DOE to invest $10 million to reduce natural gas supply constraints, improve energy consumption

A new funding opportunity announcement from the United States Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) will offer approximately $10 million in funding for cost-shared research and development projects related to bettering natural gas demand response.

Appropriately known as the Natural Gas Demand Response Pilot Program, this new offering seeks to support as many as four affiliated programs to expand on previously completed pilots. Those selected will be managed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), as the federal government works to reduce costs, cut constraining supply issues and optimize the energy consumption of natural gas.

Transparency will be a major component of the initiative, but its main goal — as a demand response program — will be to shift the strain of peak demand periods and thereby improve reliability and enhance energy efficiency goals in the larger energy system. It is due to the success of demand response programs in the electrical side of things that the government is now investigating similar programs for natural gas systems.

The DOE maintains that advancing NGDR technologies could improve performance, reliability and flexibility of the nation’s natural gas supply and delivery infrastructure alike. This could in turn allow public and private sectors to further reduce emissions in that area while still getting the maximum economic value from existing resources.