Natural gas woes bigger story than crude oil

[4dsc]

Buckle up people, we're in for a bumpy ride.. If you haven't winterized" homes before, I would suggest you do this year.. I'm also buying a good pair of "long john's" too.. Heating billing will go through the roof!!

Having seen his prediction that crude oil prices would reach $65 a barrel become reality, Dr. Michael Economides is making equally bold predictions about natural gas.

Natural gas prices, he said Wednesday while visiting Midland to address the Permian Basin section, Society of Petroleum Engineers, will reach $20 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf) around Christmas.

Having forecast $65 oil, he said, he's now predicting $100 oil "but I'm not impressed with that. Natural gas is the real story."

http://www.mywesttexas.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15274619&BRD=2288&PAG=461&dept_id=474107&rfi=6

[eallen]

1. Unlike oil, natural gas doesn't enjoy a smooth global market

Oil is easy to ship. Pour it into a big boat at one end, and pump it out at the other. Gas is more difficult. It has to be cooled and compressed, shipped in special refridgerated tankers, and then received in special regassification ports, of which the US now has only five. There are plans to build another dozen. Most of those are planned for Louisiana, because the state is friendly to the O&G industry, where most seaside areas have more a NIMBY attitude.

[Strelnikov_]

12. "Most Of Those Are Planned For Louisiana"

More redundant energy infrastructure planning, I see.

So, when the next Cat. 5 sweeps in it will not only disrupt a significant amount of domestic production, but also a significant amount of future transshipment.

[eallen]

13. You noticed that, huh?

I suspect there's two factors overriding, though. First, there's a really big NIMBY factor to regassification terminals. Neighbors worry that the thing might go bang in a big way, especially if helped along by a terrorist wanting to make a statement. Southern Louisiana is one of the few pieces of coastline that is happy to have these terminals. It's already a huge O&G region, and everyone who doesn't work in the field has a relative who does or has.

Second, the Henry hub is in Louisiana.

[whatever4]

2. Recommendations, anyone?

I'm asking, not giving :)

Propane, heating oil, if one can change one's heating source now? Wood burning stove?

I'm in a bit of a quandary, and live in the midwest, might have time to move to a different source, and as bad as things might get, might MAKE the time to change whether it's easy to do or not.

I was wondering about heating oil and propane, because those sources can be filled up ahead of time, and they don't get turned off when you can't pay the bill. You just run out, which is bad, but then again, it can be used sparingly if necessary. Using sparingly doesn't work if your line is cut off, like with natural gas.

Anyone cares to add to, or rip apart any of that, please feel free. It's something I'm wondering idly about, along with EVERYTHING else. Like many others I bet.

Editing to add, I should have also mentioned electric heat.

[ret5hd]

3. look into wood-pellet/corn stoves (nt)

[whatever4]

5. Thank you very much nm

[phantom power]

6. The future for all fossil fuels is looking pretty rocky.

I'd recommend investing in insulation upgrades, sealing drafts, etc. If you've already done that, you might look into passive solar solutions.

And a sweater.

I'm personally dubious about wood heating, from a "national sustainabiltity" perspective. If you have a supply of wood, it works great, but are we going to provide wood for 100 million people each winter? I can't help but notice the glaring lack of forests on Great Britain, a leftover of their wood-burning age.

[madrchsod]

7. if you have the money-new furnace

new furnaces are 90% efficient- my old 80`s is about 60%. propane and fuel oil are really expensive.
insulate,turn the heat down a bit ,and get a humidifier. with a little luck it will be a mild winter unless you live on the eastern side of the lakes....

[dcfirefighter]

8. Attic insulation & new windows

http://www.goldengrainstove.com/fuel.htm

of course it's from someone selling corn stoves, but you've got to figure that corn is very very highly subsidized (but then so it oil) and there are a lot of competitive producers of corn. Then again, as oil prices go up, so will corn (and every other commodity). A corn stove can also burn wood pellets, which, although they take less oil to grow, depend on lumber demand, which depends on the economy in general - I don't think there's going to be a lot of building in the next decade.

I would think that a corn pellet furnace that could also burn wood pellets (as is usually the case) would be an excellent retrofit for a house.

