And we thought Colorado had problems
Posted by Heading Out on February 22, 2006 - 1:23pm
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: china, italy, lng, natural gas [list all tags]
The China Daily is carrying a story that the gas-fired power plants in East China are unable to get enough natural gas to operate.
The shortage of natural gas has put the bulk of China's gas-fired power plants on the verge of closure, and industry leaders are calling for the government to trim its gas power development plans.Although the country uses gets about 2% of it's electric power from gas plans are to triple this use by 2010 and double that again by 2020.
Due to the lack of gas supplies in East China, gas-fired power generation units with a total capacity of as much as 4 gigawatts (GW) must remain unused in the region where the country's biggest gas pipeline ends, Wang Yonggan, secretary general of China Electricity Council (CEC), said.
The same is true with the energy-guzzling southern areas of China, primarily driven the fast-growing regional economy of Guangdong Province.
"In the south, the construction completion of a gas power plant also means it's shutdown - because there is no gas to run it," Wang said over the weekend at a power conference hosted by CEC, the industry association of China's electricity generators.
(UPDATE:Although off topic GeoPoet's comment, attached below, is worth reading).
Gas is, of course, as was discussed in comments yesterday, also used directly for heating and the article gives some numbers
Gas demand from the huge Chinese market is expected to reach 120 billion cubic metres (bcm) by 2010 and 200 bcm by 2020, but its estimated domestic production would be only 80 bcm and 120 bcm respectively.Unfortunately the Chinese hope resides with LNG, in much the same way as ours is heading towards. Though the article concludes that problems still exist with that supply.
China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC), is confronted with disagreements over prices to secure gas supplies from Indonesia's BP-led Tangguh project, for CNOOC's Fujian LNG terminal.Gas deliveries to Beijing are also of concern
It meant that more than half the gas reserves had been used with more than two-thirds of the heating season to go. Heating in Beijing will be switched off on March 15.Italy has had to cope with the pressure of running the Olympics with reduced gas flows from Russia (courtesy of Ukraine), although, just this week, they have apparently returned to normal. In the same way, Beijing has the major political party meetings in March, and to make sure that there is enough gasBeijing has used about 22 million cubic meters of natural gas every day this winter, said Li Jianzhong, a researcher with the Petroleum Exploration and Development Research Institute of PetroChina.
More than 95 percent of the city's natural gas is provided by a single pipeline from northwest China's Shaanxi Province, which can pump only 10.3 million cubic meters a day year-round. In spring and summer, when demand plummets, the surplus is stored in Tianjin for winter use.
In response to the crisis, the city has drawn up an emergency plan, halting or reducing supplies of natural gas for industrial use and replacing more than 1,300 natural-gas-powered buses with oil-fueled ones.Part of the problem is that the city has been trying to reduce the use of coal through a switch to gas-fired boilers, and as the mayor reported
"A vice mayor and I made a 'ridiculous' decision on the night of January 10 to check the gas meters of every boiler in the city's eight urban districts. After eight days, we found that real gas consumption as shown by the meters was nowhere near that reported by the district governments. Yet the real figure is critical for decision-making."Perhaps China needs to build some more tankers, although, as the rest of the world also starts to rely on this option, this may be another case of demand exceeding available supply for the next decade.
UPDATE Platts is carrying a story that Japan is running into a similar problem with Indonesia on LNG supplies.
Earlier this month Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono issued a presidential regulation enshrining a policy favoring domestic gas consumption over export sales. "The regulation is aimed at ensuring that domestic gas consumption will be prioritized over exports," energy and mines minister Purnomo said on February 8. Currently, 44% of Indonesia's gas production is consumed domestically with the remaining 56% exported. The regulation followed comments in December by former coordinating minister for economy Aburizal Bakrie that Indonesia would not extend its existing LNG supply contracts with buyers because it has decided that indigenous gas production, especially from Bontang in East Kalimantan, should be dedicated to domestic users. Indonesian energy officials also said then it had temporarily halted negotiations with Japanese LNG buyers to extend supply contracts due to expire in 2010 with the 22.25-mil mt/year Bontang LNG facility.UPDATE (2) I also just came across this on the LNG potential.
