77 comments on US Natural Gas: Lessons from BP's Tight Gas Facility in Wamsutter WY
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Thanks again for all you do Gail. Your efforts have enhanced the TOD experience greatly.
Could they not design the facility to be self sustaining through NG use,Electricity generation, NG powered transportation, etc?
I suppose they could use the natural gas to be sustainable, but they haven't started yet.
BP mentioned that some types of drilling rigs run on natural gas rather than diesel. I am not sure if they could get the type of drilling rig they needed on this basis. Perhaps their current rigs could be adapted to run on natural gas.
When I visited Shell's offshore drilling platform, it had a big electrical power plant built in that ran off produced natural gas. It powered all of the operations on the platform. The same thing could be done in Wamsutter, if someone got to work and did it.
I think there is a possibility on the NG transportation, but one has to get started on it in advance. Part of the problem is all of the workers need to be housed and fed, and the food has to come from somewhere. There are a lot of necessary chains that could break down. Lieblig's law of the minimum is what may come into play rather quickly. If by any chance there is rationing, some part of the chain is likely to get left out.
If a gas field's energy inputs could be suddenly and miraculously switched over to natural gas, the EROEI calculation could be replaced by a simpler figure for net gas "exported" to the world from this field.
If a time were to arrive when much or all of the field's gas output would be consumed for its own operation, there would clearly be no further benefit to keeping the field in production.
I'm curious as to whether transportation of equipment, personnel and energy products themselves is actually a significant factor in EROEI and/or profitability. If so, then the geography of production and consumption is likely to play an increasingly important role in energy economics.
Maybe it will emerge after a sufficiently detailed analysis that local solar and wind installations are more competitive than expected when compared with distant sources of fossil energy. One can hope.