I suppose it depends a lot on your house. If I had the perfect lot, and plenty of money, I'd build a house heated as follows:
Heating:
#1 passive solar and thermal mass (stained concrete floors, ICF walls)
#2 solar hot water
#3 biodiesel friendly oil furnace & hydronic heating
#4 masonry wood heater (tulakivi & the like)
Cooling & dehumidifying:
#1 passive solar and thermal mass + ceiling fans
#2 ground source heat pump ('free' hot water), energy exchange ventilator

[dcfirefighter]

9. attic insulation, sealed windows

http://www.goldengrainstove.com/fuel.htm

of course it's from someone selling corn stoves, but you've got to figure that corn is very very highly subsidized (but then so it oil) and there are a lot of competitive producers of corn. Then again, as oil prices go up, so will corn (and every other commodity). A corn stove can also burn wood pellets, which, although they take less oil to grow, depend on lumber demand, which depends on the economy in general - I don't think there's going to be a lot of building in the next decade.

I would think that a corn pellet furnace that could also burn wood pellets (as is usually the case) would be an excellent retrofit for a house.

I suppose it depends a lot on your house. If I had the perfect lot, and plenty of money, I'd build a house heated as follows:
Heating:
#1 passive solar and thermal mass (stained concrete floors, ICF walls)
#2 solar hot water
#3 biodiesel friendly oil furnace & hydronic heating
#4 masonry wood heater (tulakivi & the like)

[skids]

10. Changing equipment is expensive.

My recommendation would be to put money into conserving. There are plenty of resources on the web with tips.

Long term, have a horizontal geothermal survey done on your property. Probably not something you can get finished for this winter, though.

[NNadir]

14. For the short term, we'll be using electric space heaters in our bedrooms

at night. 52% of New Jersey's electricity is nuclear so we're buffeted from fuel fluctuation costs. (Unfortunately 20-30% is from natural gas.)

We can also burn some of the wood that's been piling up around here. Our fireplace is a recirculating model, and it puts out lots of heat, enough in fact to heat our entire home if we use fans.

Of course, for the short term we'll rely much more on the electricity. It's better for the environment than the biomass, which is fairly polluting. The biomass however is free in our case. I've been burning downed trees for years and have considerable wood reserves.

My wife has been reluctant to rely on wood excessively because of the smoke, and she has a point. The leading cause of air pollution deaths in the world is indoor pollution from burning biomass.

It's rather indicative of the US head-in-the-sand attitude toward energy lead to the expansion of natural gas electricity generation in the 1990's. For some reason, people believe that natural gas is "clean energy" even though nobody knows what to do with its chief waste, carbon dioxide. This is complete nonsense. No fossil fuel is safe, not even natural gas. Coal, of course, is worse.

For the long run, facilities designed for using natural gas could easily be switched to using DME, which is accessible by many synthetic processes with suitable energy input. (One hopes that this energy is NOT provided by coal.) It is also true that we will not have to depend on the doltish United States to obtain this material. DME can easily be shipped. Many other countries are rather far along on their DME programs. High natural gas prices will encourage people to invest further in DME infrastructure.

I note that methane (the bulk of natural gas) is also a very, very, very easy compound to make. It is, in fact, an annoying side product in DME synthesis.

[phantom power]

15. How would you make DME?

On the enormous industrial scale we would need to actually replace oil/coal/methane?

If we're producing methane as waste product, better to burn it into CO2 than release it. As I recall, methane is about 20x more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2 is.

[NNadir]

16. Waste methane is a good start.

Methane is still flared around the world, because it is too expensive to ship from remote locations. (Alaska is just such a place.)

The Chinese will be making DME from coal unfortunately, and they will be the first to build an industrial plant for this purpose.

Both Korea and Japan have large pilot plants (100 MT/day) using coal bed methane.

However the direct hydrogenation of carbon dioxide to produce methanol is well understood. George Olah, the chemistry Nobel Laureate, talks about this all the time; it's become almost his obsession. I agree with him that a convenient way of making hydrogen is to use nuclear power for thermochemical splitting of water, which is also well understood. China is building a nuclear plant to do just this. It is expected to come on line in about 5 years.

Methanol is a convenient synthetic intermediate for making DME - DME being preferred to methanol as a fuel since it is far less toxic and far less dangerous, has better burning properties, is easier to separate from water and has almost unlimited flexibility for use in all kinds of energy systems.

If you're asking for my advice on the subject, as an intermediate step, I would locate nuclear plants next to existing large scale coal plants, capture the CO2 and hydrogenate it using nuclear hydrogen. Although this fuel would represent a net greenhouse gas addition (from the coal) the CO2 would be used twice, once to generate electricity, and once as a motor, cooking or heating fuel. This would completely eliminate the petroleum source of CO2 as well as the natural gas input of CO2. Such a scheme would lead to significant output reductions.

