<A Touch of Stagflation? The Oil Drum We're In Deep Water>

101 comments on In a shortage, businesses lose gas before homes

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helium3 on October 7, 2005 - 3:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
We chose to fuel our new power plants with natural gas because gas was cleaner than coal, cheaper than oil and less scary than nuclear. It was a reasonable decision then, and probably still is.

Obviously, you rate things in terms of criticality. Some businesses are more important than others, some goverenment organizations are more important than others, people should be induced to conserve.

Obviously, the power plants should be the last thing to be shut off.

But really, it's not going to get that bad.

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wkwillis on October 7, 2005 - 5:23pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Gas got cheap because of the development of a new technology in the seventies, bright spot seismic. Pressure waves and shear waves are affected differently by passing through fluids, so you could directly detect oils or especially gases. This trashed the price of natural gas for a generation.
Now we know that the easy gas is gone. Tight sands, arctic, off shore, tight shale, coal bed methane, etc, are pretty much what's left.
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helium3 on October 8, 2005 - 4:40pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ahhhh . . . then that is a problem. Bright Spot Seismic, huh? That's some pretty cool stuff.

It seems like the more I think about this, the more I start tilting in the nuclear option. There's obviously a lot that needs to be done in terms of re-ordering of our way of life to make it less energy intensive, but the nice thing about Nuclear is that it does appear to be a stable source of energy if you start using breeder reactors and recycle your waste until the point of close to net energy extraction.

But I'm hardly an expert.

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Joseph Somsel on October 10, 2005 - 11:32am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
One could also add, besides supply increases, conversion efficiencies to electricity increased with the introduction combined cycle gas turbine plants.  Today, these babies can reach a almost 7,000 BTU per kW-hr.

However, at the time I was adamant that the rush to natural gas was going to quickly soak up new extraction margins.

"Quickly" in the energy business is a decade.

Too bad Calpine didn't take my advice.

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101 comments on In a shortage, businesses lose gas before homes

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