Stranded gas

A US Department of Energy (DOE) project is turning "stranded" natural gas at marginal, or low-production, oil fields into fuel for distributed electric power systems.

The project is bringing previously idle oil fields back into production and could boost US oil production by some 28 million barrels per year within the next 10 years.

Stranded gas is natural gas that is uneconomic to produce for one or more reasons: the energy, or Btu content, may be too low; the gas may be too impure to use, or, the volume may be too small to warrant a pipeline connection to the gas infrastructure.

Non-commercial gas is sometimes produced along with oil, becoming an environmental liability. This unwanted by product of oil production has become a major problem in California oil fields where producers have been forced to abandon sites early, leaving valuable reserves of domestic oil untapped.

Typically, there are three ways to deal with stranded gas: venting or flaring the gas contributes to air pollution without any beneficial offsets from the gas, using electrical energy to re-inject the gas incurs significant extra costs and, shutting down oil production leaves valuable oil in the ground.