For extra fun, since uranium is a constituent of coal fly ash, it would be possible to recover this uranium now breathed by many people who live down wind from coal plants for use as a nuclear fuel. This would eliminate the terrifying output of radioactivity from coal, coal being the largest source for deliberate release of radioactivity known. (I personally am not afraid of low levels of radioactivity - but it has been the subject of lots of international stupidity and knashing of teeth.) For even more fun, one could recover the mercury from coal it as a coolant in certain types of Gen IV high temperature liquid metal nuclear reactors. (As an interesting side product, small amounts of gold would be produced in such a reactor.)

It is known that certain amine systems are available to remove carbon dioxide from air. In fact in photosynthesis, just such a system is used, with the amino acid lysine serving as the amine. Because of the former low cost of methane, these systems have not been piloted, but they are readily available. Once these systems were piloted and scaled, it would be possible to completely eliminate fossil fuels for an almost indefinite period. The fuel cycle would become almost identical to the carbon cycle in the natural world. Photosynthesis is an equilibrium driven process, where, in effect, the carbon dioxide is removed from the equilibrium through hydrogenation (using FADH2). It is easy to imagine industrial analogues.

I'm not sure though that enough time exists for all of this. We may be reaching the ends of our collective ropes.

[phantom power]

20. Can anybody "important" be educated about this?

I'm not sure government is relevant to America's energy decisions. They seem to do whatever the energy industry tells them, not the other way around.

That doesn't give me much reason to hope, but I do see occasional signs that the energy industries are starting to grasp that they have a problem, and they'll go down with the ship just like the rest of us.

[NNadir]

22. It's not like it's a grand industrial secret.

Energy technology is more informed by public attitudes than it is by technological feasibility. DME technology is well understood. DME is already an industrial compound used to make hair spray among other things. The matter is simply one of commitment, of seeing what we must do, then doing it.

It was much easier for my generation to pretend that this time would never come and to stay high on oil and gas than it was to invest. History, I suspect, will not forgive us for our orgy of drunkenness. Future generations will look back, shake their heads, and with perfect hindsight ask how we could not have seen what is clearly so obvious.

The role of government as I see it is simply to assure that the intellectual infrastructure of adaptability exists and, of course, to educate its citizenry of the options that exist so that they can make informed choices. Still the responsibility to be educated -and to educate others - lies with the citizens themselves who must, through public participation and discourse, understand the issues well enough to address them. Our government and our citizens have failed; they have failed themselves and they have failed future generations. In a way, George W. Bush is a perfect representation of exactly how pathetically deaf and deluded we are. Somehow the conversation is still mostly about war and religion and all this shit about energy is still going on. We seem to have not even discovered what is important to look at.

I think our last best shot may have been in 2000 when President-elected Gore was not seated in office, but as Macbeth remarked after setting out on his own course of doom, "What's done cannot be undone."

The governments of Asia have done an much better preparing for the DME world in particular and the energy needs of the future in general. I note that these same governments are making the largest industrial commitment to nuclear capacity in the world. Of the 75 nuclear reactors now under construction, ordered, or planned, the vast majority of them are in Asia. Asia will dominate the 21st century, and we, I'm afraid, will go the way of the Austrian-Hungarian empire.

In Asia, the piloting of the systems like those represented by DME has already been accomplished or is well under way. China for instance is not just talking about DME - they are already building industrial plants to do it.

In the West though, we've been ossified and frankly, endlessly been drinking Koolaid. We are still more involved with fantasy than with reality.

As much as I would like to say otherwise, I'm not optimistic for the future of our culture.

[phantom power]

23. I guess I'm trying to think in terms of political leverage-points.

to jumpstart this "public discourse." As you say, the country is mostly sleepwalking into a catastrophe.

Maybe what I'm looking for doesn't exist. But my knowledge of history (such as it is) suggests that there are moments in history where the right people come together. A solution meets up with a person, or group, who sees the "vision thing" These are leverage-points, although I don't know if it's possible to engineer them. They happen as much by luck as by design.

On a purely personal level, I try to bring up these issues with people I know. But that's of limited effectiveness. And it seems too slow. Events are overtaking us. As you often point out, we no longer have decades to spend as lone voices in the wilderness.

And even in principle, I don't think individual actions are enough to solve all our problems. Individuals can choose to conserve, and we can act as positive examples, but individuals will never build 1000 nuclear reactors. Or a million wind turbines. Or 500 DME manufacturing plants. Governments do such things. Or industries, or consortiums.

[jpak]

21. international stupidity????

