Studying natural gas at the nano level

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On June 13, 2011

Natural gas is an abundant energy resource for the United States, but much of it is trapped in shale or tight-sand formations. Baojun Bai is working on a way to extract that gas by studying the energy source at the molecular level.


Bai, an assistant professor of petroleum engineering, is leading the research, which looks at how natural gas behaves in these constricted environments. Working with Bai is Yinfa Ma, Curators’ Teaching Professor of chemistry, whose single-molecule imaging system will help the researchers examine the flow properties of natural gas on a small scale.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that tight sands and shale formations may hold up to 460 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to meet current U.S. demand for nearly 21 years. (According to the Natural Gas Supply Association, Americans consume about 22 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a year).

But Bai says that traditional methods of extracting natural gas will not work in these tight formations.

“The problem is that the pore size is so small — only a few nanometers,” he says. In conventional natural gas reservoirs, the gas flows through pores that are a few micrometers in width.

The difference between nanometers and micrometers is significant. A single nanometer is one billionth of a meter. A micrometer is one millionth of a meter. That means that a micrometer is 1,000 times larger than a nanometer.

At the nanometer scale, materials behave differently. No one really knows how natural gas flows at that level, Bai says. So he, Ma and some Missouri S&T graduate students are trying to find out.

“We want an improved understanding of how the gas flows through the pore space — specifically, how natural gas in a nanoscale pore behaves,” Bai says.

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On June 13, 2011. Posted in Research, Summer 2011