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Qatar Airways uses natural gas fuel on flight from London
Gulf News Staff Report
A Qatar Airways flight has made history by being the first commercial flight to be powered by fuel derived from natural gas.

The blend, which will be known as GTL jet fuel, produces fewer emissions and sulphur dioxide.

It took more than two years for a consortium consisting of Airbus, Qatar Airways, Qatar Petroleum, Qatar Science & Technology Park, Rolls-Royce, Shell and WOQOD to develop the fuel.

Qatar Airways Chief Executive Officer Akbar Al Baker, said: “Qatar Airways is proud to be associated with this consortium and to become the world’s first airline to use this new fuel technology on a commercial passenger flight...
(Oct 13 2009)
sent in by EB contributor Calvin Sloan

Sellers on the spot ahead of gas war
Carl Mortished, Times Online
A great European war is about to begin. The heart of the conflict will be in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy. There will be battles in the North Sea, a strike from North Africa at Italy’s boot and into the South of France. The final struggle could see a cross-Channel invasion by Britain of France and the Benelux countries.

This is a war for natural gas, a struggle for control of the market in this vital fuel.

It is not, though, a fight over market share but something more fundamental: it is about control over the pricing mechanism, the way in which gas is bought and sold in Europe. It is an ideological conflict between promoters of free markets and others who support the stability of a managed price. It is also about the potential profits and losses at stake in $30 billion (£19 billion) worth of unwanted gas.

The gas price has collapsed worldwide. It has been beaten down by recession and at the same time undermined by new discoveries in America and new supplies of sea-borne liquefied natural gas from the Gulf...
(15 Oct 2009)

Assembly of peak oil experts look at shale gas
Joel Hanel, Durango Herald
As a boy in Arizona, Randy Udall did a “science experiment” by putting a tarantula and a scorpion together in a Mason jar to see what would happen.

He did the same kind of experiment Monday, pitting energy executives against each other in a debate over a large new source of natural gas.

Udall is a co-founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-USA and the brother of U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo. At Monday’s national peak oil conference in Denver, he tried to make sense of major changes in the gas industry the last few years.

The Potential Gas Committee at the Colorado School of Mines made national news this summer when it announced that, largely because of shale gas, the United States has a 100-year supply of domestic natural gas. Shale-gas deposits lie under parts of Southwest Colorado that have never been drilled, including Montezuma, Dolores and western La Plata counties.

Gas executives have seized on the study to push for a much greater role for their product in electricity generation, especially as the Senate prepares to debate a climate-change bill...
(13 Oct 2009)