Gabon, as well as other countries that are members of the Central Africa Economic Community, has mature oil fields that display a significant amount of flared gas. Flared gas is both a wasted resource as well as harmful to the environment. Due to its expertise in Gabon itself as well as the Region, Mandji Energy Gabon has been requested to be the local advisor to a venture that seeks to capture flared gas at the fields itself and distribute it to large industrial diesel users that will then be able to significantly reduced their used of an expensive imported diesel fuel.

Diesel engines, whether stationary (such as for diesel power generators) or mobile (such as engines of mining trucks, locomotives, or vessels), are able to run on a mixture of diesel and natural gas. A significant amount of diesel can be replaced by natural gas, 50% to 70% typically on the most common applications. Certain equipment can easily switch from 100% diesel to 100% gas, such as boilers or ovens. The illustrations here depict mining haul trucks that have been converted to run on a mixture of diesel and natural gas, called bifuel. Mining machinery is particularly well suited for such a conversion as it carried extremely heavy loads on short distances and are able to refuel their gas tanks without any logistical issue.

Gabon and its neighboring countries do not have a national electricity grid but rather stand-alone power generation plants running on diesel. These power plants are responsible to a very large consumption of diesel for the country as well as high electricity tariff, as the imported diesel is expensive. The conversion of these generators to bifuel will have a significant impact on the amount of diesel that needs to be imported into the countries as well as provide a substantial reduction in fuel costs for the industries adopting the bifuel system. Such a reduction in operating costs will much improve the bottom line of these industries.

Natural gas has been traditionally difficult to bring to remote sites as its transportation required the construction of a gas pipeline, with most often a prohibitive cost or large issues corresponding to environmental permitting. The advent of small-scale liquefaction technology has made possible, under specific circumstances, the sustainable liquefaction of smaller quantities of natural gas. The liquefied natural gas (LNG) can then be transported to the clients’ sites in cryogenic containers where it is offloaded to permanent storage then re-gasified for its user under normal conditions. For countries that have readily available gas resources, this approach bears much promises as it allows to efficiently place the natural gas anywhere it is needed. Replacing diesel by local gas is a great step towards energy independence as well as drastically reducing the emission of greenhouse gases.