With the fast growing energy demand because of the development of the economy in the world and more and more attention for the environmental problems, the clean, safety and economic energy is being vitally needed in the world. And according to the statistics, the natural gas will be the most rapidly growing energy in the near future in the world because of it’s higher R/P ratio, less CO2 emission than traditional fossil fuel and high safety and low cost. In different countries, due to the different production, transportation, distribution and consumption process and the different market mechanism, the various natural gas prices also have big gaps. Trough research on the natural gas physical flow and transaction flow by using the MFM(Multilevel Flow Model) and GIS(Geographic Information System), the natural gas industries and various prices in Japan, USA, EU and China are expressed and analyzed. The MFM is one kind of semantic modeling method and modeling and display design method which was originally developed by Lind12 as an attempt to formalize the abstraction hierarchy. Before my work, MFM was used to not only describe the hierarchy structure of plant process from goal to function and to component, but also represent the ‘‘internal process’’ of physical behavior by mass flow, energy flow and information flow clearly to the operators by a series of standard symbols. MFM has been applied on various manmade machines and it has been proven to be a very effective tool for reasoning about plant failure and control strategies by using the algorithms of measurement validation, alarm analysis and fault diagnosis which were proposed by Larsson and Dahlstrand. However, in my work the purpose of the usage of MFM is to calculate and analyze the natural gas industry by using the basic calculation rules and defining the mathematic formula between the functions which is absolutely different with the usage of failure diagnosis and control strategies by using the quality reasoning methods. The advantage of MFM is that first it can provides a set of formalized symbol language to describe the common properties, including flows and abstraction hierarchy structure of natural gas industry and natural gas market, and then can provide a flexible approach for analysis support of the natural gas physical flow and transaction flow. Thus, people can very easy to understand the natural gas industry physical process and the transaction process, and the working principle of the natural gas market based on a formalized and universal way, and through comparing the different MFM in different countries, it is very easy to understand the reasons of the different characters of the natural gas industry. And, undoubtedly, the GIS(Geographic Information System) is very necessary to the analysis of all the production, transportation, storage and distribution of natural gas in one countries. In GIS Geographic information is represented by a series of geographic datasets that model geography using simple, generic data structures. A GIS also includes a set of comprehensive tools for working with the geographic data. GIS organizes geographic data into a series of thematic layers and tables. Since geographic datasets in a GIS are georeferenced, they have real-world locations and overlay one another. In a GIS, homogeneous collections of geographic objects are organized into layers, such as natural gas wells, pipelines, raster-based digital elevation models (DEMs) and landuse. So, my work tries to express and analyze the natural gas industry by using combination of MFM and GIS.
Furthermore, by using the time-series data regression method, the relationship functions between various prices of natural gas and the relationship function between the crude oil price and the natural gas price are found. These relationship functions are used to forecast the future trend and make the sensitive analysis. At last, the natural gas industry and various prices in Japan, USA, EU and China are compared; the reasons of the high price of end-user in Japan are explained; and the future trends are also analyzed.
However, natural gas industry is highly relative with the geography, climate and ecology environment, that make the countries like Japan which has almost no domestic production must import from other countries through a series of complex process, and must cost much more than the domestic production. On the other hand, the hydrogen is a kind of really clean and sustainable production energy, which can be generated by HTGR(High Temperature Gas Reactor) cogeneration system. Furthermore, the hydrogen also can be transported and distributed by using the natural gas infrastructures. So, the research method of natural gas industry described above can also be used to the hydrogen industry. The hydrogen industries and price mechanisms in Japan, USA, EU and China are also predicted and analyzed in my study.