Almacenamiento de gas natural

Abstract

The largest reserves of natural gas worldwide are found in regions far of main cities, being necessary different alternatives to transport the fluid to the consumption cities, such as pipelines, CNG or ships, LNG, depending on distances between producing regions and demanding regions and the producing volumes. Consumption regions have three different markets to naturalgas; residential and commercial, industrial and power generation sector. The residential and commercial is highly seasonal and power generation sector is quite variable depending on increases of temperature during summer time. There are also external issuesthat affect the normal gas flow such as fails on the national system or unexpected interruptions on it, what imply that companies which distribute natural gas should design plans that allow supplying the requirements above mentioned. One plan is using underground natural gas storage with capacities and deliverability rates enough to supply demands. In Colombia there are no laws in this sense but it could be an exploration to discuss different ways to store gas either way as underground natural gas storage or above superficies. Existing basically three different types of underground natural gas storage; depleted reservoirs, salt caverns and aquifers. All ofthem are adequate according to geological characteristics and the needs of the distributors companies of natural gas. This paper is anexploration of technical and economical characteristics of different kind of storages used to store natural gas worldwide.