The American Scene; Gas Technology

Here 50, tonight, showers ending low in the upper 30s. And tomorrow, considerable cloudiness, little temperature change, high near 50, south easterly winds 15 to 25 miles per hour today. This is WMAQ and WMAQ FM NBC and Chicago. It's 7 o 'clock. The American Scene, a series of pre -recorded programs, providing a closer look at those things which form our contemporary society. Produced by the Illinois Institute of Technology in cooperation with WMAQ, the discussion today will consider job horizons and gas technology. Now here's our host, Don Anderson. Good morning and welcome to the American Scene. My name is Don Anderson. Today we're going to consider the job horizon in the field of gas technology. The gas industry currently supplies about one -third of our country's energy requirements.

It's a vast field involving a multitude of occupational requirements. As opposed to the more exotic sources of energy, such as nuclear energy, which we discussed last week, or solar energy, the gas industry is a well -established field. And its future is not so much a story of scientific breakthrough, as it is of technological improvement. Some insights into the gas industry will also help us better understand the future of all of our so -called conventional sources of energy. The use of coal, oil, hydroelectric power, and so on is based on many of the same factors affecting the gas industry. The ultimate factor, of course, is cost. The operation of the gas industry requires such knowledge as production, processing, transmission, storage, distribution, and utilization. And in each of these fields of knowledge, changes in developments are occurring which require greater and more specialized education. Even though the gas industry does make use of a broad range of non -professional occupations, its future is dependent on the skilled technician and the educated

professional. The many technical activities ranging from exploration and drilling to the design and construction of pipeline systems, to the development of new appliances, requires experts trained in a host of engineering and scientific areas. It may be difficult to describe the job horizon in terms of number of people employed, as technology advances, occupation requirements will change. But without doubt, as our population continues to expand, our need and uses of energy will grow and become more sophisticated. And it is safe to say that the gas industry will continue to supply a large share of our energy requirements well into the next century. Joining me in this discussion of the job horizon and gas technology, I am pleased to welcome this morning, Dr. Richard F. Booker Check, Chairman of the Education Department of the Institute of Gas Technology, and Mr. Jack Hebler, Associate or Director of Research, also with the Institute of Gas Technology.

And gentlemen, thank you very much for coming this morning. And I think before we get into the career opportunities in this field, we ought to really define what product we're talking about. Jack, can you give us some limits as to what we're talking about when we speak of gas? We're not speaking of gasoline. We're speaking about natural gas, which is essentially methane. It's quite a pure fuel. And for this reason, it has uses which are very important to our economy. Dick, how does this relate to the other conventional sources of energy that we are familiar with today? We have to recognize that the conventional sources of energy are by and large fossil fuels. We're talking about coal, the liquid petroleum products, natural gas. The energy that apart from these sources that we use today

is really as part of the total picture, relatively small. The hydroelectric power, for example, today corresponds to approximately 3 % of our total energy requirements. And the other 97%, by and large, comes from the fossil fuels that I've already described. The natural gas and petroleum liquid products are very closely related. They both have them come from underground deposits that are produced in substantially the same kinds of ways. The industries are very much alike then in what they have to do in terms of getting the product. In terms of producing the product, as it stands today, that is quite true. Well, now we hear an awful lot of talk about the future of our conventional fuels and about how we're running out of fossil fuels that some day we're going to use up the supply that we have. How true is this? Well, I would say that it's simply untrue. The whole question, of course, of the total amount of

fuels available under present technology is open to debate. But in terms of coal, for example, we probably have something like 2000 years supply. In terms of economically recoverable reserves today, we have something in the order of 100 years supply of petroleum liquids and natural gas. The experts can argue about the exact number of years and about the basis for the calculation. But basically, we're talking these orders of magnitude. In none of our lifetimes, will these resources be lost? This is based on current usage. This is sometimes confused with the life index of probed reserves, which for natural gas are approximately 20 years. Well, I don't quite understand the degrees are the reserves, which have actually been drilled and measured, and you can guarantee they're there and ready for use. This is a very

different number than the actual reserves, which are many times that. Well, yes, the life index is kind of an inventory. If you ask any one of the companies that is in business and operating, what they're inventory is they can tell you and their life doesn't depend on their present inventory. In the same argument, too, with respect to the life index. When you mention that a good figure to use would be 100 years supply of natural gas, what happens to the gas industry 100 years from now? Will it go out of business? No, certainly not. We have to see this kind of picture that in a gaseous fuel, one has a very convenient and economical fuel, whether the gas itself is derived from natural gases or whether the gas is derived from let us say coal. The very inherent economics of transportation and fuel and utilization, I think it will inevitably mean that we will have a sizable amount, certainly the

