Month: July 2009

There are two ways to define the energy content of natural gas in common use — Higher Heating Value (HHV) and Lower Heating Value (LHV). The difference can be especially important when reviewing the performance of engine-driven systems. Higher Heating Values for a fuel include the full energy content as defined by bringing all products of combustion to 25° C. Natural gas typically is delivered by the local gas company with values of 1,000 – 1,050 Btu per cubic foot on this HHV basis. Since the actual value may vary from month to month some gas companies convert to therms. A therm is precisely 100,000 Btu. These measures all represent higher heating values. Some engine manufacturers rate their engines using Lower Heating Values (LHV) which can be both confusing and potentially misleading to the casual user of their product literature. Lower heating values neglect the energy in the water vapor formed by the combustion of hydrogen in the fuel. This water vapor typically represents about 10% of the energy content. Therefore the lower heating values for natural gas are typically 900 – 950 Btu per cubic foot. The error can occur when a manufacturer says their engine uses 900,000 Btu/hr but it was expressed on a LHV basis. The engine would actually use about 1,000,000 Btu/hr as purchased from a gas supplier. Therefore, always check the fuel rating method when natural gas is the fuel for the system. This potential confusion almost never exists with liquid fueled systems.

Reservoirs with temperatures of 150 degrees C or more. Producing oil or gas from such fields means constantly pushing back the technological frontier. HPHT can also cause a hole to collapse and danger of a blowout. When oil is produced from very deep wells it comes out of the ground at a very high temperature cooling quickly on its way out and causing paraffin to form and clog the pipes. In addition, the oil is produced at extremely high pressure (about 230 times the pressure of air in a car’s tire)

Located in Erath, LA, the Henry Hub is a pipeline interchange and the delivery point for the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) active natural gas futures contracts. Natural gas from the Gulf of Mexico moves through the Henry Hub onto interstate pipelines serving the Midwest and the Northeast. The Henry Hub is the largest centralized point for natural gas spot and futures trading in the United States

The Henry Hub is the largest centralized point for natural gas spot and futures trading in the United States. The New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) uses the Henry Hub as the point of delivery for its natural gas futures contract. The NYMEX gas futures contract began trading on April 3, 1990. NYMEX deliveries at the Henry Hub are treated in the same way as cash-market transactions. Many natural gas marketers also use the Henry Hub as their physical contract delivery point or their price benchmark for spot trades of natural gas. Henry Hub spot and futures prices have become the surrogate for “real-time” wellhead natural gas prices.

A gusher is an oilwell that has come in with such great pressure that the oil jets out of the well like a geyser. A well that has blown out of control and from which oil, water, or gas is escaping with great force to the surface.

An uncapped oil well connected to a reservoir of petroleum oil that is under high pressure. The oil can shoot 200 feet (60 meters) or higher into the air. Sometimes the term refers to an especially rich well

Including the hooking up of platforms in order to start the offshore platform operations