New Business Models and Technologies to Reduce Energy Poverty with Natural Gas

Natural gas presents an opportunity to address energy poverty at a variety of scales. It is a globally abundant energy resource that is proven in most basic applications: electricity generation, cooking fuel, and transportation fuel. Although global gas resources are abundant, they are not distributed uniformly and the cost and complexity to produce natural gas resources is uneven from region to region. The proposed assembles Stanford and external experts and leaders to discuss ways that natural gas could most effectively be used to address global energy poverty in an environmentally sound manner; it would be held at Stanford University in 2016. The goals of the workshop would be to identify: (1) new business models for bringing natural gas resources to bear on energy poverty; (2) new technological developments that could enable use of natural gas in energy-poor regions at a variety of scales; (3) regions in the developing world that would benefit most from new use of natural gas resources. The final product from the workshop will be a white paper that would address these goals and provide a framework for new research and activities to use natural gas to alleviate energy poverty. We anticipate that the workshop will elevate awareness of the opportunities and challenges of using natural gas in energy poor areas, and that the organizational capacity of Stanford to address these opportunities and challenges will be enhanced by building new research collaborations, interactions, and synergies.