous fuels segment of U.S. petroleum energy production are the natural gas liquids extracted from natural gas as produced and before sale. These natural gas liquids, commonly termed NGLs, are ethane,... 

Fig. 16.2. U.S. petroleum energy production by year. (Data from U.S. Department of Energy.) ...

The carbon footprint of transport fuels has been analyzed in several studies starting from 1990. One of the most important is the study realized by Sheehan et al. [13] at National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the United States.This is an LCA study that includes the impact of C02 emissions. Most important operations belonging to the petroleum diesel product system include crude oil extraction, its transport to an oil refinery, crude oil refining to diesel fuel, its transportation to the user, and its use in a bus engine. 

Primary energy supply is a key issue for any new transportation fuel. Constraints on domestic resources and production of petroleum have led to increasing levels of imports. An important policy driver for alternative fuels for transportation in the USA is that they will alleviate some of the issues surrounding dependence and economic vulnerability related to petroleum imports, especially from politically unstable parts of the world. This raises some important questions for hydrogen as a future alternative fuel will the USA have the resources to produce hydrogen for vehicles at low cost and with low environmental impact ... 

Considering the composition of petroleum and petroleum products (Speight, 1994, 1999), it is not surprising that petroleum and petroleum-derived chemicals are environmental pollutants (Loeher, 1992 Olschewsky and Megna, 1992). The world s economy is highly dependent on petroleum for energy production, and widespread use has led to enormous releases to the environment of petroleum, petroleum products, exhaust from internal combustion engines, emissions from oil-fired power plants, and industrial emissions where fuel oil is employed. 

Succinic acid is commonly produced in microbes because it exists as a part of the TCA cycle, one of the ordinary metabolic pathways for production of energy. Several groups in the world are developing this production system to produce cheaper succinic acid from renewable resources like starch, glucose, cellulose and so on. If succinic acid could be produced from cheap carbon sources and the price were competitive with the petroleum-base product, many C4 chemicals could be expected as derivatives. 1,4-Butanediol is the typical one, which has a huge market. 

The physical processes by which natural gas liquids are recovered include phase separation, cooling, compression, absorption, adsorption, refrigeration, and any combination of these. Obviously the definition already stated excludes refinery light volatiles produced by the destructive decomposition of heavy petroleum fractions and it also excludes liquids that may be produced synthetically from natural gas. These distinctions are of economic importance in considering our basic energy reserves. Both the refinery volatiles and the synthetic liquids represent conversion products from other hydrocarbons and the conversion is usually attended by a considerable loss. Thus it has been stated that only about 47% (17) of the energy of natural gas is realized in the liquid hydrocarbon products of the Fischer-Tropsch type of synthesis. 

The common practice is to relate energy units to a common product, in this case, to petroleum liquid. For example, world consumption of crude oil and liquids (condensates) from natural gas in 1999 reached 149.72 Quadrillion (1015 BTUs)—Quad. If the amount of energy from other sources were converted to equivalent barrels of oil, the total world energy consumption in 1999 would be 380 Quads.1 The relative distribution of these sources is shown in Fig. 18.1. More energy comes from oil than from any other single source. 

Petroleum is and will remain the major source of mobile energy for the next century. However, petroleum production has passed its peak in the United States, and in several decades it may peak in the rest of the world. However, in 2001, approximately 45.8 trillion kW hours of energy were consumed worldwide using oil, and projections indicate that this number jumps to approximately 71-74 trillion kW hours in 2025, indicating a —58.3% increase in oil consumption. Also in 2001, the U.S. energy supply from petroleum products was 11.2 trillion kW hours, and it is projected that this number will increase to 16.1 trillion kW hours, indicating a 43.8% increase.8... 

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