However, he is a blabbering idiot that is only interested in pumping up his stock price to profit for himself. Natural gas is “cheap” now because the demand story is weak but if we increase demand by canceling natural gas plants and replace them with NG cars (the use in cars may be more efficient, but would over power the demand from gas plants), the price will follow. How can anyone argue any fossil fuel is “plentiful”? Don’t we all remember natural gas was “plentiful” at $1/decatherm? Now its $7 after reaching $13/decatherm only a few months ago. This is ridiculous. In addition, what he doesn’t say is that LNG and other sources of gas come from THE MIDDLE EAST. Isn’t that what we are trying to avoid here?

We should be pushing products that will NEVER be dependent on foreign entities. Screw those people. We should be pushing battery and other technologies that allow for truly domestic industries to flourish. How about this novel idea? Solar to PHEV! You can plug in your car to a socket that is entirely powered by the sun. That suffices the argument against me that PHEV will increase electricity demand, well duh! We should endorse a “demand reduction” campaign so that people will learn how to TRULY be efficient with energy use (ie products that don’t suck the life out of your electric bill (aka wallet) and teach people that just changing out lightbulbs is minuscule compared to what can really be accomplished with efficiency), and push solar financing. Solar financing can benefit the mortgage market, can reduce electricity use on the grid, can increase electricity grid inflow (excess power from home/ commercial solar), can increase home value, and finally, can reduce the need to keep building new plants!

The reason he is on the wind kick is because his stupid Texas elite friends (no offense to normal Texans) want the excess wind from the state to be transported to where the electricity demand is greatest. Texas overbuilt wind, it’s a fact. In addition, Texas can’t export electricity out of the state due to the transmission association that is called ERCOT.

Don’t people realize that you can’t solve an oil problem with electricity, two different topics. I just wish people like Boonie would do their due diligence before coming up with a completely asinine plan.

I would love to see you analyze the other mainstream energy plans as well. With the various proposals out there today, I am struggling with which is the best step forward. And it’s clear that I am not the only one. We need a consensus.

Can we all agree that solving the energy climate crisis begins with the agreement on a plan?

But Pickens has always said in his interviews that he wants to replace diesel trucks with natural gas.

Also on his website: ‘The Pickens Plan is a bridge to the future-a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives, and buy us the time to develop even greater new technologies’

The website doesn’t say what those greater new technologies are, but that might include batteries with greater capacities tan those we have now.

With Pickens coming out with his Pickens Plan, it’s given alot of people ideas of a different future and other ways of doing things. It’s legitimized wind power those people who would’ve thought that wind power was just for enviro’s and could be pushed by an oil man.

The Pickens Plan can be implemented faster than all those batteries and battery cars can be built and because of that, it could same hundreds of billions of dollars going to the United States instead of other countries, just as the plan says.

The Pickens Plan ca

Pickens keeps complaining that we are going to have a $7 trillion trade deficit in oil over the next decade unless we make radical change. Fleets and big trucks ain’t radical change. If all we did was the Pickens plan, I seriously doubt we would even lop $1 trillion off the cumulative trade deficit.

Joe– you have any stats on the % of large trucks that already use natural gas? I was under the impression that it wasn’t overwhelming.

I also agree with you that it will be difficult to get NG investors and operators on board, but I don’t share your cynicism that this is an effort to raise the price of NG.

I think the numbers make it clear we’re not just talking about trucking here. Trucks don’t run on gasoline. You’ve got to save more than 31 billion gallons of gasoline to reduce imports by “more than one-third”.

If you don’t like the Pickens Plan because Natural Gas power plants aren’t going to allow their plants to be idle, then you must really think the Gore Plan of 100 percent renewables in 10 years is stupid. Or that it would ever happen.

Maybe it will deplete the Natural Gas faster and increase the cost, but then we’d have to start building more Ground Source Heat Pumps and installing them in buildings quicker along with the renewables to power them. We’d still be using less oil from foreign countries in the near future.