order of present usage, like 30 percent, of the energy usage being in the form of a gas. In the year 2000, in the year 2500. Well, that sort of bring us back in a cycle wasn't the gas that was used some 30 or 40 years ago derived from coal as well. It was produced primarily from coal during operations of making coke for blast furnace use. This is where essentially the gas industry was founded, a manufactured gas, and it may eventually, as you say, end up there again. One thing I might point out that one of the great advantages of gas compared to coal, for example, is the fact that it moves so easily. It's a gas that flows with relatively little energy requirement through very convenient pipes, whereas coal has to be moved about generally speaking in lumps. Oil

is relatively intermediate at a liquid and is relatively hard to distribute. I think the point might be made in connection with this business of the future. By large, the growth of reserves has pretty much parallel to demand. As long as there is an incentive for the producers to be going out and finding natural gas and petroleum liquids, they will, in fact, be finding them. If one had asked 10 years ago, for example, whether continental Europe would have significant gas available to it, natural gas, one would have had to say no. But within that 10 -year period, you know, honest reserves of gas have been found offshore on the continental shelf, and a tremendous market is now a building and really a brand new industry for the continent. And it's very difficult to say what the reserves of the future will be.

One really can't say, because people haven't looked as hard as they would have to if they were running out of it in one place. How do these things last week we talked about nuclear energy and it as a field for the future, a field which is just now developing and potentially could be providing a good share of the energy required by our country sometime in the future. How do you relate the natural gas industry with these more exotic areas of nuclear energy? Is there going to be much effect on the gas industry? Well, again, it's a question of economics. At the present moment, the directly burnable, as the term goes, nuclear energy in the form of uranium is very small and really quite trivial compared to the other reserves. However, through research and science, if

the fusion process can be developed, if the breeder reactors can be developed, and these are very severe engineering problems, and Zadana Leigh, which has with it severe economic penalties, of course, then the reserves of nuclear energy are quite fantastic. We probably will get into it later that once you produce energy from nuclear sources, it will be in the form of electricity, and then you have a distribution problem of the electricity from central stations. It appears very unlikely now that the nuclear energy package will ever be something that you can put in your bread box. There are some estimates on, for example, what proportion of our total energy requirements might conceivably be met and say that you're 2000 by, say,

energy derived from nuclear sources. It turns out that a reasonable estimate is of say of the order 10 to 15 percent, and that if one inquires at the same time, at that time, what kind of an estimate would be come to as for natural gas and petroleum liquids, we'd have to say it's probably of the order of 75 percent, so that the basic energy picture is not going to be, I think, very different in the future than it is today, which means that the careers that, to a degree, anyway, the careers that we have today in the field will be pretty much the same in the future. They'll be changed somewhat in terms of technical development that come along. Well, one factor that I think might be brought in at this point, if we're talking about energy supply and ask the question, do you suppose that, say, by the year 2000, will the industry be growing in that period or not? In the answer to that, would appear at present, by best estimates, to be that the industry will be serving somewhere between two and four times

as much energy to the public as it does now. It doesn't necessarily follow that there will be twice as many people employed in this industry, but it must follow that there will be many, many more than presently. The amount of energy being served is that based on simply the population growth that there are going to be more people and there are two more factors. Two factors, one certainly is the increase in population. The other one is that there's a kind of direct correlation between the degree of industrialization, the gross national product, if you will, and energy requirements. And I doubt that our gross national product is going to be decreasing in the foreseeable future. And hence, our energy requirements will be increasing in direct proportion. Well, let's try and trace a little bit through the operation then of securing our natural gas and then getting it to the consumer. And I think this will give us an idea of the scope of the field and the many various kinds of occupations that

are available in it. Jack, what's the first step? What has to happen first before we can get natural gas to use as energy? The first step is drilling, which is very similar to putting down an oil well. They're generally speaking, natural gas is quite closely associated with petroleum. And generally speaking, come out of the same well. This is not completely true, but it's a pretty good general rule. So you put down a hole and you reach a deep enough point, you hit pockets of natural gas, which are under quite high pressure, so that the gas tends to flow out of the hole through the drilling pipe quite by itself. The gas, which comes out, contains more than

