 Welcome everybody. Welcome to Stanford. I tell you this was the best five years of my life when I was studying here So I am really excited for you all. You're at the beginning of that journey So we're not really interesting time, right? This this energy transition. I mean, I think energy has been in transition its entire path but you know Renewables are really sexy right now, right? I bet a lot of you are really interested in working on on renewables and My goal today is to convince you that natural gas has got some sex appeal to and and and if there's one thing I want y'all to take away it's that when we're thinking about energy all types of energy have a role to play and We don't want to let perfect right striving for a totally Green clean energy mix is what we're all after ultimately, but we don't want to let perfect be the enemy of the good So if we can do something in the near term that is good, we shouldn't You know ignore that because it's not perfect So so these are my my three takeaways that I actually put down on paper so We're in an era of decarbonization, right? Especially in the United States. That's what we're all here we want to solve this problem and in in my mind these are the three key points regarding gas, right? So unless you've had a head under a rock, which I'm guess you haven't because you got into Stanford You'll know that we have this abundance of natural gas, right? So in the last ten years, we've discovered this way to untap natural gas from shales and We have this resource that we didn't know we had right? we all thought that gas was on its way out and Suddenly the United States in particular goes from being a net importer of gas to a net exporter and this abundance of gas has Some some real opportunity for decarbonization that I'm going to talk about The second part is I think in the US We think a lot about the US But there's a big wide world out there and there's a lot of people without any energy and Natural gas has a real role to play in that and the third part is We all recognize the need to reduce carbon dioxide and The oil and gas industry have to be part of that conversation and I think right now. It's really polarized the energy communities are very polarized and I think that initiatives like the natural gas initiative are Working to bring communities together because the oil and gas industry has a lot of technology and Money that can help solve this problem. So I'm going to touch on each of these and then I'm going to kind of outline What research we're doing within the natural gas initiative on this Okay, so just to set the stage Right, we've had this huge uptick in both gas production on the right in the US and oil production and If I was to ask you, you know, we've got this big increase in the production of fossil fuels What is that done for carbon emissions in the United States? Way more way more fossil fuels than we had before. What's it done? Yeah, why they already told you they already told you the answer they blew my punch line. Okay, so yeah, so natural gas has I Guess the pointer doesn't work Natural gas production has gone up in the last ten years and with that we've seen this huge decline in carbon dioxide because coal has been displaced But these Unconventional fields, right? So we're talking about this huge volume of natural gas and one of the big issues is that we're Terrible at getting it out of the ground right so Typically for those of you that are not familiar with oil and gas reservoirs a gas reservoir a conventional gas reservoir that pulls gas from sandstones Yet almost a hundred percent recovery, right? It's like 90 percent almost every time and suddenly For these shale gas we're getting 25 percent recovery factors. That means for every well that we put down We're getting 25 percent of what's in the ground. We're leaving 75 percent behind That's that's completely inefficient, right? So, you know, if you're like a really really smart engineer and you want to work on this problem instead of PV Which everyone's doing this is a this is a great problem to solve and in fact I have an undergraduate working with me on this and we came up with some really great ways to improve recovery factors and we're gonna have a paper on it and everything so This is this is a key problem, right? So across the whole states of the United States We've got 200,000 wells and they're completely inefficient. So let's figure this out. This is, you know, unacceptable huge footprint for Not very much resource Per well Okay, we've talked a lot. I know you've heard probably all day about the need to limit CO2 emissions and the issue around coal So the top map shows the primary coal production in 2017 I think that was You know, we see what's happening, right? So why is China? Exploding with Coal right now. Why are they choosing coal? It's full of coal. So it's a local resource. What else? They're easy to build. Yep And in fact, we've got 300 gigawatts of coal generation under construction Right and these coal plants last what three decades something like that So and and it's I'm sure you've heard statistics like this during the week So 38% of global power is from coal and it's generating 75% of the global power emissions But really it's a cost problem, right? We got to change the economics here. So This is a natural gas brief. This is from the program. I ran We have a couple of really smart economists who are looking at how to do this and it it's not rocket science, right? I'm a lowly geophysicist and even I understand if you stick a price on carbon and tell people they have to pay and Coal is generating 50% more carbon than the equivalent natural of natural gas Right, we put a price on it and suddenly gas becomes more attractive and there's some threshold at which that happens But you know, I think especially in the the states we forget that In other countries they don't have the luxury of thinking about the environment and trying to do the right thing They're trying to get energy to people that don't have