Like it or not, the Pickens Plan would be a good start and the better start so far on the Forever Plan, where everything can run off the grid instead of carbon fuels and then as much of the electrical grid as possible is supplied with non-carbon fuel power. Try to add to the Pickens Plan instead of taking away from it.

Why does this matter? Politics. I’d like everything to be the ‘makes most sense way,’ but people aren’t willing to wait for that. If we don’t do and advocate for the people who are living and working today, people will vote and buy from somebody else. Getting nationalistic can help put up renewable power. Getting immediate about people’s needs, jobs and earnings now can also help. American jobs and earnings now. Isn’t that the drill, drill, drill message?

Maybe we should write about how the Pickens Plan and the Gore Plan can all be turned into the Forever Plan.

Even without that, I suspect that biodiesel is less damaging than burning yet more natural gas.

Oh well, the world will soon run out of natural gas, nomatterwhat.

Ronald wrote, “Try to add to the Pickens Plan instead of taking away from it.”

Why shouldn’t we get it right the first time, instead of doing something stupid and then trying to fix it later? That just wastes time.

Ronald wrote, “but people aren’t willing to wait for that.”

In case you haven’t noticed, plug-in vehicles and announcements are running 10:1 over CNG vehicles and and announcements. The thing that you will wait for is the Pickens Plan. You’ll be able to drive on electricity directly before you can drive on CNG, unless you get a Civic.

As well, wind turbines can be used to compress air to be stored in depleted natural gas fields, to be used to power turbines when the wind is not blowing.

Electric cars are not practical in the northern tier states because THEY DO NOT HAVE HEATERS! Electric heaters in the cars would make the battery die a lot sooner. Also, when it is very cold, batteries cannot release as much energy as in a warm climate. Same for A/C. Of course you could put a gasoline burning heater in the electric cars and just live without A/C in the summer.
[EK: This paragraph is completely untrue. Response in separate comment below.]

Natural gas powered vehicles have heaters, A/C and plenty of power, just like now. That is, they are suitable for all climates and we need not sacrifica any performance. That is, they are cars people will actually want to buy. Electric cars are only usable in a small part of the country. And gas can be sent all over with only a small fraction of the transmission losses of electricity. You can lose up to 30% of the energy in transmission losses with electricity.

Almot any car on the market can be converted to run on natural gas. For example, in Canada, virtually all the taxis there run on natural gas already. In Orange Couty CA, the city usses run on gas.

As well, natural gas, also known as methane, can be generated from bio sources without using food crops.

These are merely engineering problems. They are merely difficult, not impossible to overcome. We engineers love to solve problems and this is just one that needs the political will to stitch together and co-ordinate so that private companies can find the solutions.

My reading of the “Pickens” plan is the CNG would be used for fleet and trucking. I would be glad to get those dirty diesels off the road, especially in cities.

If you’re worried about that, then for 1-2k per vehicle you can have high performance NOX and particulate abatement controls. Much cheaper than NG retrofits and doesn’t need new infrastructure.

There have to be other clear benefits. Replacing one imported fuel with another is not a good idea, and should only be done when domestic energy isn’t practical. That’s not true, for most transportation needs, electricity works just fine. Plugin-hybrids are a no-compromise option, and as Earl shows us, even when NG is used to generate electricity, EVs use much less of it.

So the question is: are we going to make the infrastructure investments for niche transportation applications like long-range trucking? Or might we just as well build an entire fast charge electrical infrastructure, engage in a crash program for more electrified rail, and skip the transitional methane phase?

What is not clear to me is that an automotive NG fuel switch is easier and faster than electrification. Sure, you can convert a gasoline ICE to methane quite easily. And yes, there are extensive NG pipelines all over the US. However the NG vehicle refuelling infrastructure itself will take decades to build. Surely, an electrified extensive railsystem and plugin-hybrid fast charge infrastructure can be build in such a timeframe. This is an important aspect, because electric is so much better in the end. Do we really need the transitional NG vehicle phase?

