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40 comments on The European situation is not really stable

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Solaris on January 9, 2006 - 12:35am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
As usual, hard data on EROEI is tough to come by for any energy supply process.  A commentor at http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic9164.html+eroei
said that liquification consumed 25-30% of the original gas volume, tanker shipping consumed less than 1% and regasification consumed 0-10% (depending on whether free waste heat was available at the receiving end).  The commenter did not provide any references, however.  

I would have to believe that even very long natural gas pipeline transport would never come close to consuming the kind of energy needed for the LNG supply train.  

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wkwillis on January 9, 2006 - 12:42am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You can make a bigger diameter pipe to reduce viscosity. Or run two pipes at half throughput.
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BioDiesel on January 9, 2006 - 2:25am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I have read other places that the transport energy is much higher than 1%.  I can't find a link, but 1% just sounds too low.
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Hugo Chavez on January 9, 2006 - 5:10pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/global/index.html

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/global/worldlng.html

LNG is Natural Gas compressed to a ratio of about 600-to-1 volume-wise, for transporting. This second EIA page says," Shipping accounts for 10 to 30 percent of the delivered value of LNG (depending on the distance from the reserves to the market)." I'm not sure if the liquification/gasification process on either end is include in that. I would assume it is as part of the larger %30 number.

It is not hard to figure these things out however. an hour on google will provide you with a wealth of information about the different components of the LNG delivery system.

You cannot of course burn LNG, you need to first regasify it into regular NG. Once it is in gaseous form it is the same commodity on the consumer end and it is this consumer price that matters. You will see slightly different prices for LNG vs NG at the wholesale level in different parts of the world, but this probably has more to do with the fact that the two are selling in two different markets - one buyer may not have the ability to regasify the product and therefore would not be in the market for LNG.

It looks like NG has spiked to a worldwide average of about $9-10 per 1000 cubic feet. This is still, in my estimation, low. NG follows the basic course of crude oil prices on a BTU-basis. As we see oil move to $100+, $20 for NG is going to be the norm.

As this price goes up, producers will do what it takes to move the product to market.

At higher prices the costs of shipping/deliver/processing as e percentage of the total cost obviously goes down.

That Russian-German pipeline that they just broke ground on will be moving 1% of the world's daily usage. Fairly significant. The UK has only two options - oil or gas. There is no hydrogen economy yet - as far as I can see. So if they don't want to import more oil, I think they'll be moving some of that gas from Germany to Holland to the UK.

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40 comments on The European situation is not really stable

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