methane, which is, as I said before, the primary constituent of the gases we use it contains propane and higher hydrocarbons, which are condensed out and used as liquefied petroleum gases. What's the common name for this? Then the gas, in some cases, the gas contains sulfur. Generally speaking, this is not true, but sometimes it does, and this has to be removed. So at the site or close to the site, there's a process of development. Generally speaking, in the field, right at the site. Before we carry it any further, even before you put a hole down, you better have a pretty fair idea where you're going to put this hole. So that Jack did neglect to mention that there is an exploration operation that is ahead of this. Namely, there are the geologists, and those related to that general area of study, have techniques and have pretty

fair idea as to the kinds of geologic formations within which one is apt to find all other gas liquids. You mentioned earlier that we don't look for new reserves of this fuel unless we need it. Well, what is the state today? Are there a lot of geologists needed by the gas industry to go out and survey the countryside or the offshore areas to find new reserves? Are we pretty well set today as to the reserves that we have? I think there's going to certainly be a continuing emphasis on exploration. The problem here becomes when we have to bring in the world picture at this point, because exploration operations are being conducted by the petroleum and gas companies around the world, not just in the confine of the continental limits in the United States and more than that offshore. So there's going to be, without any question, a continuing need for the kind of technical people who know how to explore, know what to do about it. In case they do come up with something, what does it mean? Interpretation,

there's a tremendous host of very highly specialized technical skills that go along with the problem of discovering likely places where oil is to be found and assisting the process of the evaluation in the process of drilling. Well, now we're back to the field again where our reserves are that we have found and we've sunk a hole and we found our natural gas. The kinds of jobs that are required in this area are generally non -professional or are they very skilled technicians that are required out here as well. For talking about the, there are all manner of jobs involved here, really. We're talking at one level in the process of drilling and certainly there is some in the column that have many, many unskilled jobs that attach to this. There are many skilled jobs that go along with it. You actually have got to the whole drill, for example, somehow you have

produced the material that's underground and the management of the reservoir for the purpose namely of getting maximum production or maximum utilization of the available thing material there is, not matter for amateurs, it's a matter for highly qualified experts in this area. So that this now is a problem of petroleum engineers and those related to petroleum engineering. Well, once we get it out, how do we get it somewhere where we can use it, what happens here? Let me put it one more step. The by -line chemical and mechanical engineers will be designing the plant that removes the, I say, the heavier petroleum fluids from the gas after it comes out and operating that plant, managing its operation. To move along then we have, let's say we have the gas, now in Texas, we would like to be at Chicago. It's an interesting concept but

there are great many practical engineering jobs involved in the design, construction and operation of a plant line so that we're here calling upon the services of, for example, civil and mechanical and chemical engineers. At any time did they ever just put it in tank cars on a railroad and ship it up that way? Was this a solution or before we had pipelines, we just didn't have the natural gas in Chicago? That's right. In most localities there is natural gas in limited quantities so that the original uses of natural gas was on a quite local basis rather than bringing it in from a long distance of way. As a matter of fact, right at this moment, speaking of tank cars, natural gas is being liquefied by cooling it to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit and shipping it about in that form, gas industry in some localities is actually opening up new

areas of gas utilization by shipping it in as a liquid rather than building pipelines. I feel that they having established the market they will then build a pipeline. It's a reversal of the... It's not an economic factor here except that until they have enough customers it wouldn't pay them to build a pipeline. Introduced by the way, a different concept here and two and the industry being as broad and scope as it is, it impinges on so many of the aspects of the world around us. I don't know whether you're familiar with the term cryogenics, the low temperature operations, well we're talking here about liquid fraction of natural gases, low temperatures, the area of cryogenics. It's made difficult to imagine anything besides the problems of designing marine vessels. It's hard to imagine a scientific or commercial application of technical skill that somewhere will find application within the industry.

