Gas Against Wind

[Keepitsimple]

Interesting article.....much more than what I've included here:

What’s that you say? Gas is running out? Have you not heard the news? It’s not. Till five years ago gas was the fuel everybody thought would run out first, before oil and coal. America was getting so worried even Alan Greenspan told it to start building gas import terminals, which it did. They are now being mothballed, or turned into export terminals.

A chap called George Mitchell turned the gas industry on its head. Using just the right combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) – both well established technologies -- he worked out how to get gas out of shale where most of it is, rather than just out of (conventional) porous rocks, where it sometimes pools. The Barnett shale in Texas, where Mitchell worked, turned into one of the biggest gas reserves in America. Then the Haynesville shale in Louisiana dwarfed it. The Marcellus shale mainly in Pennsylvania then trumped that with a barely believable 500 trillion cubic feet of gas, as big as any oil field ever found, on the doorstep of the biggest market in the world.

The impact of shale gas in America is already huge. Gas prices have decoupled from oil prices and are half what they are in Europe. Chemical companies, which use gas as a feedstock, are rushing back from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Mexico. Cities are converting their bus fleets to gas. Coal projects are being shelved; nuclear ones abandoned.

Link: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/gas-against-wind

[msj]

Interesting article.....much more than what I've included here:

Link: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/gas-against-wind

I just can't bring myself to read an article which claims that 5 years ago people thought gas was going to run out.

Absolutely dishonest representation.

It's not that gas (or oil) is going to run out.

It's that the supply/demand curves are going to change to make oil more expensive than it used to be which will have a profound effect on the world's economy.

Entirely different (and more complex - hence not understood by a person with the handle "Keepitsimple?").

[TimG]

I just can't bring myself to read an article which claims that 5 years ago people thought gas was going to run out.

It is actually true. NA gas supplies were on the decline and NA was set to become an importor of gas. the discovery of commerically viable fracking changed all of that.

[Keepitsimple]

I just can't bring myself to read an article which claims that 5 years ago people thought gas was going to run out.

Absolutely dishonest representation.

It's not that gas (or oil) is going to run out.

It's that the supply/demand curves are going to change to make oil more expensive than it used to be which will have a profound effect on the world's economy.

Entirely different (and more complex - hence not understood by a person with the handle "Keepitsimple?").

Read the article - until we found a way to get at shale gas through fracking, we WERE running low on gas. But that's not the issue - I thought the article was interesting because it makes so very clear the incredible abundance of relatively clean-burning, relatively cheap natural gas - which makes thge case for Dalton's Windmills (and many others) that much harder to justify. You'll usually find that once you strip away all the noise, things are much simpler than they often first appear. And yes, I do try to keep things simple.

Edited October 16, 2011 by Keepitsimple

[jbg]

But that's not the issue - I thought the article was interesting because it makes so very clear the incredible abundance of relatively clean-burning, relatively cheap natural gas - which makes thge case for Dalton's Windmills (and many others) that much harder to justify. You'll usually find that once you strip away all the noise, things are much simpler than they often first appear. And yes, I do try to keep things simple.

As we know, the reactionary conservatives "environmentalists" are doing their level best to make sure we are stuck with ultra-high energy prices and some kind of rationing. They would rather manage a disaster than allow the people, through the aegis of the free market, to enjoy abundance.