It’s a gas, man:
Just a few years ago, the industry didn’t have the technology to unlock these reserves. But thanks to advances in horizontal drilling and methods of fracturing rock with high-pressure blasts of water, sand and chemicals, vast gas reserves in the United States are suddenly within reach.
As a result, said BP chief executive Tony Hayward, “the picture has changed dramatically.”
“The United States is sitting on over 100 years of gas supply at the current rates of consumption,” he said. Because natural gas emits half the greenhouse gases of coal, he added, that “provides the United States with a unique opportunity to address concerns about energy security and climate change.”
Recoverable U.S. gas reserves could now be bigger than the immense gas reserves of Russia, some experts say.
But it doesn’t require us to tighten our hair shirts, so it’s off the table.
Actually, that is the Dark Secret behind wind power. In the words of “Climate Change believer”, friend of Barry, and CEO of power company Exelon John Rowe, “Wind is essentially a natural gas play.”
What this utility-speak means is that for every kilowatt-hour of wind power, you need to supplement that with 4 kWHr’s of natural gas-fired electricity. Wind mills are essentially a “range extender” for natural gas, but natural gas does the heavy lifting of CO2 reduction.
What this also means is that wind mills will decorate the landscape as well as the front covers of glossy annual reports for power-generation companies, but nothing will change in the US — that is, the bulk of new electric generation will come from natural gas, just as it has since those Dark Days of Ronald Reagan, and all of the bluster about environmentalism is just for show.
And wind only range extends natural gas if that natural gas is being used in lower-cost, lower efficiency turbines. If you are burning natural gas in turbines for cogeneration, or in high efficiency combined cycle plants, you won’t be throttling them down as much when wind power is available (in the case of cogeneration, because you need the waste heat, and in the case of combined cycle, because the capital costs are high and you want to amortize them over as much produced energy as possible.)
I’d like to see CNG cars achieve better market penetration, but the obstacles seem daunting to me.
As we replace coal use with gas that 100 year estimate will fall off dramatically even though natural gas is far better than coal.
PS — Off the table? Why do you say natural gas exploration is off the table?
The article was about plans to extract natural gas and the payments to be made to the land owners.
Some solar thermal power plants burn gas when the sun doesn’t shine (e.g. SEGS in the Mojave Desert).
This quote from a Sierra Club guy seems quite reasonable to me:
Why do you say natural gas exploration is off the table?
I didn’t say exploration is off the table. But I’ll bet that Congress will throw up all sorts of roadblocks to exploitation.
Bill, there’s an excellent Technology Review article on these gas finds, which you can find by googling. In there they address your point. If ALL of our fixed (i.e. non-transport) use of coal and oil were replaced by natural gas, then there are enough newly proven natural gas reserves under continental US soil to last at least 60 years. And nobody thinks they’re done finding the stuff yet.
This is really an astonishing find. In any other era, it would be headline news. The degree to which it’s been suppressed and ignored because it seriously undermines the Accepted Wisdom, which is that We Are Running Out Of Fossil Fuels Eek Eek is astonishing for me to watch, and I’m a right cynical old bastitch.
Fuel cells work great with natural gas.
And methane (natural gas) can be converted to methanol that can be used in flex-fuel engines. Of course the farm lobby won’t make any money that way, but…
… and nuclear reactors fueled by Uranium, Thorium, or Hydrogen (with or without Boron) can do the same thing, only a few orders of magnitude better for non-mobile applications.
… and nuclear reactors fueled by Uranium, Thorium, or Hydrogen (with or without Boron) can do the same thing, only a few orders of magnitude better for non-mobile applications.
If it were truly a few orders of magnitude better, then everyone would run nuclear plants for base power and peak (they’d go to some sort of storage system), even with the anti-nuke hysteria.
After 30 years in the gas business, I have seen our government shoot my business in the butt on many occasions. That’s not going to change in the near future, say the next 3 years.
“Yet other environmental groups favor developing gas to displace coal.”
When I read crap like this, I wonder how reasonable it would be if it was your employment at stake. I guess those UMW union dues contributed to Obama’s campaign weren’t well spent.
It’s my understanding that the immediately recoverable methane from these shales amounts to only about 2% of the organic carbon in the shale. Companies like Luca Technologies are working on using microorganisms to produce more methane from these deposits (and from other economically stranded fossil carbon deposits). The total resource may be far larger than is currently projected.