Then there is the market effect of increasing NG demand. Price goes up.

If we do decide to go for methane, then I suggest it be produced domestically - which would require heavily subsidizing biogas and coal to methane plants, but would easily be justified by a quick calculation on the effect on the trade balance. The CO2 has to be offset or sequestered, of course. Trees, terra preta, olivine sequestration, that seems manageable and at a reasonable cost.

Earl Killian — Yes, I know. The exhaust can be filtered, at a rather high efficiency cost.

Poppycock! New systems already in use use less than one percent of the vehicles’ normal energy requirements. NOX rare metal catalysts are cheap and use a bit of the heat that would otherwise be wasted anyway. Particulate filters require a tiny amount of power due to increased resistance of the filters.

I don’t know much about the efficiency of diesel soot filters except that Mark Jacobson in his testimony on black carbon before a House committee wrote:

Although controlling soot emissions from existing diesel engines is beneficial for reducing particle emissions, the addition of a trap decreases mileage, thus increases the carbon dioxide emissions from such vehicles by 3.5-8.5%.

He cites three references for this paragraph, which you can lookup in his written testimony.

Why would you post such disinformation? What you wrote is utterly untrue.

We have two electric cars in our garage, and both have heaters and AC, so I know what I’m talking about, whereas you are simply making up BS. Estimates by RAV4-EV drivers are that the AC and heater consume about 5-7% more power than normal operation. (The RAV4-EV uses an electric heat pump for heating and cooling.)

Even hobbyist conversion EVs tend to have heaters. See Darryl McMahon’s comment at http://climateprogress.org/ 2008/ 07/ 11/ plug-in-hybrid-faq/ about his 30 years of experience driving EVs in Ottawa, Canada.

Earl, have you considered running for Secretary of Energy during the next presidency?

And 5-7 percent isn’t a whole lot to begin with anyways.

I was hoping Art Rosenfeld or Joe Romm would take the Secretary of Energy job.

Many older systems on the road are less efficient, but it’s not a huge stretch to think that the more efficient and compact systems will dominate in the future (especially with today’s high oil prices).

I’m not so sure about truck economics, but 5–7% is a killer for ocean vessels.

(and anyway, I was using the same source as Earl Killian, without remebering just where I had seen it.)

You wrote that the coal plants should be shut down before the NG plants. probably true in a global warming reason. But not because of an economic reason. And that goes to what we need as part of a national energy program.

What happened to real estate inductry? Some people could make money selling subprime mortages, if the those with the mortgage paid up, the lender made money, if those with the mortgage didn’t pay up, the lender made money because they could sell the house later for a larger profit. If everybody started to do it, a tipping point or people who couldn’t pay the mortgage and unsold housed occurred and the whole real estate market would be flooded with to much housing real estate.

What is happening with biofuels? 30 percent of our corn goes to make 3 percent of gasoline type transportation fuel and we have some increase in food prices. If everybody started to do it, 100 percent of our corn to make 10 percent gasoline type fuels, we’ll have much greater increased food prices.

What that has to do with natural gas and coal is that natural gas is to valuable to use to make electricity. Natural gas is versatile and can be in small burners, small and large furnaces to heat water in homes, heat individual houses and for heating in industrial processes. Coal not so easy to use every where. Its ok for some to use natural gas for electricity, at 20 percent of total elec. production, but if everybody started to use natural gas for elec. production instead of coal, we would be using natural gas for 70 percent of our electrical production and run out of it so much quicker. Which is why California sometimes pats itself on the back for using so much natural gas for elec. production instead of dirty coal, if everybody did it, we would more quickly come to fuel limits and economic problems.

Even though we might like to shut down coal plants before the natural gas plants because of global warming, economically it makes more sense to shut down the natural gas plants first because of the valuable versitile advantages of natural gas over coal.

