http://madrad2002.wordpress.com/2009/06/06/natural-gas-2/

Somewhere there was an item about using nuclear to extract from shale. What was that?

Gas shale is gas locked within shale, as opposed to the conventional gas trappedbeneath a layer of shale.

Oil shale is kerogen, a sort of pre-oil, which needs to be heated to convert it into oil. That’s done naturally by burying it sufficiently deep for sufficiently long, but it can be done artificially. That’s where nuclear power, or some other source of heat, could come in.

Converting coal plants to wood is cheaper than converting them to gas. And if the wood is ‘chosen’ so that it has near zero CO2 footprint (e.g., harvesting fallen trees before they decay) the coal remains in the ground, and burning the wood produces only the same CO2 as decay would have produced. So there is a net effective sequestration of the an amount of CO2 about equal to what burning the coal would have produced – plus the energy of combustion.

That’s 4 times better than converting to NG!

Very good news. There seems to be a myth that we don’t have very much biomass. In reality, we have huge amounts of biomass, it’s just variable in quality, high in moisture content, and hard to harvest and transport.

I think the problem is going to be to get the dead insect and drought killed trees out of the forests before they burn in huge wildfires, brought about by global warming. Have you considered combining fire suppression with your tree harvesting program? Firebreaks and fire roads can be pretty much the same thing, and would offer access to wider areas of forest.

Have you considered transforming at least part of your wood into biocarbon?:

http://www.bioenergymagazine.ca/ article.jsp?article_id=341&article_title=Biomass+-%3E+Biocarbon+-%3E+Bioenergy&q=&page=all

Wood-based bioenergy for example, was revolutionized through the development of wood pellets which nearly double the energy density of green wood chips, producing approximately 9.5 gigajoules per tonne (GJ/t). Wood pellets have emerged as a significant fuel supply for various areas of the world, most notably in Europe. Building the new bioenergy industry though, is not without its challenges. Wood fibre is bulky, therefore expensive to transport, and the material must be densified to open up the global potential for bioenergy in Canada. Biocarbon, while produced from the same type of biomass as wood pellets, has an energy density equivalent to that of coal, which yields an energy density of approximately 30 GJ/t, or 60 per cent more energy than wood pellets.

Biocarbon, also called biochar or charcoal, is a renewable replacement for coal manufactured for industrial markets. The material can be produced from biomass resources such as wood, municipal and agricultural waste, and tires through a controlled heating process called “carbonization,” which heats organic (carbon-containing) materials to elevated temperatures in an environment of controlled and reduced oxygen levels. During the carbonization process all of the energy necessary to fuel the process can be supplied by the biomass.

Sure, and the extra amount of car needed to carry the compressed gas tank would not hurt that much. If it was LNG the system to keep the stuff cold would probably be overwhelming.

But the talk of reserves is relevant. For quite a few years, the reserves of natural gas have held on such that production was about matched by new findings. If you believe that reserves are unlimited, then whoopee! But if you think the asserted reserves are not real, then the added load of using natural gas to fuel even the efficient Prius and its imitators would cut off the end point at some time not so far off.

Oil shale is not gas shale, huh? Anyone care to explain? What are the extraction costs and tradeoffs?

Somewhere there was an item about using nuclear to extract from shale. What was that?

These are questions, not answers, but I’m not ready to jump on the bandwagon until I’m clear that we aren’t hiding from reality.

There are over 60 million households already using natural gas to heat. Renovate the buildings to use about half the natural gas they use now, and put micro CHP every where you can. In 2008 residential use was about 5 trillion cubic feet.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ dnav/ ng/ ng_cons_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm

83 million btu heating&etc per household pre renovation, 42 million btu afterwards, and each household also burns and additional 6.8 million btu which makes electricity. 14% efficiency for the electrical production of the CHP, and +95% overall for the combined heat and power. (note to Detroit–America needs your manufacturing capacity)

Makes 0.12 trillion kwhs from CHP, and frees up 2 trillion cu ft annually, which would make another 0.4 trilion kwhs annually in the underutilized natural gas fleet.

0.52 trillion kwhs equals one in four coal plants shut down. So far so good.

Each of the 112 million US households are using about 10,000 kwhs annually. Everyone reading Joe’s blog knows we could cut that in half in about ten years with zero impact on lifestyle, and make money at the same time. New fridges, LCD screens, solar hot water, CFL/LED, etc. That liberates another 0.56 trillion kwhs annually. Two out of four coal plants shut down.

Use new natural gas to shut down the rest of the coal plants? Yes, if the environmental controls are adequate, and the new pipelines are put in carefully and with full respect for the environment and land owners (little or no chance there between FERC and the alligator shoe crowd)

Power down every coal plant in the US by 2020? Towards peaking at 425 ppm CO2, Hansen et al write:

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/ docs/ 2008/ 2008_Hansen_etal.pdf (page 30 of 36)

A basic assumption underlying Fig. (6) is that, within the next several years, there will be a moratorium on construction of coal-fired power plants that do not capture and store CO2, and that CO2 emissions from existing power plants will be phased out by 2030. This coal emissions phase out is the sine qua non for stabilizing and reducing atmospheric CO2. If the sine qua non ofcoal emissions phase-out is achieved, atmospheric CO2 can be kept to a peak amount ~400-425 ppm, depending upon the
magnitude of oil and gas reserves.