it, right? We got a billion people on the planet with no Energy and we have another billion and a half with like really unreliable or intimate and energy And if you think about it, there's no rich countries That don't have energy right so in order for economic growth and development and all the luxuries that you and I Are afforded at places like Stanford and in the United States and other developing countries We need energy in order to make that happen so as you go on your journey at Stanford, I Encourage you to step back every once in a while and think about this from a global perspective, right and You know, we know that the energy demand is only going to continue to increase. We've got huge population Growth in fact India is gonna surpass China in terms of its energy demand over the next 20 years or so And we have this changing paradigm, right? So the United States, which was an importer is now an exporter of energy We have more energy than we know what to do with like negative numbers and The Middle East which was exporting a lot is now importing so it's a changing paradigm and I really I really think that the global picture is worth stepping back to consider and In addition to power, right? So, you know getting light and electricity to people We have four million four million people dying a year every year Because of indoor air pollution because they're having to cook and heat their homes with wood and biomass and all manner of ugly things, right? That's more than eight malaria and tuberculosis combined Right and that's that's unacceptable in a world where we have this abundance of natural gas My goodness get these people some propane tanks, right? Seriously, right and that's what that's One of the things that we look at in the natural gas initiative and I'll kind of touch on this a bit more in a minute But you know, we've got these like giant solutions, right? So the bottom is a big LNG Tanker, you know, and there's all this infrastructure that goes with it Well getting that in place in places like India is a logistical nightmare, right? and it takes a lot of money and there's supply chain issues and Sometimes, you know, we have to step back and look at these kind of smaller scale solutions So there's this really neat company that we've been Interacting with called Pago. They've come up with this smart meter, you know It turns out in Africa in particular a lot of people don't have flushing toilets, but they all have a mobile phone and So they use, you know, the internet is now global and they can use that in order to Buy energy in this kind of format, right? And they have people consultants that go out to these little rural villages delivering this kind of smart canister So energy, you know as you're as you're thinking about What you're going to work on and I think scale is really important and sometimes the most immediate solutions are not the huge projects, right, but rather practical on the ground solutions So, you know the outlook for energy I think, you know, we all Wish and thought I think that this transition to cleaner energy sources would be faster than it has been But the increase in energy means that, you know We're going to be reliant on Renewables and natural gas for a long time and again going back to that not letting perfect be the enemy of the good, right? If gas is a way to get energy to people in developing countries such that they become economically stable Such that they can start making good decisions about the environment and Having less health costs to deal with then I think that that's You know a really valuable source of energy to think about But we still have You know Carbon dioxide emissions, right? So so we've got this increasing energy We do need to think about the carbon dioxide emissions So I want to take a minute to talk about carbon capture and sequestration So I'm sure many of you are aware I came out of Chevron, you know a big Oil and gas company. There's been this paradigm shift in that business, right? So all of a sudden right these big Corporations are like, oh my gosh climate change. It's real right public acknowledgement and with that They're putting their money where their mouth is with initiatives like this So this is the oil and gas climate initiative And they're looking they're collectively putting in fairly large sums of money to find solutions and Carbon capture and storage is an absolutely critical part. It's been you know Demonstrated that in order to achieve the Paris Accords two-degree scenario CCS is absolutely necessary. So this graph shows the amount of Carbon that you would have to capture and store in order to meet the two-degree scenario through time And it's broken down here into power industry and other Okay, so this is where we're at right now. This is how much carbon we are currently Capturing and putting in the ground 30 million tons a year. It doesn't even it's like irrelevant on this chart, right? So this scale is in gigatons, and we're talking about million tons 30 million tons. That's where we're at right now pathetic okay this Happens to be The equivalent of what global this should say oil and gas production is right? So currently the oil and gas industry is producing about 30 billion barrels a year So they're sucking out 30 billion barrels of oil and gas from Horus rock for the most part that you could put carbon dioxide into That's looking good like maybe we pull it out and we put stuff in and here's like twice Right, so in order to get out at 2060 you're looking at sequestering twice the amount of global oil and gas production and There's been lots of ways that people have looked at this right there's like geologic storage in aquifers but really the oil and gas reservoirs are the only viable solution and We've been actively working with a number of companies to do just this right so they know the subsurface We don't have to spend years Characterizing the rocks they over they've already done that for us and most of the infrastructure is in place It turns out you can pretty