My cousin from Boston who has been cheering as coal fired and nuclear power plants have been decommissioned and / or converted to natual gas is outraged that there is now a natural gas shortage forcing prices up.
Who possibly could have seen that coming?
Just imagine if we weren’t fracking.
I believe this is more a storage and distribution problem than a production shortfall. Because natural gas pipelines have a finite capacity, they move the excess gas during the summer when there is little demand and put it into underground storage closer to the point of use.
It looks like the Keystone XL pipeline is close to getting approved.
Is it possible to anticipate O’Bahama or his henchman Holder…. I hope you are right.
Wasn’t there a HUGE NGas field discovered stretching over 1/3 of the middle Atlantic states 4 or 6 years ago (I realize that there is a lag time between discovery and delivery)? NGas is a natural byproduct of harvesting crude oil, should we be getting buckets of cu ft from the Dakotas? Also, I distinctly remember a news story over a broadcast station (no http://www.beforeitsnews.com here) about a non-traditional energy source that several known companies were trying as significant adjunct power sources – had something to do with layers of metal or ceramic pates with different coatings…. The reporter actually went on site and showed the power source functioning. I don’t have enough precise knowledge remaining at this point to run it down.
The problem with natural gas is you first have to get it somewhere that it can be processed. Typically this means the developer builds a collection network that central gathers the gas from the wells to a bigger pipeline. Natural gas has things that need to be cleaned up, and is odorless as the skunk smell isn’t present yet.
It’s correct there is overlap between natural gas liquids and petroleum products. I don’t know if it is still true, but in Central Michigan, Total oil had developed an oil well in the middle of nowhere. Without the infrastructure in place, they flared off the natural gas. Most of the gas in the Middle East was being flared until we realized that might add CO2 to the atmosphere
I was reading up on how Liquified Natural Gas is made after I wrote that. They have to scrub it of a variety of stuff – hydrogen sulfide, water (which will cause LNG to explode, corrosive acids. It’s the only practical way to ship natural gas where there isn’t a pipeline. You get it down to -240F and insulate it and it will behave – a small amount will boil off, but that state change just keeps the rest even colder. You vent off the gas and use it and you’re ok. The alternative is compressed natural gas – methane still in the gas form under high pressure. CNG takes up a lot more room and generally more dangerous
Need to replace those fossil fuels with renewable’s that both parties in power can support, Art.
Just as the subsidies replace oil with corn, we need to replace the fossil fuel methane with methane produced by cows… and of course fed by corn.
… need to always find new programs to keep food out of the mouths of starving people overseas.
If I didn’t mention it yet, the most remarkable thing on my Chicago to Charlotte road trip was the huge wind farm that stretches most of the way from Gary to Indiannoplis along I-65 sitting mostly in farming fields.
I’ve seen a few individual windmills and a huge group of them in California in one mountain pass, but this was a forest of them. Just like natural gas, a windmill in the middle of nowhere is not very useful – it has to be connected to a power line that can handle the power and be reasonably close to a good road to bring in the materials to build it and access for maintenance when it breaks.
It was a very windy day and about half of them were not spinning, so I don’t know if they’re broken or just were disabled to prevent damage.
Just like corn ethanol, the energy inputs to create and repair these windmills over their lifetime will likely exceed the energy they produce – but government distortion of the free market with tax mandates and green energy mandates will create things that make no economic sense. If it was a good idea, people would do it without government coercion.
On the positive side, this is employing a lot of factory workers in China and killing off a lot of the excess migratory bird population.
One of the advantages the US had over other nations was an abundant supply of energy and the ability to harness it. At first, that mean using the power of water flowing from rain drenched mountains of the east coast to turn mills, then later to generate electricity so that the power could be used away from the rivers.
One of Japan’s disadvantages is that Japan had no fossil fuels. By switching from fossil fuels to solar as states like New Jersey are doing, Japan will have an advantage because they have a better climate with more sun and cheaper energy than New Jersey.
yeah , you are right Art, those windmills are a huge waste, they don’t generate enough electricity and without Gov subsidy’s they are a money pit. Community colleges are graduating a lot of ‘wind mechanics,’ but companies that own the mills lease to Siemens and they import workers for maintenance. if you get one of these monstrosities on your land in Texas, you have hit ‘Donald Trump lotto’. You can make $450K per year easy with the Gov Subsidies, and the electric company has to buy your electricity.
Its a racket. The rules are convoluted as to where an who can have one in Texas. Those dam thing are in West Virginia, Texas, and they are wanting to build some in the mountains of Virgina.
parrott
The shame here in NJ is that they are putting up pizza box sized solar cells on the telephone poles. Imaging the labor cost having to climb up each pole – probably multiple times – to install one.
NJ the law lets you choose your electric supplier, but they are passing this outrageous costs on as part of the “distribution” costs when it is false accounting and actually generation rather than distribution – that is how the mobsters circumvent the law that stipulated you can choose your supplier.