It is quite true that the combustion of natural gas releases about 50% (or, as Joe suggests, 60%) less global warming pollution. But that’s only part of the picture. We don’t fully understand the full life-cycle of global warming emissions from the production, processing, and transmission/distribution of natural gas. And this is a problem given that methane emissions are 25x as potent as CO2 emissions.

In the major natural gas producing states in the Rocky Mountain West, such as New Mexico, inventories of global warming pollution upstream oil & gas operations demonstrate that these operations are the second largest source of global warming pollution, second only to electricity generation. But these were top-down inventories that were not premised on accurate equipment inventories and other data and thus did not fully account for the pollution, and it’s almost a certainty that these inventories not only underestimate the actual magnitude of pollution, but do so significantly. Efforts are under way to establish reporting protocols/rules at the federal, regional, and state level, and reporting rules have been recently put in place in New Mexico and California, but we have a ways to go before we understand what’s really going on with this sector.

The upstream production process is quite dirty, with global warming pollution emitted from the drilling process itself, flaring & venting, and the host of compressor stations, pipelines, pneumatic valves, condensate tanks, and other equipment used in the production of the gas, as it moves downstream to market. Global warming pollution from these operations is too often discounted because it originates not with a single, big, identifiable source (e.g., a coal-fired power plant) but, instead, with hundreds of thousands of individual wells and pieces of equipment strewn across our rural and wildlands landscapes (far from the eyes of our mainstream media, politicians, and DC-based policy/lobbying groups). In effect, a giant, disaggregated, landscape-scale factory. Put simply, there is considerable waste in the production process leading to climate concerns.

Industry argues that they have no incentive to waste, but this is just a baseless argument that the free market somehow works perfectly and that their companies are perfectly efficient. The reality is that some companies have done decent work to reduce emissions but that many of the smaller, independent oil & gas companies don’t have the expertise or capacity to reduce these emissions and are simply resistant to the idea of reducing those emissions. Moreover, without any sort of price signal or regulatory framework in place, there are huge structural barriers in terms of how production operations are conducted that incentivize investment in new leases or other activities rather than efficient production.

Furthermore, as mentioned in Joe’s post, there are serious environmental concerns. In the Western U.S. we’ve witnessed the drilling of approx. 120,000 oil and, primarily, natural wells since 2000 and anticipate, on federal public lands alone, an additional 126,000 wells. Irresponsible development is leading to degradation of our watersheds, threatening to pinch off ancient migratory wildlife corridors, and creating localized health impacts from ozone pollution in states you typically think of as having infinite, untrammeled skies. Moreover, federal land managers continue a rush to lease mentality initiated under the prior administration. At present, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, based on FY 2008 data, has leased over 47 million acres of land for oil & gas but only 14.5 million acres have actually been developed for production. Arguments to expand our reliance on natural gas thus often hide a political agenda to acquire leases to assist in industry’s bottom line, not necessarily to produce gas for market, and to undermine conservation efforts to provide our most treasured landscapes with permanent protection.

I have little doubt that natural gas will play an important role in our transition to efficient use of clean energy, like wind and solar, and I’m a resolute pragmatist. But we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves and we should think carefully about how our positions will actually play themselves out in the political sphere, where calls for natural gas could lead to irresponsible development that does little to nothing to solve our climate and energy problems.

So, if indeed we do move to use natural gas as a transition fuel, then we need to first put in place measures to ensure responsible development — measures to quantify & monitor the full life-cycle of global warming pollution, measures to require use of cost-effective, off-the-shelf technologies (like EPA’s underutilized Natural Gas STAR program), and measures to ensure that production does not compromise the resiliency of communities and landscapes to resist the impacts of a warming world. Right now, those measures are not in place.

And we should be cognizant of the bathtub principle — that once the tub (our atmosphere) is full, even incremental additions of water (global warming pollution) are highly problematic. So please don’t jump on the natural gas bandwagon before we understand its full implications. We too easily fall into the trap of fearing coal so much that we’ll take anything else instead. And the propaganda from natural gas companies and individuals like Mr. Pickens (who just posted above) should be taken more than a few grains of salt.

Erik Schlenker-Goodrich
Director, Global Warming & Energy Program
Western Environmental Law Center
Taos, New Mexico

Your say: LNG terminals have been in the works for years. Shale gas will kill virtually all of them — and that is a very good thing!

Some who have significant knowledge of the natural gas reserves continue to believe that their financial interest will be well served by providing a means of conveying that resource to us for many years in the future.

On what basis do you think that should be killed?

[JR: LNG is a very problematic approach, not even including its terrorism-related concerns. The energy wasted liquefying natural gas could be put to better purposes. And frankly, that natural gas would be better used by countries that are going to need it, if we don't.]