It’ll give a big boost to our economy if we could lower the cost of diesel in the United States for our truckers and shippers all accross the country. We do that by substituting natural gas for diesel fuel in fleet trucks and buses. We can also do that by increasing house insulation, increase the use of ground source heat pumps instead of fuel oil to heat homes. That fuel oil could have instead been made into diesel fuel.

Here’s a website about trucks and buses that run on CNG that are already operating and there sure can be more built. And from that fuel substitution to only buy from the United States we might be able to pay for more renewables.

here.

http://www.cleanenergyfuels.com/main.html

keep America strong.

Turn this around and you’ll find it is too valuable to burn in internal combustion engines, because they are too inefficient. In my example, burning NG in NGCC plant and shipping the electricity over the grid to plug-ins results in one-half to one-third as much NG burned.

Ronald wrote, “economically it makes more sense to shut down the natural gas plants first because of the valuable versitile advantages of natural gas over coal.”

You forget that economically coal plants cannot operate without NG. Baseload technologies require associated “peaking” power plants. Today that is NG. If you remove NG from the grid, you get rid of most of the peakers. The existing coal and nuclear power plants then cannot do the job.

In contrast, using wind for plug-ins is a great match, as argued in the post.

Sure, you are still going to need NG to modulate the elec. grid, it’s just that now the NG turbines don’t have to be at full and higher power levels, they can be cranked down. NG saved.
[EK: do you just make things up to suit yourself? On what basis do you claim that we can reduce NG consumption by 55% at load-following and peaking power plants without causing blackouts?]

There are more NG powered vehicles on the road today than battery vehicles. The research into those batteries isn’t even complete yet. The engines for NG trucks that some of the engines are of 450 horsepower only have to be ordered and manufactored.
[EK: My family has put 83,000 miles on a 2002 Toyota RAV4-EV. On what basis do you claim the research on those batteries isn’t complete? There are always new battery technologies being researched, but that doesn’t mean adequate technologies haven’t been available for some time.]

The NG can be used in the PHEV’s instead of buying oil that’s turned into gasoline.

The trade is that we put up Pickens Windturbines and then we can buy less crude oil to turn into gasoline and diesel.

You are saying that we build batteries and then we will buy less crude to turn into gasoline.

These are not either or. This can be both. It is a false choice.

The Pickens Plan allows us to buy, build and install windturbines and then we pay for that with money from not having to buy crude oil to turn into gasoline and diesel.

Do both.
[EK: The CNG half doesn’t work. Crunch the numbers. It doesn’t work.]

I’m not so sure about truck economics, but 5–7% is a killer for ocean vessels.

Oil price increases of 500-700% over recent years have not killed ocean shipping, the sector took a blow, but is still alive and relatively healthy right now.

5-7% is nothing. I’d worry more about the financial crisis developing; any investment intensive sector can suffer badly. And the shipping biz is very capital intensive.

Suggest you take a look at the hour-and-a-half pickensplan special that was shown 10/29 on RFD-TV. Hopefully, it’s on the web somewhere.

On this show, Pickens verified that Phase One of the plan is to bring the 70% down to 38%. i.e. to bring our percentage of foreign oil imports down from 70% to 38%. He says we can do that without any cars, but by focusing on moving 1 million 18-wheelers from diesel to CNG.

Do those numbers jibe with your 17.9 billion gallons of diesel number?

He also contends that electric will not work for 18 wheelers. On the face of it, this seems believable, but do you have reason to think otherwise?

As far as the NG infrastructure goes, I would think if just limited to 18 wheelers, the truckstops would be amenable to installing CNG compressors, if it was clear that the CNG trucks would be there. This would be small but easily-identifiable portion of the overall transportation fuel infrastructure, I would think.

Again, thanks for this discussion.

I am confused about Picken’s claim that natural gas is so plentiful. If that is true, someone needs to explain why there is such a big push for LNG terminals that are ports for importing LNG.

