Search Results for: "shale gas"
Relevance | DateThe Bear Growls, The EU Grovels: Adventures in the European Gas Market
By Donald Hertzmark -- November 6, 2009 2 CommentsAmong those hoping that global warming is real we should now count the EU. As winter approaches there is, quelle surprise, the initial hint of yet another gas supply crisis between Russia, Ukraine and Russia’s EU customers. The problem is that those pesky pipelines have to go through somewhere to reach the market and that somewhere happens to be the Ukraine (unless it’s Poland, more on that later).
Source: US DOE, for better map resolution
All those red lines running Northeast-to-Southwest carry gas from Russia to the EU countries. There is just no getting around the Ukraine for most of the transits; it is big and (if you are Russian) in the wrong place.
Gas: The Great Green Hope for Europe
As noted previously, gas use in Europe is roughly the same as that of the US, a bit over 20 tcf annually. …
Continue ReadingForced Coal-Plant Conversions to Natural Gas: False Hope for “Cheap” Climate Action
By Robert Peltier -- October 10, 2009 5 Comments[Editor: This MasterResource post from July is reprinted given the ‘war on coal’ strategy by environmental groups and certain activist strands of the upstream natural gas industry, led by Chesapeake Energy (Aubrey McClendon.]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance, posits in the Financial Times (July 19) that converting our fleet of coal-fired power plants to natural gas could be accomplished “practically overnight” and will have the effect of “jump-starting our economy….without the expense of building new power plants.” Thus did Kennedy express his new-found love of natural gas: It’s our “bridge fuel to the ‘new’ energy economy.” (Where have we heard that before–wasn’t that Enron’s tag line decade or two ago?)
Yet Kennedy’s proposal ignores the extremely high cost of fuel conversion (upwards of $100 million for a medium-size coal plant) and the added fuel cost to burn gas.…
Continue ReadingForced Coal-Plant Conversions to Natural Gas: False Hope for “Cheap” Climate Action
By Robert Peltier -- July 23, 2009 9 CommentsRobert F. Kennedy Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance, posits in the Financial Times (July 19) that converting our fleet of coal-fired power plants to natural gas could be accomplished “practically overnight” and will have the effect of “jump-starting our economy….without the expense of building new power plants.” Thus did Kennedy express his new-found love of natural gas: It’s our “bridge fuel to the ‘new’ energy economy.” (Where have we heard that before–wasn’t that Enron’s tag line decade or two ago?)
Yet Kennedy’s proposal ignores the extremely high cost of fuel conversion (upwards of $100 million for a medium-size coal plant) and the added fuel cost to burn gas. He seriously mischaracterizes how an electricity market operates. And Joe Romm (Climate Progress) had added to the confusion by calling Kennedy’s proposal a “game changer.”…
Continue ReadingU.S. Gas Resources: Julian Simon Lives! (Malthus, Hotelling, Hubbert are wrong again)
By Michael Lynch -- June 22, 2009 2 CommentsThe Potential Gas Committee has issued its new biennial gas resource estimate for the United States and once again raised its estimate, this time by 15%, or from 1,321 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) to 1,525 Tcf. This equates to a 70-year domestic cushion, given annual U.S. consumption of 20 Tcf. The evaluation of available shale gas, production of which is now soaring, played a major role in this re-evaluation and potently demonstrates how new technology (aka human ingenuity, what the late Julian Simon called the ultimate resource) creates resources, refuting the static fixity/depletion view of the mineral-resource world.
Few realize that the PGC has been raising the estimates of conventional resources throughout history, even as the United States has consumed large amounts of natural gas. Thus gas has been and is an expanding resource, not a depleting one.…
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