much use the same wells that you pull oil and gas out with to put carbon dioxide in The pore space is there the volumes are on the right scale and it has the potential for real impact I think this idea of scale is really important So I'm really excited about this and my hope is that the evil oil and gas industry Become the atmospheric services industry that kind of helps us with this huge problem because there really aren't other viable ways of Capturing co2 right now and storing it Okay, so I'm gonna talk a little bit about my program and I wanted to As I go through this kind of give you a feel of what professors are working on what and and All of this information is on the website so ngi.stanford.edu if anyone's interested And I'm always up for a coffee if you want to just have a chat Ilman as he came and saw me So, okay, so the natural gas initiative is we have about 40 research groups across campus so science and engineering business economics policy even the medical school and we We Work with industry partners, so it's an affiliate program. They pay dues and And we fund research projects in many many different areas related to natural gas So some of our members, I'm sure you'll recognize So these are the The seven focus areas that we do Research in and that we fund research in we are This year we added data science and hydrogen. I'll talk a little bit about those and we are actively growing so I One of the things I'd like to do this year is look at renewable gas and how that fits into this picture So if it's all right with you, I will take you on a quick journey with my gratuitous PowerPoint and And and just kind of give you a little flavor of each of these Mostly so that if there's something that tickles your fancy, you know, the right people to contact you can reach out to me and say Hey, I'm super interested in that all of these focus areas have a website on Link to NGI with papers and all sorts of cool stuff. So I'll start with methane emissions so this is Adam Brandt and Rob Jackson and I kind of talked a lot about the benefits of natural gas and what I didn't tell you minor issue is that we actually have a bit of a problem because Methane is leaking from a lot of the infrastructure So about 2% of production global production of natural gas Leaks into the atmosphere from the well heads or from the pipes that it's transmitted through and so this group is actively working on detection methodologies and mitigating ways of Rendering that a non-issue. So this is a picture from they did a big field trial So they took a I think 12 companies and did control pests in the field to look at how good those technologies were at detecting the methane leaks They just had a paper out on that yesterday. You can find it on our website if you're interested we have a couple of postdocs who developed a Low-cost sensor in the lab and have now been funded from our members to form a company So that's full moon. We have a paper coming out on that too and then we're looking at kind of Globally quantifying because nobody has really been able to come up with a baseline of how bad this issue is So top-down Estimates and bottoms-up estimates don't really match. So this group is working on figuring out exactly how serious an issue methane leaks are. I Talked a little bit about unconventional gas reservoirs. So this would be Mark Zobac and Tony Kopfcheck part of this is around making the Process the production process more efficient But there's also some really cool work that Tony's doing on using carbon dioxide as the hydrofracking fluid So imagine you get more Production and you sequester CO2 in the process. So that's the basic idea Energy access so Mark and I Work on this. I'm really interested in developing decision analysis tools to help people in a national level make choices in their energy Sources I think that they're you know, we talked about the relative cost of gas and coal If you start including externalities like health care Suddenly gas becomes way cheaper, right? So if you look at China and what they're spending on health care associated with pollution Related health costs gas it becomes a much better choice So I'm interested in kind of quantifying that and also getting natural gas liquids and propane We talked about that out to people so that they don't have to Cook over wood and biomass Methane conversion for the chemist in the room. This is a 40-decade old problem But there's a lot of benefit in being able to convert methane efficiently to methanol and so we have three faculty members Tom Haramio Matteo Carnello and Jialing Zhang working on this from different perspectives. We've just had a couple of papers in nature That Matteo Carnello wrote around really cool stuff Natural enzymes are able to do this and he was able to mimic that in the lab Hydrogen so 80% of hydrogen right now is generated from natural gas So there's a link there, but also there is You know a real decarbonization target would be to use hydrogen in the natural gas pipelines Right, so if we add more hydrogen and it burns very similarly you can add up to maybe 15-20% and so we have a lot of research going on in this space We just had a big workshop and we have a white paper coming out soon should be out in the next month or so and That's Jialing Zhang is our faculty leader for that Global markets and governance so this is the issue around carbon pricing and looking at how the gas renewables and Coal electricity markets all work together Frank and Mark are actually running a workshop for us in Less than a month where we're going to play a game to look at this Data science data science is everywhere and What we recognized at Stanford not just NGI this is kind of much bigger than that is that? subsurface data science is all this technology and It's not really being integrated and grounded in the physical models And so we're holding a it's going to be epic a workshop we have technology giants like Microsoft coming in but also tons of like startups and energy companies and consumers