In another comment, I mentioned something that bears repeating.
My company is currently suspending drilling operations in Oklahoma due to lack of available water. State, municipal and private water owners have all told us that they will no longer sell water to us. We are experiencing similar problems in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, but not to the degree we have encountered in Oklahoma.
So what we have here in Oklahoma is one resources scarcity(water) precluding the extraction of another (petroleum) declining resource.
Yea - Hubbert was right, but his science is about so much more than oil...!!
Ethanol also has water issues:
http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/state/13906471.htm
Water might turn out to be a bigger problem than oil.
Of course, if we had enough energy, we could build desalination plants...
But shipping cost money and energy. :-/
Exactly. The idea behind building ethanol plants in North Dakota is to put them where the corn is.
That depends on where you grow the corn: In the irrigated Sacramento Valley and San Joaquin Valley of California much corn is grown with humongous quantities of highly subsidized water, obscene quantities of fertilizer, and enough pesticides to kill off a medium-size ethnic group. The yields are fantabulous.
By way of contrast, in God's Own Country, i.e. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, parts of Nebraska and some other places we get plenty of rainfall to grow corn without irrigation, though the quantities of artificial fertilizer and pesticides are huge, and the erosion of soil is not a negligible issue.
Like Sweden, Minnesota has abundant water. Indeed, a Swede will feel right at home in Minnesota, except that most of the Swedes I know speak better English than many of us do. Shucks, we even have Finnlander jokes and Norweigian jokes, just like in 'da Old Country. Yah, you bet.
As far as the Great Plains go: I say, give it back to the bison and the Native Americans--and quit draining the Oglalla Aquifer.
That is the deal killer for ethanol made from corn or just about any crop used to make ethanol. It won't free us from fossil fuel usage, it just hides said usage behind a politically good facade.
I guess with the public, out of sight is out of mind.
http://unplanning.blogspot.com/2006/02/plans-that-stink-to-hog-heaven.html
I think we are seeing fertilizer production already moving toward where the NG is.
Yes, NG fertilizer production in US has become uneconomic, odds are that all US fertiliser plants using NG will shut down.
Cheap transportation has perhaps temporarily distorted normal economics, that has swung back a bit and will swing further.
There will be further 'adjustments' along these lines.
It's not really a complicated problem - just one that the ethanol plants need to address. They could make some of their money back selling recaptured process water for irrigation, or else just return it to their own process.
Now there's a topic I haven't heard much about in a long, long time, except maybe with regard to the Middle East.
The Saudis and their neighbors have the biggest ones in the world. Even with high-efficiency, multi-effect evaporators, vapor recompression, etc, they are highly energy intensive. To some extent, the Saudis are in effect drinking a certain portion of their oil and gas. I wonder how well the increased population of Saudi Arabia and some other countries in the area could be sustained without desalination.
Back in the Sixties the Johnson administration had gradiose ideas of making the Southwest deserts bloom through the use of huge dedicated nuclear-powered desalination plants. It doesn't look like the concept got very far, and given our current energy situation, I think we can kiss that one goodbye, at least in the near term.
Indeed, water resources is going to be a worsening problem in parts of the US, and we're not going to easily solve it through expending energy from our shrinking supplies.
There have been some wild schemes for building pipelines from the Great Lakes, but I suspect you can only do so much of that sort of thing before you seriously start impacting the hydrology in the Great Lakes area.
But they are all petroleum-powered, so far as I know. Israel's new Ashkelon desalination plant has its own natural gas power station.
There used to be proposals to tow icebergs down the the Middle East and sell them for fresh water.