As to real data, Argonne measured the production Prius engine at 38.2% versus the plug-in Hymotion Prius version, where the engine efficiency dropped to 32.6% due to the plug-in conversion for the UDDS driving cycle. (see SAE2007 World Congress, Argonne number 2007-01-0283) This production Prius engine is an example of what is presently done in production quantity, though not by Detroit. I imagine that similar performance could be obtained from NG fired car engines, assuming the Prius style implementation.

I agree that the US car production is an abysmal example of waste. However, I have a hard time not thinking of the production Prius as the standard of comparison, since it is a reasonably practical machine in actual existence. I think Detroit could be shamed into coming up to this standard, along with the public. It would really cost very little to get to this level.

When people propose solutions, it might clarify things if the evaluation was made relative to the benefit of simply switching to the Prius standard. When people think about buying an electric or plug-in, they should think of it relative to the alternative of buying just a regular Prius.

But beware of the deception of Detroit’s version of the plug-in car and their hybrids.

Another frequent source of confusion comes from basing calculations on the assumption of combined cycle gas plants. Efficiency calculations for the USA do not support that there is a lot of this. (See www.miastrada.com/analyses for calculations and references.)

Then when there is an urge to make assertions about how coal, natural gas, and hydro are loaded and mixed, look at:
http://reports.ieso.ca/ public/ GenOutputCapability/ PUB_GenOutputCapability_20080916.xml

Here it is made clear how actual coal plants are operated. This hour by hour, day by day data, happens to be for Ontario Canada, which seems to have similar inclination to minimize CO2 and also has some government regulation regarding reduction of that CO2. Curiously, California does not seem willing to publish such data. It also gives a clue about the dependability of wind power. I have not had time to examine this amazing data set as thoroughly as I want.

There was indeed a big push for LNG terminals. It has taken years for the associated construction process. In the meantime, there has been dramatic technological improvements in the process for extracting NG from shale. This has increased the estimated U.S. reserves of NG by a great deal - I apologize for not being able to quote the numbers. These shale plays, such as Barnett, Haynesville, and Marcellus have blessed the U.S. with so much NG that our domestic price is the lowest in the world. This would correctly imply that there is a substantial surplus in the U.S. right now. Even without looking at LNG, which of course adds additional processing and shipping costs, you can merely look at the reduced import of NG from Canada to bear this trend out.

The bottom line is that there is not currently a market for LNG in the U.S. The folks who invested in the LNG terminal infrastructure are not going to be able to recover their costs anytime soon. It would not surprise me if several of these building projects are halted.

What you say about domestic price sounds incorrect. My memory may not be exact but the Russian price to itself and Ukraine and Europe, I think was quite low. Maybe there is something I am missing, and maybe the EIA does not count the shale plays, but the fundamental facts are (1) USA has 211 Trillion cubic ft of natural gas reserves and (2) we used 27 Trillion cubic ft in 2006.

That works out to 7.8 years to the point where we have NONE.

Something is very wrong.

EIA data from two sources agree. See:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/ pub/ international/ iea2006/ table81.xls

EIA data is from:Gulf Publishing Co., World Oil, Vol. 228, No.9 (September 2007).
PennWell Corporation, Oil & Gas Journal, Volume 104.47 (December 18, 2006).

Even Boone should be able to look this stuff up.

Seriously, this needs further discussion.

My sense of things would suggest that the price of coal actually is what sets the price of natural gas. Even though that has gone up a lot as a percentage increase, it still is a dirt cheap. And that is still going to be a big problem.

Watch the political fallout when serious restrictions get placed on coal.

Looks to me as if folks (EIA) underestimated unconventional gas by a significant degree. Not surprising really, since EIA’s latest numbers are from 2006, and shale gas plays (and associated technological improvements) are a fairly recent phenomenon.
Take a look at this website for some more discussion:http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4436

I am quite confident that Boone has in fact looked this up, and I would tend to give Boone more credence than a 2006 EIA report.

Have you a good source to compare European gas prices to American gas prices? That would indeed be very interesting. Will do a bit of legwork on this as well. I admit to taking Boone at his word when he says that America has the cheapest NG in the world. It is worth checking that assertion.