to Figure out where we need to go in this space so it's going to be a round table discussion I have space for a few students so if people are interested you can let me know So the events that I've been talking about are it's what we affectionately call NGI week. It happens in October We have three workshops and an affiliates meeting if you're interested you can email me We have information on the website the agendas are up and We certainly welcome your participation So with that I will take any questions that you have we need mics Can you speak loudly? Hi, I'm really great doc. Thank you for chatting with us One of my questions was that when you think about energy access it seems like the trade-off between coal and natural gas is pretty clear But what about the trade-off between say natural gas or like a solar lamp? Or is the solar plus storage combination still not at cost parity with natural gas? It's a great question and it's geographic the dependent right so We do look at all of those trade-offs, right? I think the the biggest priority right now is displacing coal We have to figure that part out But you're right that we also need to think about how natural gas integrates with renewables So we are holding a conference in India for example to talk about that and to figure out, you know, where? those trade-offs lie, but I yeah, I think it's a great question and you know I don't have any answers because it it really does depend on what location you're talking about Yeah Yeah, thanks for your talk So throughout the week we've basically been People have explained to us how carbon capture is often one of the most expensive parts Or negative emissions is one of the most expensive parts of this cycle So my question is if the if the infrastructure and the knowledge is in place, why is this so expensive and It's a great question so you have to transport The emissions basically to the site that's a big part of it, right? It's you know putting in pipelines is probably the most costly element if you're looking at already depleted oil and gas reservoirs and the wells are in place it Becomes much more cost-effective So one of the things that I think we need to jump on right now is in places like the shallow Gulf of Mexico and The North Sea there's a whole bunch of fields that are just on decline like they're getting ready to start thinking about abandonment abandonment for oil and gas companies is super expensive and so if we can Flip it right to start injecting Carbon dioxide and do CCS there then it becomes actually a positive cost equation for the companies So I think the numbers that we see are often from scratch Like if you were to do this from scratch at the source, you know, I mean it's a lot of work Right, so these oil and gas reservoirs they're characterized sometimes for a decade before they're drilled and that's Part of the cost equation that I think people often quote and just a follow-up question then So is there any incentive though for them to maintain these places with the labor to to basically reduce those emissions? I'm sorry to go negative emissions because now they're no longer making any money off of that And I would hope they have altruistic region reasons for continuing. I don't think that's now So I I I think in places like the North Sea where there is carbon pricing It becomes a better equation for them And we have that's our job right is to figure out the economic in fact and mark will probably talk a little bit about that Are you just playing games? So yeah, but I think you know figuring out how to make the economics work, right? We can't expect companies to do things if it's going to lose the money, but if we can be Ingenious right and suddenly if they don't have to spend five billion dollars abandoning a well and instead Right, it's a lot cheaper for them to sequester and they get the good PR, right and their shareholders are happy That's a better equation So part of it is reframing it right to make it an economic incentive, but it's a great. It's a great question Thank you. Yeah Thank you Professor I'm Shenzhen from China Yeah, I as I mentioned before just now China is full of coal and the main electricity output is from the Co power plant. However, the Chinese government also want to Make a big energy transformation. This is why we are come here And my question is since China is full of coal, but lack of the natural gas The Chinese government want to make a energy transformation without damage damage for its Economy and those to the national security. Therefore, what's your advice for this kind of situation? Well, you know, I I mean I understand why they're developing coal, right? We all do right? It's an economic reason So you actually have a lot of unconventional resources. So one of the things that we've been doing is working with Chinese the Chinese oil companies to help them Characterize and develop those resources. So that's one possible option I think it's all trade-offs and I think including the externalities into the equation, right? You know the the pollution issues alone right are costing a lot of money and so when you start kind of looking at this in a more holistic way I think that Different choices might be made, but I mean I it it's challenging. We're all like trying to Figure out paths forward through this challenge. So I can't give you any kind of You know magic wand advice on that One last question is the China Has import many natural gas from Russia or LNG from Australia, but do you think This way and is is it still be a safe when an emergency Happened like Political Something happened. Well, you know Something happened. Well, you know geopolitical concerns are always a risk, right? And I mean, I think the states is really lucky that we have this resource right here because it does give us national security And I mean, it's a great question. And I think diversifying You know your sources is important Yeah Lots to think about Thank you. All right. All right with that. Thank you. Dr. Bonnes. We'll come