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December 2004
Real-time Natural Gas Formation Offers Prospect of Renewable Energy Resource for Generations
Researchers at LUCA Technologies, Inc. have made a discovery regarding natural gas production in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin that could lead to a renewable source of energy for generations to come. The company announced that laboratory evidence shows that the Powder River Basin (PRB) coals are generating natural gas in real time through the ongoing activity of anaerobic microbes (bacteria that live in the absence of oxygen) resident in those coal fields. The company has termed sites where this microbial conversion of hydrocarbon deposits (coals, organic shales, or oil) to methane occurs “Geobioreactors(TM),” and believes the careful management of such sites may offer a new long-term solution to U.S. energy needs.
Robert
Pfeiffer, LUCA Technologies president and
chief executive officer, commented, “Our
research on native coal, water and microbial
samples from the PRB has determined that PRB
coals can produce natural gas in real time.
This finding suggests that the gas in the
PRB need not be an ancient remnant of microbial
activity, as generally believed, but instead
is being actively created today. Moreover,
we can increase or decrease methane production
by PRB microbes by altering their access to
water or nutrients, or halt gas production
entirely by exposing the organisms to oxygen
or heat sterilization. This finding holds
the potential of turning what is today thought
to be a finite energy resource into a renewable
source of natural gas that could potentially
go on for hundreds of years.”
LUCA believes that in order to attempt to maximize the ultimate recovery of methane from this potentially enormous natural energy resource it will be necessary to amend certain current operating practices as well as review current legal and regulatory underpinnings of energy development. The company is currently discussing its findings with Wyoming and U.S. national agencies, as well as with major energy companies working in the PRB region.
Microbial Methane Production
from Coal
It has long been known that certain
ancient microorganisms are “meth-anogens”
— microbes that generate methane by
metabolizing other hydrocarbon sources. While
it has also been generally accepted that much
of the methane resident in coal fields was
produced by such organisms, most of this production
was thought to have occurred millions of years
ago, when the hydrocarbon deposits were less
mature and closer to the surface of the earth.
More recently, however, research has suggested that living methanogenic organisms may be present and actively forming methane within some major coalfields. LUCA scientists, employing the tools of modern biotechnology and genomics, have confirmed the presence of such microbes within anaerobic core samples from the PRB. In addition to demonstrating that methane production by these microbes can be stimulated by the introduction of additional nutrient compounds, or suppressed by heat sterilization or the introduction of oxygen, LUCA has shown that radio-labeled CO2 (carbon dioxide) introduced to these PWB core samples is converted to radio-labeled methane. This demonstrates that the methane formation is the result of a biological process occurring today.
“The U.S. has enormous amounts of buried hydrocarbon reserves, many of which cannot be extracted in an economically or environmentally benign fashion with current technologies and production practices,” said Mr. Pfeiffer. “Any of these settings, given the right set of conditions, has the potential to produce biogenic methane in a long-term, sustainable fashion.”