The value in rich gas — ColdStream Energy’s play inside a complex midstream sector
The “rich” gas burned at thousands of U.S. compressor stations is worth far more than the fuel it provides. On Episode 56 of the F+L Webcast, Dr. Mathias Schlecht explains how ColdStream Energy recovers that value — and why the hardest part isn’t the technology, but the contracts. Midstream is a very complicated business — and the complication is not mainly technical. It is contractual. Across the U.S. system that moves natural gas from the oil field to the power plant, “there are so many different contractual setups. Who gets the value of the gas that’s being moved? Who gets the value of the heavy hydrocarbons?” Those agreements are often written for 10 or 20 years, “and nobody wants to touch them.” That tangle is the backdrop to the opportunity Schlecht has built a company around. The value in question is hiding in plain sight — going up in flames. Gas straight from the field is “rich,” heavy with propane, butane and hexane, “raw materials for plastics, for the propane you might use at your house.” Much of it is burned to fuel the compressor engines that move gas through the pipelines. Burn it, and that value is destroyed; worse, it drives up tightly regulated volatile organic compounds (VOC) emissions and can trigger detonations that shut engines down. “That means you move less gas,” Schlecht said, “and based on that, impact even oil production.” ColdStream Energy, the Houston, Texas-based company Schlecht leads, exists to close that loop. Its MaCH4 system uses pressure swing adsorption to strip the heavy hydrocarbons out of rich gas before it reaches the engines — delivering clean, pipeline-quality fuel while routing the valuable components back into the pipeline to be monetised downstream. “It’s a very energy-efficient process, which is fully reversible,” Schlecht said. “That is the beauty of our system.” Getting there took a hard pivot. ColdStream’s original business was mechanical refrigeration; when that market “became very crowded,” the company bet on adsorption instead and, under Schlecht, exited the legacy line “to 99%.” “I’m a strong believer in focus,” he said — a conviction sharpened by a career that ran from leading R&D teams at Baker Hughes to a company of 13. Commercialising new hardware in oil and gas, he added, comes down to a first believer: “You always need a beachhead.” His first compression customer signed for two systems and stayed through six months of upscaling “because they believe in the technology.” The pitch ultimately rests on a number. A single system preserves roughly a million dollars a year in heavy hydrocarbons that would otherwise be burned, and pays for itself “in one to three years” — against a Joule-Thomson (JT) skid that “is doing its job, but it’s not making any money, it’s just costing the customer money.” Add a reliability dividend — roughly 98% uptime, remotely operated, “drop it and forget it” — and better fuel quality, measured by methane number, lifted from a poor 30-to-60 range to 70 or 80. The real hook, Schlecht says, is that customers buy to fix engine downtime; the recovered hydrocarbons are the bonus. Emissions fall out the same way: VOCs down roughly 70%, CO down 20%. “Emissions control should not necessarily drive up your cost,” he said. “It should drive additional value.” Then there is the frontier that has everyone’s attention. Ask Schlecht where the growth is, and he points to the surge in power demand from AI and data centres. Rather than trucking gas to a data centre until a pipeline arrives, why not site the data centre next to a rich-gas line and clean the fuel there? “If you don’t have access to a natural gas pipeline, but you have a rich gas pipeline, we can be part of the solution.” Bring the data centre to the gas, he argues, “instead of just trying to bring the gas to the microgrids.” He is already in talks with a producer building exactly that.