CC, Pizza box sized solar cells are not going to get it done. How does that help? You have to have batteries for each set of solar cells and then a inverter to convert that DC energy to AC for the electric grid.
Yeah, your gonna have to re-wire your house to utilize that DC for low-current draw items,(LEDs) While big heavy draw items should stay on AC (Fridge, Electric stove /Water heater, if you are not gas). Didn’t we talk about this once with Tesla?
Its going to take some cash to reconfigure your house. I have been working on a plan to light the closets in our house, with DC LEDs. I have been thinking of running DC wires to all the closets from the attic(where there easy to get to) and have one 12v DC transformer and a switch at each closet for off/on. I think it will work. I use the same concept for mud-room/ laundry room. I use a old Cell phone charger and 4 LEDS for a dome light in a car. the power strip where the Transformer is plugged in is the switch.
Gonna have to rewire or add wire to your house.
Then a ‘Carrington event’ is gonna just burn it all down.
parrott
Thanks. I can’t imagine the expense of a collection network. In the area of NW PA where I grew up there is still some flaring – haven’t been back in awhile. My HS history teacher had wells on his land, didn’t turn on the pumps ’til the price hit 20$/bbl.
Not to mention the coal mine in Centralia that’s been burning since 1962
This guy does some great videos… going places that are “off limits” and then posting the videos…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMyG-IqiR34
This is wandering way off, but in that same era, the Pa. Borough where I grew up did the same thing. The “dump” was in an a ravine near the edge of town and the city garbage trucks and the annual junk day stuff was dumped in this area and deliberately lit on fire to reduce it in size. People also had trash burners and would burn most of their trash in the back yards.
Yeah I remember my grandparents having a 55 gallon metal drum as a trash can/burn barrel
Nothing wrong with that,
EPA can jump up and KMA !
Parrott
and the Politico is against Natural gas and pipelines . Obo likes it.
LOL http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/fracking-natural-gas-exports-climate-change-102452.html?ml=m_ms#.Uu-cEdj9LGg
a-parrott
Pete Seeger had an opinion on that. Check out this performance from last year- it may be his last public performance, and it is that classic from his friend Woody Guthrie that Pete popularized decades ago. We all learned the first verse in grade school “This Land is Your Land”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt9jWoXmrLw
I’ve been an “energy engineer” (nuclear and fossil) for over 30 years. Natural gas is a fantastic fuel. But it is INSANE to take such a high quality and PORTABLE fuel and dedicate it to fueling large stationary base load power plants. Natural gas should be used for vehicles, peaking (supplement during high demand) power plants, for industrial processes, and for home heating/cooking. Diamonds are the hardest material known to man. So why don’t we find diamond-faced hammers at Home Depot? It would work but it’s total overkill. It’s the same way with base load power plants.
We have thousands of years worth of coal in this country that can be used to generate electricity and industrial steam without damaging the environment. If we use the technology already available to us (nuclear fuel reprocessing and breeder reactors), we have an UNLIMITED supply of nuclear fuel. Yet our politicians are busy passing laws that force the production of expensive diamond faced hammers to drive framing nails… Idiots.
It’s hard to watch the pattern of policies and not conclude they have the common goal of destroying the US economy. Europeans are driving much of this. They’re using the “money” created by the Fed to turn around and buy up American business to dismember it.
What about the ultimate fiat currency – “carbon credits”.
As an optical engineer (lasers/physics, not glasses) I couldn’t agree more… I view Solyndra and those other ‘solar’ grifters as criminal fronts/racketeers.
The problem is, our so-called elected leaders now deal in Favor$, not logic.
The sheeple are also to blame. Here’s an example from Michigan –Art will appreciate this one– it’s a small town (Rogers City) near our summer home:
For the past 7 years, the city has bet its future on the hope of getting a ‘clean coal’ power plant. The mayor (a democrat) promised them jobs, union wages , growth, etc. Former MI governor Jennifer Granholm (a -Canadian- democrat no less) assured she would help navigate MDEQ/EPA hurdles.
Upon our first visit in 2009, we noticed homemade signs (black plastic bags) stenciled with white letters in people’s yards, promoting the ‘Wolverine Clean Energy Venture’ coal power plant. “Union jobs, good wages, and a future.”
The irony? Most of these people are democrats. They voted for a president who vowed to do whatever was necessary to bankrupt any new coal plants!
Lo and behold, the EPA changed plant emission rules… the governor folded and sided with the environmentalists. Meanwhile, the mayor had approved infrastructure improvements, raising local taxes. As a final slap, a permit was granted for Saginaw, MI… to a company which helped Granholm’s campaign.
A week before Christmas 2013, the developer ended the agony… “not viable.”