Someone must know more about the effects of ionizing radiation than the US National Academies of Science...

http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11340.html

http://www.nirs.org/press/06-30-2005/1

But then again, if my claim to fame was contaminating myself and my coworkers with 125I. I would be a little sanguine too when it come to exposure to low-level radiation....

[NNadir]

25. Yeah, international stupidity.

You know, like a tech hiding under the table because of a microscopic sample of uranium or pretending that one has worked with tritium to claim that one actually knows something about radiation.

Duck, it's a cosmic ray!

[jpak]

26. LOL!!!!

a tech!!!!

pretending!!!!!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Please tell us again about that super-secret molten salt breeder reactor....

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[jpak]

17. and when everyone in NJ turns on their electric heaters

during that cold snap - the grid will fry and everyone will suffer.

Which will most likely happen somewhere in the northern US this winter if there's a severe cold snap and limited gas supplies.

People with oil heat and pellet stoves w/o battery back-up need electricity to run their furnaces.

Greedy natural gas and electricity hogs will cause everyone's ruin.

note: ALL new wood stoves have to meet new EPA particulate emission standards and most pellet stoves are so efficient they are exempt from them.

People who use inefficient fireplaces and older wood stoves are the problem when it comes to woodsmoke pollution....

[NNadir]

31. And now, let's play "DATA AND CALCULATION!"

I love this game. It's my favorite show.

Since I had a business meeting this afternoon in New York City (a small town just across the river from New Jersey) that went better than I ever imagined in my wildest dreams, I'm in the mood for some fun and relaxation.

I certainly want to get to the fun and dopey prediction that electric heating in New Jersey will lead to collapse of the power grid, but being long winded and possessed tonight of a great sense of fun, first I will divert myself by discussing the dopey idea that New Jersey is about to "go solar."

We hear all the time from people who don't understand even the minimal basics about energy about the wonders of the New Jersey solar industry, from people who know doodly squat about New Jersey and even less about industry and industriousness.

Because they can't understand numbers whatsoever, these people want to represent that the installation of tax break for rich people (not that I hate rich people - since I am planning on being one) represents an irreversible swell toward the Godot's solar nirvana - this being Beckett's Godot for whom self deluded consumerist twits wait anxiously although he never actually comes.

Then of course, there's numbers. We can tell about the solar nirvana and it's connection to reality by looking at numbers.

Here's some numbers about electricity production in New Jersey:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/states/statesnj.html

I will point out the relevant information here.

In the period between 2002-2003, the share of electricity generated by natural gas in New Jersey decreased from representing 31% of our generation capacity to 26%. Coal stayed depressingly constant at 16%. Petroleum rose from 1% to 3%, and nuclear generation rose from 50% to 53%. The balance in both years, 2%, is covered by "other."

New Jersey is described sometimes by "solar only" advocates thusly:

"New Jersey is now one of the leading states in the nation for solar..."

Here for instance is a marketing blurb from solar salesmen saying exactly that: http://www.powerlight.com/newjersey/index.shtml

Based on the marketing and hype - assuming that it isn't fraudulent as in a lie, as in a misrepresentation, as in pure wishful thinking, as in a huge delusion, as in an alcoholic hallucination, we would assume that at least this "other" 2% would be PV solar energy. But we would be wrong if we so assumed.

In New Jersey, in order to make the claims of the so called "renewable" crowd look somewhat less pathetic and deluded, "waste incinerators" are defined as class II "renewable" energy sites:

"...Another supply side option is the replacement of fossil fuel electricity generation with a renewable energy source that has low or no mercury emissions. Class I renewable energy sources are defined in the Electric Discount and Energy Competition Act (Act) as photovoltaic, wind, wave, or tidal power, solar thermal electric, fuel cells, or geothermal. Class II renewable energy sources are municipal solid waste incinerators that generate electricity and hydroelectric electricity generation..."

http://www.state.nj.us/dep/dsr/Vol3-chapter3.pdf

New Jersey law, in typical "dump our empty promises on future generations" mandates that "The percentage increases to 6.5% in 2012 of which 2.5% is to be from Class I or Class II renewables and 4% is from Class I. Currently, New Jersey uses 68 million megawatt hours (million Mwh) of electricity yearly. Per the requirements of the Act, in 2012 approximately 2.7 million Mwh must be supplied by Class I renewables and 1.7 million Mwh must be supplied by Class I or II renewables."

Burn more garbage.