-Ptone
Back in the 70's there were some schemes developed to supply SA with alternate sources of water that went to the extremes of sending tugs up to greenland and towing back an iceburg. In Riyadh the average humidity is 8%. You feel like you need a drink every 15 minutes of walking outside. If you leave a piece of bread out on the kitchen table, its rock hard in 10 minutes. Outside August temps are 127-130 in the SHADE! 104ºF at 12 midnight. In the Sun, temps reach 150-160ºF near ground surface. I've left a cassette tape in my car parked in the sun and come back to find a melted globb of plastic.
There are no rivers running all year anywhere in S.A. except for a short fat inky looking one downstream of the Riyadh sewage treatment plant, which quickly disappears into the sand.
Occasionally it will rain and the drops dry up on the way down and never hit the ground. Watch out for the lightning though.
Much of SA's water is drilled and pumped from undergound "fossil water" aquifers, meaning it entered the aquifers thousands of years ago and needless to say, just like the oil, once it's pumped out its never replenished.
We think we've got problems. All we have to do is downsize our cars. Try matching a camel on MPG-H20.
It is obviously a very inhospitable environment in which for humans to live.
The indigenous nomadic tribes seemed to have been able to make a go of it, but their population was but a small fraction of the population of modern-day Saudi Arabia. It seems that the very existence of modern Saudi Arabia is totally dependent upon consuming large amounts of oil, a certain fraction of which they drink, via oil-fired desalination plants.
These exemplary entities, such as Dubai, seem to be artificially propped up through a massive influx of fossil fuel. Am I being over dramatic, but does anyone else out there think that Dubai closely resembles a nicer version of the planet Tatuine (sp?) of Star Wars? It makes Las Vegas seem absolutely natural.
I feel too old to move anywhere, but if I had to, I think I'd pick one of the Scandanavian countries, as they seem to have mastered the art of living cooperatively instead of competitively. Or maybe I'm misinformed. The climate, though, is another story. Cold weather doesn't help curtail one's alcohol consumption.
We do not have an uncompetitive culture, for instance IKEA comes from Sweden and Nokia from Finland, both of them learned their skills on the domestic market. There is no socialist paradise in any country although Norway probably comes closest and Swedish health care is a good example of a lumbering command economy that produces a lot of aimless work and consumes vast ammounts of money.
I think the cold winter is a key factor. Collect a lot of firewood and have consensus in your house or you will die cold and miserable, repeat this for hundreds of generations and it affects the culture.
I was surprized at the work they would let me get involved with whenever I offered to try something new and different from my usual work. I think perhaps the Americans engineers specialize too much in that regard. I would never have been allowed to do 75% of the stuff I did, if I was with a US company, due to the specialist mentality they usually have. I learned much more than I would have otherwise and did so in a very short time. Perhaps, when you have a relatively small population and live in remote areas in harsh conditions, everyone develops a level of self sufficiency that is quite advanced, regardless of the collective good political atmosphere. The combination seems to be a good one.
There is much room for innovation with water conservation. Singapore may be on the cutting edge with its water reclamation plant (i.e., "from toilet to tap"). What, you didn't realize that your bottle of Evian was once T-Rex piss? Singapore is just making the hydrologic cycle a bit more concise. ; )
I am reminded of a benefit of trade / globalisation: agricultural production is determined by the least available of its requirements, be that water, fertilisers or minerals, labour, etc. The movement of these resources mutually increases production for deficient areas. The principle is a general one, and we have exploited it to our benefit.
Now imagine it in reverse.
"That is what Tainter meant by the cost of complexity. As resources decline, the solution often cause more problems, until it's just not worth it any more.
Ethanol also has water issues:
BISMARCK, N.D. - Ethanol plants need more than corn: If all the proposed factories in North Dakota were built, they would use more than 1 billion gallons of water.
Drought in future years could curtail North Dakota's burgeoning ethanol industry or at least limit potential plant sites, particularly in the Red River Valley, officials say.
Ethanol plants are big water users. The Sioux Falls, S.D.-based American Coalition for Ethanol says it takes at least 3 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of ethanol fuel.
http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/state/13906471.htm
Water might turn out to be a bigger problem than oil.
Of course, if we had enough energy, we could build desalination plants