I agree with your comments about coal. Sentiment would seem to indicate that more coal will be exported, as opposed to increasing domestic consumption.

A Goldman Sachs research note of 10/13/08 included the following:
“Goldman said it lowered its 2008/2009 winter, 2009 summer and 2009/2010 winter UK NBP prices to $15.35 per million British thermal units, $10.60/mmBtu and $14.20/mmBtu, respectively.

Goldman also lowered its 2008/2009 winter NYMEX natural gas forecast to $7.60/mmBtu, from $9.50/mmBtu previously.”

Looks to me like British NG gas is about double the price of US NG. I don’t pretend to know all the reasons, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Gasprom had something to do with it.
(see http://www.reuters.com/ article/ rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews/ idUSN1351320220081013)

On the coal issue, in that same research note “Goldman said it still expects summer 2009 NYMEX natural gas to price at parity with coal, but at lower levels.”

Since there really is actually NOT a plentiful supply of natural gas in the USA, the logical thing is to bring it here. We know how to do it with LNG terminals and ships. And Russia would be delighted to have an energy glutton like the USA as a customer for their huge volume of natural gas.

And Pickens has said he doe not mind who he deals with. I wonder if he is quietly buying up LNG facilities.

So its Pickens and Putin forever?

The supposed new technology is old stuff that is just being worked a little harder to get more production. The only such new technology mentioned is horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. This stuff is not new. Maybe it is better than when I last heard about it. Whether that will in fact change the basis of the reserve estimates is not clear.

I think we should stick with the EIA until better information comes along.

And back to Boone’s statement that natural gas is plentiful, aside from the facts we have been looking for, why would we need wind at all if that were so? Of course it would help with CO2, but Boone does not seem to much focused on that problemz; he mostly talks of dependence on foreign oil if I recall correctly.

The smell gets stronger.

I continue to examine theories. Perhaps he predicts that there will not be trillions of dollars to make enough wind towers to matter much. By using natural gas to fuel cars and trucks, there will be increased demand for that natural gas. It will still be needed for electricity generation. And he can sell his product for ever more dollars as we approach the end of domestic supply.

Comments please.

Are you joking when you say the USA does not have a plentiful supply of NG? I suspect you are, or you haven’t been reading about any of the latest huge discoveries. Do a little research on the Haynesville or Marcellus shale plays and you might come away with a different “joke”.

Please pay no attention to that comment of 10:57 PM.

I recap my 3:08 pm comment: I do not think I have yet seen sufficient evidence that natural gas is plantiful. Of course there will be additions to the reserves, but the kind of technology discussed in the references is not the sort that opens great new reserves. It seems that natural gas will be getting to be quite undependable as an energy source in about eight to ten years, and certainly not a fuel on which we should build future systems.

Well, if you discount the Navigant report, then you’ve eliminated the single report that attempts to look forward in calculating U.S. natural gas reserves, as best I can tell. If you want to wait for definitive EIA data, the EIA report that includes 2008 production should be available in 2010.

Here’s an excerpt from a USA Today article, which also references the Navigant report:

“The U.S. has enough natural gas resources to last up to 118 years, or 2,247 trillion cubic feet (Tcf), says the study by Navigant Consulting for the American Clean Skies Foundation. That group is largely funded by natural gas companies.

The Potential Gas Committee, an independent research group, estimated in 2006 the U.S. has 1,530 Tcf of gas, an 82-year supply.”

So, Navigant says 118 years of gas. Potential Gas Committee says 82 years of gas. The disparity with your 8 to 10 year figure is significant.

Again, my suggestion those interested in this topic is to look for articles on the Marcellus and Haynesville shales. While still early in the production stage, these gas shale plays are producing at phenomenal rates. Another place to look for additional info is the Chesapeake web site…

To your point on NG not being a fuel on which we should build future systems, even Boone describes NG as a transitional fuel, until the next technology becomes available and affordable in large numbers.

