I didn’t know a ton about propane. But then I prepared for a keynote earlier this week. And I learned a lot in the process.
My background is in oil & gas.
At Baker Hughes and Key, I spent a lot of time on the upstream side of things, exploring both E&Ps and equipment & service companies.
At Pinnacle, I focused on the midstream and downstream segments, along with power, mining, and chemicals.
While I’ve had considerable exposure across the world of oil & gas, I’ll admit, I spent little time diving into the nuances of the propane market.
But that’s what I did to prepare for my remarks at the Power Generation Summit hosted by the Propane Education & Research Council this week in Frisco, Texas.
One of the most interesting elements of the niche (but important and growing) role that propane plays in power is its positioning relative to natural gas and diesel.
Natural gas and diesel get a ton of attention for the obvious reasons.
They’re produced in huge quantities and have considerable momentum, each for different reasons.
But when it comes to power generation, propane has advantages over both.
Where you don’t have a natural gas pipeline, propane is much easier to transport than natural gas, and propane has a much higher energy density.
On the diesel side, propane burns much more cleanly and can store indefinitely, unlike diesel which requires conditioning when stored for a year or more.
Some industrial players are deploying really interesting combined heat and power systems featuring propane that sit entirely apart from the grid.
And these systems have efficiencies that compete with some of the largest existing utility-scale CHP installations.
Propane is far from a universal solution.
But it does have a compelling promise in how it can help us expand and strengthen our rapidly evolving power sector.
For me, preparing and delivering the talk, and interacting with the impressive folks that attended the summit, was a reminder of how many dimensions the power sector actually has.
