ASSIGNMENT #1,CHAPTER 1, QUESTION 1.9

1.9 You are a design engineer working for natural gas transmission company. You are assigned to a design team that is charged with preparing the proposal to the state Public Utility Commission to build a plant to receive liquefied natural gas from ocean-going tankers and unload it into your company’s gas transmission system. What technical issues and societal issues will your team have to deal with?

Natural gas is used primarily as a fuel and as a raw material in manufacturing. Natural gas is considered as an environmental friendly clean fuel, offering important environmental benefits when compared to other fossil fuels. LNG is the liquid form of natural gas. Gas cooled to approximately −162◦C liquefies and has a volume approximately 1/600 that of gas at room temperature. However, facilities for liquefying natural gas require complex machinery with moving parts and special refrigerated ships for transporting the liquefied natural gas to market.

Hence, they are many technical issue that need to be taken care of in order to build a plant to receive liquefied natural gas. Cost for building the facilities and handling the vast quantities of liquefied natural gas is expensive and need special skilled workers. They need to have large cryogenic tanks to store the liquefied natural gas; typically these may be 70 m in diameter, 45 m high, and hold over 100,000 m3 of liquefied natural gas. This will cost a lot in term of financial economic in natural gas industry.

Next, infrastructure also plays an importance role in building a plant for natural gas. Liquefied natural gas need a huge place to process and store it. So, it need a place near to the sea and vast area of land to accommodate the company’s gas transmission system. Hence, a good safety workplace should be in highest priority in building and managing the transmission’s gas system. All facilities need to be in good aspect of safety and safety procedures must be followed to cope with all hazardous and danger in workplaces.

Moreover, the aspect of transportation also one of the technical issues arise due to the properties of the gas itself that is low density. The low density of the gas cause it to be difficult to store or transport by vehicle. The natural gas pipelines are impractical across the ocean, so the best way of transportation is by compressing the gas into liquid at liquefaction plant, and is returned to gas form at regasification plant at the terminal on the land. The ways of transportation must be follow step by step based on the rules and regulation so that there are no problem during transportation of the liquefied.

In societal issues, by building a new plant to receive liquefied natural gas, it can create more job opportunities to community. As we know, process and handling of transmission’s gas system has a lot of work and procedure to be followed, thus a lot of workers needed to accommodate the jobs.

Through environmental view, natural gas did not give a lot of impact to environment such as in air, water and soil because natural gas plant has facilities and technologies in managing waste in properly mannered before releasing to surrounding. For example, when managing surface water, companies must prevent contact between rainwater and contaminants at the processing facility.

They must also design the sites properly to ensure that rainwater that lands on a gas plant is collected in a central location where it can be stored, treated, and reused or released into the environment in a controlled manner. If methane is allowed to leak into the air before being used from a leaky pipe, for instance it absorbs the sun’s heat, warming the atmosphere. For this reason, it’s considered a greenhouse gas, like carbon dioxide. Hence the increasing of this gas will give the bad effect in term of health to the community. Companies that use effective liners and secondary containment systems, and continue to monitor groundwater throughout the life of the project, can ensure that leaks and spills are prevented and any contamination that does happen can be detected and cleaned up quickly.