The new governor, a RINO, doesn’t offer much hope: “Michigan’s energy future should be driven by clean, renewable sources like wind and solar…”
It’s worth noting the plant was going to be built at the bottom of a calcite (limestone) quarry… one of the largest in the world. Google ‘Rogers City’
Wolverine Energy pulls the plug on power plant…
Note: the link below is via Sierra Club, so ‘status’ reports are clearly biased.
Wolverine Clean Energy Venture defeated
Alas, ATLAS SHRUGGED.
A lot of Michigan’s power comes from hydro plants in Ontario and Quebec – they were somewhat controversial at the time as they flooded so-called First Nations ancestral lands.
Hydro is good for a variety of reasons, but it still has pretty finite limits on how much energy it produces, and it takes land out of use that could have been used for other things.
When they presented the coal plant to locals, the PR photos depicted wind generators near the limestone quarry… to promote it as both clean and renewable. But that is on the lee side of northern lake Huron. The best location for wind is along lake Michigan. Frankly, I doubt all the liberals from Petoskey to Traverse City are willing to tolerate a shoreline of wind generators.
DOE says 56% of Michigan electricity comes from coal.
I find the notion of ‘solar power’ in MI to be amusing… here in Arizona it’s a no brainer for 320+ days a year.
Duke Energy has a problem up near the Virginia border. A decommissioned coal fired plant built in 1949 had a huge leak of coal ash from a holding pond into the Dan River.
http://www.wbtv.com/story/24693583/duke-starts-dredging-river-as-coal-ash-deal-dumped
Governor McCrory worked for Duke Power (as did I). Tests of water quality showed the ash was not toxic but duke is starting a cleanup.
The coal plant has been replaced by natural gas turbines.
https://www.duke-energy.com/power-plants/coal-fired/dan-river.asp
Right, I just read about that the other day. A similar (but much bigger) coal ash disaster happened with TVA near Kingston TN several years ago. An earthen dam for a coal ash holding pond collapsed inundating downstream farms and homes.
Bottom line is that very few technologies (if any) are inherently safe. When companies and governments don’t operate facilities and maintain structures properly, big accidents can (and will) happen. I predict that with similar inadequate maintenance we’ll see natural gas units blowing up 30-40 years from now. 🙁
Yep, the city of Danville, Va , is all upset that their water may not be safe to drink. Their water comes from the Dan river. EPA had a town meeting Monday night saying the water is fine to drink. As you could see, all of the coal ash settled on the bottom of the river. If they get a couple good floods this spring it should clean it out good. Just wait a while. Roanoke Rapids NC could have an issue then.
parrott
prboylan, why not use the natural gas to generate the electricity to charge the batteries to power the vehicles on the road? lol
…. and why stop there? If batteries are such a “green” solution, why shouldn’t we all be powering our homes with batteries? lmfao
It all depends on what you definitional of “green” is. – paraphrasing a former administration
Believe it or not, that is exactly how the new BMW i3 electric car is designed! i.e. BMW offers a 2 cylinder gas engine as an -option- but only to serve as a generator to charge the battery.
Get me the “green” model that uses electricity to heat the passenger compartment. lol
Just wear multiple layers of clothing and fur lined gloves and stop being a wimp!
On the other hand, driving the car from LA to Vegas across the desert with no air conditioning could be a problem. Lithium ion batteries can recover from being cold, but get them over 85F and those battery packs are permanently damaged. So the battery needs either active thermal management (air conditioning powered by the battery) or passive thermal management (using the heat to melt a substance causing a state change and dissipating the heat away from the battery pack)
The FERC took an unprecedented action Friday, that reminds me a bit of the Jimmy Carter era. The FERC ordered a pipeline to prioritize shipments of propane through their pipeline over concerns about “price gouging”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2014/02/07/ferc-forces-private-pipeline-owner-to-deliver-propane/
The FERC can’t create propane out of thin air. The propane being forced through today means the stock piles at the source in Texas will be reduced. Rather than moderating demand due to market driven pricing, an even bigger crisis will be created in a few weeks when supplies have been burned up and now the tanks at the refinery are empty.
In addition, something else was scheduled to go through that pipeline that will be pushed back, causing an unplanned change in availability to some other product. I don’t know the specifics involved, but pipelines have to carefully plan what they send in what order to avoid cross contamination of products that don’t play nice together in consecutive batches.
This demand by politicians is bipartisan. Scott Walker is right there demanding central planning by government – overruling market forces.
On Friday, the pipeline involved in the FERC order to inject propane failed.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/08/enterprise-pipeline-outage-idUSL2N0LD03R20140208
The 20 inch pipeline connects Texas to the Midwest and the Northeast carrying propane, gasoline, naphtha and other volatile liquids. The pipeline will be prioritizing propane until February 21st, at which time the FERC will declare winter is over.
The plot thickens – diverting the propane to dem Yankees up north is going to kill the chicken farmers in Mississippi
http://www.wdam.com/story/24697526/chicken-farmers-struggle-with-propane-shortage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjiNROf_U4Y