Todd Travis
Todd Travis

The world is preparing to consume more electricity than its existing power infrastructure can comfortably provide. AI, data centers, and industrial operations are accelerating demand, while new generation and transmission capacity can take years and billions of dollars to build. Todd Travis, founder of Texas Monoline LLC, believes part of the answer is already moving through the infrastructure that exists today.

The mechanical engineer, who has spent three decades in industry, argues that pressure losses throughout oil and gas systems represent a largely overlooked energy resource. His calculations point to thousands of locations where pressure is intentionally reduced as gas moves from wells through transmission networks, creating opportunities to recover energy that is currently dissipated.

Travis is applying that thinking through Texas Monoline, which focuses on converting pressure and flow already present in oil and gas systems into usable mechanical and electrical power. The approach is centered on capturing energy at points where gas would otherwise be deliberately depressurized, including producing wells, pipeline systems, storage caverns, and regasification of LNG.

The issue has economic weight as well as an engineering dimension. Travis explains that remote well sites, offshore platforms, and other isolated operations often depend on combustion-powered generators that require continuous fuel, maintenance, and logistics, or solar or wind energy that depends on environmental factors. He argues that pressure-driven generation could change the economics of those locations by converting an existing physical resource into electricity without requiring additional fuel consumption.

The pressure on power infrastructure is also expanding beyond traditional industrial demand. AI systems, data centers, and mining operations are expected to require substantially more electricity, while major grid expansions can take years and require significant capital investment. Local generation offers one way of addressing demand closer to where power is needed, particularly in locations where extending transmission infrastructure is difficult or expensive.

Travis estimates that roughly 22,000 producing gas wells in the United States could each generate as much as one megawatt of electricity per hour if pressure reduction at the wellhead were handled through expansion turbines. He sees a comparable opportunity farther downstream, where transmission pressure is reduced before gas reaches consumers. The figures, he argues, point to a broader engineering problem: infrastructure can be highly productive while still leaving significant usable energy on the table.

The challenge becomes more complicated because the knowledge needed to address these opportunities is often divided between industries that rarely exchange ideas. Travis experienced that divide firsthand after spending a decade in upstream oil and gas before moving into the power industry, where he worked on generator sets, landfill power generation, and backup systems for aircraft carriers. Returning to oil and gas gave him a different way of looking at familiar equipment.

"We within industries do not cross over," Travis explains. Engineers can spend entire careers within one sector, leaving techniques developed in power, aerospace, or automotive engineering largely unknown to people working in oil and gas. His experience at a Gulf Coast cavern meeting reinforced the point, revealing specialized drilling activity that existed outside the conventional oil and gas drilling landscape he knew.

That separation has consequences for engineering efficiency, according to Travis. Solutions developed for one application can remain confined to the industry that created them, while companies elsewhere spend time and money addressing comparable technical problems from scratch. Travis believes companies should create cross-functional teams that bring expertise from different engineering disciplines into the same room.

His proposed "CAT teams" would give major companies a structured way to do that. An oil and gas company could bring in specialists from aerospace or another engineering field to examine problems through a different technical lens. The same model could work in other sectors, with companies looking outside their established networks for expertise.

The opportunity extends to standards and testing as well. Travis points to welding qualification procedures as an example of where repeated work can create substantial costs. He notes that hundreds of companies may carry out essentially identical qualification procedures for the same welding application, even though the underlying requirements have already been established through extensive industry experience.

"We need to start thinking differently now," Travis argues. For executives, that means treating knowledge-sharing as an engineering resource in its own right. Cross-industry conferences, specialist exchanges, and shared standards could help companies identify technical solutions that are already being used elsewhere.

The larger issue, as Travis sees it, is how industries define efficiency. New equipment and new systems will continue to matter, but engineering efficiency also depends on recognizing what existing infrastructure is already capable of doing. Pressure, machinery, and accumulated technical knowledge can all represent resources when engineers have the opportunity to examine them from outside the boundaries of a single industry.

Travis's argument ultimately reaches into the economics of power itself. Every unit of electricity generated from an existing pressure differential represents fuel that does not have to be burned to produce that power, particularly in remote operations where fuel delivery and generator maintenance can carry substantial costs. The opportunity lies in treating energy already moving through industrial systems as something engineers can capture and use, not simply something the infrastructure was designed to dissipate.