Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Natural Gas: An International Perspective

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Published in 2006 this book about natural gas is already partially outdated in January 2012, due to the disruptive development of shale gas in the United States.

A while back, a project at work with a global tilt having to do with the natural gas (NG) supply chain crossed my desk, and I was in desperate need of a good reference to make some sense of it. By chance, I happened upon Chandra's Fundamentals of Natural Gas. Since the project had to do with the role of international liquefied natural gas (LNG) within the context of a supply-side NG supply chain, this book really fit the bill- especially when it came to discussing all of the upstream operations, such as exploration and production and the all-important liquefaction step.

This slim volume, weighing in at just over two hundred pages, contains five very focused chapters and really does live up to its title by taking an international perspective to the supply chain. The first chapter covers the basics of upstream activities- exploration and production, while the second chapter delves into the midstream- transport and storage. The third chapter provides a pretty good overview of the various uses of NG, and devotes quite a bit of space to the topics of electricity generation (in which it is making significant gains worldwide) and synthesis gas production for transportation fuels (a kind of technological backwater if you ask me). I was kind of dismayed with the third chapter because the author didn't delve deeply into the true heart and soul on NG uses- as feedstock for fertilizer and petrochemicals production. Chapters four and five really brought the international perspective to the fore, and had to do with the role of liquefied natural gas in what is rapidly becoming an increasingly interconnected, global gas market. Chapter four spoke exclusively about LNG project development, while chapter five brought in the dimension of world trade, both from the standpoint of multi-country pipelines and mammoth LNG projects.

On the plus side, the book was highly readable, but on the minus side- six point font! Still, the book was quite light on text, and very heavy on graphics, charts and tables, with about a quarter of the book being taken up by four appendices, a glossary and an index.

In sum, this was a good reference that brought me up to speed on the international dimension of LNG, as well as the complexity of the NG supply chain. The book is definitely a keeper.