I don’t know what smell you’re talking about, but I suppose you can see a conspiracy if you want to. Personally, I believe the energy crisis is real, and T. Boone is the only person to put forward a plan. If you’ve got a better plan, believe me I’d love to hear it.

Actually I do have a plan which I think is far better. It is briefly shown at http://www.miastrada.com.

The formula is simple and it is Joe’s “the core solution.” Simply by using one tenth as much fuel in personal transportation, and still get around just as fast, we could accomplish much of the needed CO2 reduction and the people could continue with their present lifestyles. The cost is zero or less, since it only requires that people replace their current cars with a new kind of vehicle. The possibility of selling this seems real.

However, it does require getting used to a very different kind of car.

Operation of this new kind of vehicle would be natural as a plug-in, with a range extending engine, but it differs from the much publicized plug-ins because it first cuts the energy needed to push it down the road by a large percentage. (80% to 90%). The present design needs only 12 hp to go at a steady 80 mph.

Miastrada is my project and I hope to realize some future return on my investment, just like Boone, though I am starting with somewhat less, and do not seem to be getting as much attention.

Miastrada is not the only vehicle that will accomplish this. Another example is the Aptera, which is close if not actually in production.

There is another of Joe’s favorite solutions inherent in the very low power vehicle system, which is distributed cogeneration of electricity.

My reason for objecting to the “plug-in” cars currently emerging is that they mostly ignore the possibility of making aerodynamics a lot better. Thus they will continue to guzzle, more or less, but people will think the problems are solved.

Comments please?

Good luck with this effort.

Still, I don’t see, on the face of it, a conflict between Pickens Plan and the miastrada.

Pickens wants to replace 1 million diesel-powered 18 wheelers with 1 million NG-powered 18 wheelers. The miastrada and aptera seem to be aimed at totally different market segments.

That 1 million (he says) will get us from 70% imported oil down to 38% imported oil. I think those numbers agree with Earl’s number above, but he has not verified that yet, so I suppose that should stand as unconfirmed. Nonetheless, it does seem to be a way to reduce a big chunk of foreign imports using known technology that is available today. Yes, there would have to be some infrastructure, but my focusing on 18 wheelers, you could concentrate on NG compressors being placed at truckstops. Still seems reasonable to me…

So at the moment there does not seem to be much evidence that Boone’s claim that natural gas is “abundant, cheap, and it’s ours.” I also am skeptical that natural gas engines would be very effective as replacement for over the road diesels. There is not that much of it, the price will go up a lot when it is used a lot more, and it will probably end up being imported as LNG from Russia, Iran, or somewhere else in the Middle East.

Wind energy is a more promising part of his plan, but even that does not seem to be economically viable and this includes the problem of both generation, dependability of strong winds, and cost of distribution systems. Just because Boone says so, does not mean we should hear real details with numerical analysis before getting very excited about it.

Another area that I am inclined to reject is the idea of “mandates” which Boone states would be necessary. Mandates sound like burdens that will be carried by power companies and utilities, but they rather immediately come around as higher bills for consumers. This is not technically a tax but it really is exactly the same in all practical respects. So here again is a way that Pickens would drain resources that need to be used for better things.

Still to be fully written up, and subject to serious discusion, there are measures that can be applied to trucks that would be vastly more effective in CO2 reduction than the Boone approach. These include in the aerodynamic area (1) rear end fairings that would be unloaded rear end fairing structures, (2) active fairings that make the gap between tractor and trailer virtually zero, (3) underbody fairings that prevent repeated aerodynamic actions along the truck length.

As to rolling resistance of trucks, there is an in road rail system possibility which involves embedding steel rails in highways which protrude about an inch above the road surface, such that these would be noticed when cars drove over them, but would provide a base for steel wheels mounted next to truck rubber tires, The steel wheels would be smaller in diameter than the rubber wheels such that on regular road surfaces, the rubber truck wheels would be operative and where the rails were available, the steel wheels could be engaged. This would make truck efficiencies much more like that of railroad systems.

