As long as the amount of natural gas extracted from the Marcellus Shale exceeds the amount that the state can handle, Perry Babb has been brewing plans to alleviate the oversupply.
He is involved in the projects of compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, loading natural gas into trucks, and then using it to make things. Babu once admitted that he was the kind of prolific entrepreneur, and bankers even begged him to stop starting new companies.
His latest chemical adventure is such a collection of hot topics that government and university scientists have been writing "what if" papers throughout their careers, and they can hardly believe that their work may be verified in field experiments.
It has hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, shale drilling, chemical production, economically difficult communities, possible solar connections, and elk habitat.
"I have no problem with using the word miracle," said Babu, a former pastor, of the $410 million project. The project is planned to be built on a large area of mostly empty land in Clinton County.
This project, called "KeyState to Zero", located in central Pennsylvania, summed up a zeitgeist in the energy industry without applying for any permits or obtaining financing. For many years, hydrogen has been the next big event, but now, companies and governments have pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions before various self-set deadlines to prevent catastrophic climate change, which has encouraged hydrogen.
Genvia Chief Operating Officer Capella Festa said at S&P Global's second annual hydrogen market meeting in May this year: "If we are talking about reducing emissions by 20-30- 50%, I’m not sure if we will hold a meeting on hydrogen."
The newly established hydrogen joint venture Genvia is supported by Schlumberger, the world's largest oilfield services company. Other oil and gas service giants, Baker Hughes and Halliburton also announced hydrogen projects.
This is why they are all chasing hydrogen: The road to net zero means generating as much electricity as possible, and mass-producing electricity by adding carbon-free sources. Hydrogen is a colorless, odorless, and highly flammable gas. It is the main energy candidate for industries that cannot be electrified (at least not easily), such as shipping, cement and steel production, and long-distance freight. Hydrogen does not contain carbon, so it does not release carbon when burned or reacted in a fuel cell.
In an increasingly carbon-conscious world, it may also be the lifeline of the oil and gas industry, because hydrogen is usually extracted from natural gas.
In April this year, Babu declared at the first Appalachian Hydrogen & Carbon Capture Conference in South Pointe: "Hydrogen is the next chapter."
"Thank God, if you are in the Marcellus industry, this is not the end of natural gas," he said.
Babu said, "The most environmentally friendly thing we can do is to use natural gas on a large scale."
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Mr. Babu’s project did not start with hydrogen. It started with a stranded asset-a 7,000-acre piece of land in Clinton County. A small natural gas company called Frontier Natural Resources leased the right to use natural gas and inherited 4 production wells.
Frontier hired Babb to study how to deal with the natural gas because there was no pipeline nearby to transport it to the market. Mr. Babu decided to switch the market to natural gas. The team built a small factory, which is currently in the start-up phase, to liquefy the gas and load the compressed fuel into tankers for local transportation.
But more fuel remains on the ground, so many economic development studies reviewed by Mr. Barber predict that a large number of manufacturing plants will focus on the supply of shale gas, and set out to build one that uses natural gas as energy and raw material.
At first, he thought it would be a fertilizer factory. Then comes the ammonia and urea equipment. Ammonia extracted from natural gas is used in agriculture and the chemical industry. Urea is a combination of ammonia and carbon dioxide, and is mainly used as diesel exhaust liquid to reduce vehicle emissions.
In December 2019, he presented this idea at a meeting with two senior officials of the US Department of Energy. Shawn Bennett, then Deputy Assistant Secretary for Oil and Gas at the Department of Energy, was one of them.
