Frozen Gas

Shortly before the Korean war, a Chicago gas company injudiciously tried to raise the price of the natural gas it was selling to a power company controlled by William Wood Prince. 47, now chairman of Armour & Co. and a managing trustee of the 30-company Prince trust (TIME, March 3). Indignantly, Prince ordered his research men to find a way of bringing methane to Chicago by water transport. The result, twelve years and $50 million later: a method of shipping liquefied methane that promises to bring handsome new profits to Business Wizard Prince and to open untapped markets for the low-cost fuel in countries which do not have their own gas fields.

Something for the Boilers. Prince's researchers started off from a long-established fact: when it is chilled to -258DEG F., methane "freezes" into a liquid that occupies only one six-hundredth as much space as methane gas. A Moscow utility plant has for years "frozen" methane to store for peak consumption periods. But no one knew a safe and inexpensive way of keeping methane at such a low temperature while it was being shipped. To solve the transportation problem, Prince pooled resources with Continental Oil Co. and later with Royal Dutch/Shell in a combine called Conch International Methane Ltd. The solution Conch found was a double-hulled ocean tanker equipped with aluminum storage tanks insulated with balsa wood and encased in steel. Even with this kind of insulation, some methane did vaporize--just about enough, the engineers thriftily noted, to fuel the ship's boilers.

In seven trial runs, a Conch-designed methane tanker successfully hauled liquid gas from a plant at Lake Charles, La., to London, where it was pumped into special storage tanks and fed as a gas into the city mains. The British were delighted--they pay about $1.60 per 1,000 cu. ft. for homemade coal gas v. an estimated 90-c-for liquid methane. Last week, over bitter opposition from the British coal industry, Sir Henry Jones, chairman of the British Gas Council, which operates Britain's nationalized gas industry, won government permission to spend $50.6 million on facilities to handle liquid methane, which Conch will bring in from French wells in the Sahara. Within three years, Jones hopes to be importing enough frozen methane to handle up to 12% of Britain's gas needs.

Better than Texas. Eager to begin operations, Conch has already signed contracts with British shipbuilders for two 28,000-ton methane tankers worth $10 million each, is busily dickering for more frozen-gas customers in Switzerland, Germany and Italy. And even though the U.S. is liberally crossed with gas pipelines, several East Coast and Southern California utilities are studying the economics of using liquid methane to extend their fuel supplies when demand finally overtaxes the pipelines. Convinced that the British deal is only a beginning. Conch boasts: "We can deliver liquefied gas from Africa or Arabia to Japan for no more than it costs to deliver Texas gas by pipeline to New York."

In another breakthrough in fuel technology, the hard pressed U.S. coal industry moved a step closer to economica11y attractive pipeline transportation of its product. Since 1957 Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co. has fueled one of its generating plants with coal slurry (a mixture of crushed coal and water) brought in through a 108-mile pipeline from Consolidation Coal Co.'s Cadiz, Ohio, mine.

But the necessity to remove almost all the water before the slurry could be burned has discouraged other companies from following Cleveland Electric's example. Last week New York's Babcock & Wilcox Co. demonstrated a furnace that can burn slurry with 30% water content, making pipeline-pumped coal almost as easy to handle as fuel oil. Plans for a coal pipeline from the Pennsylvania and West Virginia fields to big East Coast power companies are already under consideration. But to coal producers and consumers alike, pumped coal's greatest immediate usefulness is apt to be in beating down railroad coal-hauling rates. Since Cleveland Electric put in its solitary pipeline, the railroads serving the company's other generating plants have dropped their coal-hauling rates by $1.05 a ton.

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