Certainly the in road rail system would involve some infrastructure, but it would be far less expensive than many other proposed systems. The benefits would be to reduce fuel usage by 70% to 90% for long haul trucking. Boone’s plan would probably not reduce fuel usage at all; he even presents it as only a measure to shift away from foreign oil.

These are just examples that are on my working list. I expect there are quite a few other things that merit consideration. I think subjects like this should be getting our attention. And yes, if they do not prove out when the numbers are worked out, they should also be rejected.

Thanks for the discussion. It is great to get interactions from people that delve into real detail.

1. Of course, the market will dictate the price of NG, and sometimes it may be cheap and other times it may be expensive. So, I agree with your critique of the word “cheap”. I do happen to believe it’s abundant in the U.S., but we can certainly agree to disagree on that, and even there, it is a reasonable question to ask for how long will the abundance last.

2. Your road rail system is intriguing to say the least. My first reaction is that approach would involve a substantial infrastructure investment, but I’m OK with that. My second reaction is that approach could be combined with NG-powered 18 wheelers to get the best of both worlds: reduced fuel usage combined with a shift away from foreign oil. I would favor the NG shift as a step we could take immediately, while the road rail system (I imagine) would take decades. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on how quickly such a plan could be implemented.

regards,
theta

In my scheme of things natural gas is important for electricity cogeneration based on the low powered equipment in high efficiency cars, where home heating and airconditioning and such would be run from the otherwise wasted heat of running heat engines that charge batteries. In this way we would get two to three times as much electricity per BTU as they now get in central power plants. Not everyone is familiar with the rather non-intuitive process of absorption chillers which run from heat. I throw in the history of gas powered refrigerators of days gone by, Servel being a common brand from that past. (owned by Electrolux of Sweden and an Italian company has some involvement)

An interesting quirk of recent history is that absorption chiller type refrigerators were wiped out as a possibility in California by the efficiency laws here. These laws miscalculated true efficiency in the same way many purveyors of electric cars miscalculate efficiency. This is part of the reason I make such a fuss about how electric motors are evaluated.

But back to comparing distributed cogeneration of electricity and running trucks on natural gas as competing climate solutions: The natural gas engines that run trucks would not be as efficient in use of energy as the cogeneration system, since there would be waste heat which would be hard to use effectively.

So I hope this kind of explains why I am seriously concerned about the natural gas situation.

I read the natural gas references you provided. One reason for my skepticism on the Navigant report is that particular part about the PGC, which as near as I could tell was no more than a few phone calls to gas producers. My immediate reaction was to discount such by 90% based on my limited experience in that field. But to say a little more, not only is this world full of overblown optimism, “all hat-no oil” being a watchword, but there are some real ways people can get mislead by reading production reports. And it looks like the Navigant analysis was inferring reserve expansion on the basis of current upticks in production.

So this gets to the matter of natural gas production, which is both relevant here and as an explanation of the history of methane in the atmosphere. I had some experience tromping around in played out oil fields looking at equipment operating to squeeze the last drops from areas around Bartlesville OK. Most of these wells were electric powered. Then we got further from civilization where there were massive cast iron engines pop popping along on natural gas, which is usually a wasted product of an oil well. These ran the oil pumps for these sites on gas that is typically vented to the atmosphere. In big amounts it is flared off. To capture this natural gas requires pipe line access which is a problem for the widely distributed oil well placements. As the price of natural gas goes up, there is then adequate financial justification to fund more pipeline spurs. I am suggesting that the supposed new technologies that are greatly increasing natural gas production are not much more than the practical actions here described.

So it looks to me like domestic natural gas and oil, both of which exist in vast quantities, are simply getting very expensive to get out of the ground. And both are subject to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing operations. And there is an ever dwindling amount of easy availability for these fuels.

I hope this is not information overdose. Thanks for responding,
Regards, Jim