Well now we're moving across the country here where we're getting closer to Chicago from Texas through a pipeline which involves the civil engineer and the mechanical engineer and people of this nature. Once it gets here in Chicago what happens? Now we need now. Well the big problem now is that we have in the city here many millions of people who live in individual homes and who require individual service so that somehow we've got to move this material from a high pressure situation at this what we call a city gate and distribute it to these many many customers. This involves if you take this city really an incredible network of underground pipes. An enormous problem of metering, of maintaining and managing a very complex piping network involves many many skills of course that somebody has to design this network and decide when it should

be reinforced and if it is to be extended how shall it be extended and what about the problem of you don't just leave the pipe open from Texas and keep siphoning it off as it comes in. There's a problem of storage somewhere isn't there? Well there's two problems. It's two problems involved. One of them we didn't bother to mention the fact that this gas is compressed as it comes along but what we have it here truly there is then a storage problem because of the nature of the market. What does this involve? We used to see huge huge tanks sitting around various parts of the city that gas hold there. That's right now I know in some areas these are disappearing. How are these storing the gas in these? In the Chicago area to be specific close to home it started in an underground natural formation which is called an aquifer very high sounding name for a water bearing

permeable rock structure which has superimposed on it a very dense leak -proof virtually leak -proof rock structure on top of which are farmlands and things of it. And once again we get the geologists to film this place that we could see. This is a very active place for the geologists finding such localities. The gas is pumped into this a formation and as you do so you force the water down and it's like storing gas in a water bottle which you probably have seen. In other localities they have, as I mentioned before, natural gas formations which existed and which were used and used up in the local formations and gas can then be pumped

into these at high pressure and stored until it's needed. This same business that we mentioned before the liquid -faction natural gas is a very up -to -date and seriously being considered method of storage also. In this case when builds basically a leak tank converts this gaseous fuel to a liquid at low temperature and then stores it until necessary to use and then vaporizes it and has available what amounts to peak load gas. I use the term peak load which perhaps is confusing the issue a little but I think one can visualize this is one of the problems requiring technical attention. The demand for gas is not constant through the day nor is it constant from day to day during the week nor from season to season and in order to enable them to make the best use of the available supply it's very convenient to imagine

storing during periods of loading man so that you can make use of that stored gas during periods of highest demand. It sounds like you're getting a more complicated way of storing natural gas than you did. Well this is necessary because the expanding industry requires these measures to be taken. By and large you always take the easy methods first and exploit them and as you move forward in your technology and in your demand and selling your product you have to develop more exotic methods. One's which require more engineering. Well let's get into the educational requirements here. The way the field has been described so far it's a broad broad field that's going to require many many talented people to train technical professional people.

What about the scientist versus the engineer in this field? Who are we going to look for for the future of the gas industry? Well I think we're going to look to the engineer as we have in fact throughout our history and for that matter not just the gas industry but I think the country at large. We're talking about that kind of man who converts into practical real terms and scientific conceptions. The man who can take an idea and make it a practical working reality for the common run of people so that there isn't any question about it. It's going to be the businessman if you like. The engineers who are going to be running this business and are going to be the most significant primaries at it. Jack is director of research very briefly. What are some of the future areas that we're getting into where the engineer is going to play a role? Well one of the more interesting ones is to

attempt to use gas energy's primary attribute which is ease of distribution to bring it to the home and then generate electricity in the home as a means of promoting the gas industry and as a means of making living cheaper for everybody. This is called a fuel cell which is a battery in effect except that it has a continuous feed whereas most batteries are storage devices. This has a continuous feed of gas energy and it's converted directly into electrical energy. Well what would you say to a young person considering this field as a career today? That it's a wide open field, a good field to get into something that they can feel secure in in the future. Well I feel that it's a very wide open field and a very long lasting field. Yes and that one needs challenge. One needn't worry too much about their jobs

disappearing through complete change and the use of our energy in this country. Not for a long time. Well thank you very much gentlemen for coming this morning and giving us a better understanding of this field of very interesting field of gas technology. Dr. Bookichek and Mr. Heeler both of the institute of gas technology thanks again for coming this morning and this is Don Anderson saying that morning for the American scene. This has been the American scene today's discussion. Job horizons and gas technology. Add his guest Dr. Richard F. Bookichek, chairman of the education department of the institute of gas technology, and Mr. Jack Heubler, associate director of research also with IGT.

Host on the series is Don Anderson, director of public service broadcasting at Illinois Tech. The American scene is pre -recorded and is produced by the Illinois Institute of Technology in cooperation with WMAQ. Next week's topic will be job horizons and visual communication. I will be discussed by Mr. Gordon Martin and Chad Taylor as we continue our investigation of the American scene. Here's a fact April is teaching career month. Now we'll have a spot quiz. What's the largest profession in this country?