News Article

OsComp, Global Partners Pursue Virtual Pipelines for Natural Gas
Date: Apr 23, 2013
Source: Forbes ( click here to go to the source)

Featured firm in this article: OsComp Systems Inc of Somerville, MA



OsComp Systems, a privately held start-up company based in Houston, Texas, wants to distribute natural gas the way that propane is distributed and has pioneered a compressor technology that it claims will allow it to do so. If it succeeds, OsComp could provide a cost-effective, reliable alternative for customers who want natural gas but not the gas transmission and distribution grid

Funded by Energy Ventures and Chevron CVX +0.18% Technology Ventures, OsComp's compression technology is designed to reduce the energy needed to compress and transport natural gas by a factor of four compared to conventional systems.

David Brooks, the Granite Geek columnist at the Nashua Telegraph, described OsComp's virtual pipeline like so:

The heart of the company is a new compressor design that can handle natural gas containing water vapor or other hydrocarbon liquids (aka ‘wet gas') and whose rotary design is smaller and far more efficient than traditional compressors . . . OsComp's compressor, combined with various technical tweaks to tanker and loading technologies, overcomes difficulties that limit the use of compressed natural gas.

A big complication is that natural gas is stored under high pressure to reduce its volumes, which leads to problems when it must be delivered for use at lower pressures. As you may remember from physics class, changing the pressure of a liquid changes its temperature. That's how your refrigerator works: coolant is compressed and decompressed to absorb and release heat as needed.

With natural gas, temperatures can fall to the cryogenic levels, around 238 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, if pressures change too fast -- not good.

OsComp claims a technology that they've labeled RapidFill, which can handle these temperatures, allowing trailers to be loaded and unloaded quickly enough to be economically feasible to deliver relatively small loads to relatively small customers, as measured by million British thermal units consumed per year, known as MMBTU . . . .

The economics of OsComp's virtual pipeline depend on the price differential between natural gas and fuel oil. By replacing expensive fuel oil with inexpensive gas, OsComp claims it can provide customers with a payback in the form of fuel-cost savings in a few months.

OsComp recently formed a strategic alliance with Global Partners LP, a publicly traded energy logistics and marketing master limited partnership based in Waltham, Mass., to provide compressed natural gas (CNG) to large commercial, industrial and municipal customers in New England. Global is building a network of CNG distribution sites to support an end-to-end natural gas transportation solution for commercial, industrial and municipal customers who aren't near a pipeline.

"Our strategic alliance with OsComp provides us with new and innovative technologies that we believe will directly benefit our customers through reduced capital expenses, lower maintenance costs and higher efficiency, resulting in lower overall costs," said Eric Slifka, Global Partners‘ Chief Executive Officer. "OsComp's technology is installed, operating and proven. Through its turnkey CNG system, OsComp is successfully delivering gas to customers in the oilfield though a natural gas virtual pipeline that includes trailers and unloaders."