The garbage to energy industry - a fraud much older than PV electricity as it dates to the 19th century has run into some local opposition. Our neighbors in Delaware for instance have passed a law to make wood waste burning incinerators illegal. It started with bits like this: http://www.greendel.org/item.xhtml?name=alert_0029

Speaking of wood, did you hear the joke about the ninth rate thinker who proposed in consumerist fashion that the solution to the fact that wood burning pollution is for everyone in New Jersey to buy a new wood burning stove that reduces particulates to "EPA approved levels." Did you know that there are also "EPA approved levels of particulates from diesel engines?" Apparently in this alternate universe EPA approval is the same thing as rendering something safe, particulates that are EPA approved and get stuck in your lungs don't cause any injury whatsoever, because they're EPA approved. Of course, we don't even need to touch with someone else's lung tissue the rich spoiled brat argument that the solution to pollution is to buy more shit.

Buy. Buy. Buy. I note that of the millions of people who die each year from inhaling "biomass" exhaust, very few of them are rich people who are deciding between a new catalytic wood stove and a trip to hurricane alley's Disneyworld. Some live in deforested countries like Nepal. http://www.undp.org.np/news/news061.htm But, let's be clear. The International Organization of Twit Empty Promises to Make Rich People Feel Less Guilty About Consumerism might as well be a unit of the Repuke party. Only idle rich boy solutions count.

Now let's turn to the schadenfreund prediction of anti-nuclear dopes who understand almost nothing about energy at all that a switch on the part of New Jerseyans from natural gas to electricity will cause New Jersey's power grid to collapse. In short, LET'S PLAY "DATA AND CALCULATION!"

Most people who are not twits know that in most places peak electrical demand is not associated with winter weather - it is associated with summer weather. It is true that electricity demand on particularly cold days in New Jersey and elsewhere does indeed increase, because many people already have electrical heat - irrespective of and predating the natural gas crisis. On January 23, 2003 for instance the PJM grid, which serves New Jersey, experienced a peak winter electricity demand of 55,031 Megawatts, surpassing its old winter record of 50,129 Megawatts set on January 27, 2000.

http://www.pjm.com/contributions/news-releases/2003/20030128-winter-peak-demand.pdf

Did New Jersey's grid collapse? Not at all, because PJM's grid has experienced much higher demands in summer. The all time summer demand on this grid was 63,777 megawatts. (It didn't collapse then either.) Now let's leave aside for the moment that the grid demand seems remarkably unaffected by the dorky empty promises of the distributed power PV solar power squad. Instead let's just calculate using the real magic of subtraction what the reserve capacity of the PJM grid is as experimentally determined by real data. Ready? (Greenpeace members should run off to find someone who knows how to work a calculator or spreadsheet at this point.) 63,777 MW - 55,031 MW = 8,746 MW.

How much power is represented by 8,746 MW? It's the equivalent of just less than 9 average sized nuclear plants, and it easily outstrips the entire solar PV capacity (measured in physicist watts and not in phony solar "peak bright sunny day under the best alignment conditions at noon 'watts'").

In New Jersey, the average home heated with natural gas - as my home is - burns about 1000 therms per year.

http://www.bpu.state.nj.us/reports/NJCEP2003AnnualReport.pdf">See the footnote on page 4.

A "Therm" is 100,000 Btu, or in SI units, 105.5 MJ. http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html

Now we can calculate the average power requirement for natural gas burning in New Jersey. 1000 Therms/year = 105.5 gigajoules/year. 105.5 gigajoules-yr(-1)/31,557600 sec-yr(-1) = 3.3 kW.

According to the US Census, which was last conducted when a sane person ran the government, 2000, the number of households in New Jersey is roughly 3.3 million.


http://www.wnjpin.state.nj.us/OneStopCareerCenter/LaborMarketInformation/lmi25/pl94/GCT.xls

How much power would be represented by replacing all of the natural gas required by average New Jersey homes if all of the New Jersey homes depended on natural gas for heat? 3.3 million X 3.3 kW = 11,000 Megawatts or slightly above the known reserve capacity of the PJM grid.

It is not true however that everyone in New Jersey is going to switch all of their power demands from natural gas to electricity. In fact, not everybody uses natural gas in the first place. Many people actually have electric heat already. It's not too hard to afford; we're better than 50% nuclear. Other people use #2 heating oil. I'll bet there are at least 5 people in New Jersey who heat their homes with biodiesel.

While it has been stupidly suggested than when I said that I would put an electrical space heater in our bedrooms at night to conserve natural gas and reduce my heating bills, that I was being an energy pig, what I actually indicated that I will be reducing my overall energy demand, since I will under these circumstances I will be able to turn down the thermostat in the rest of the house, which contains far more area than the three bedrooms that will be heated by the electrical space heaters. I can probably turn the thermostat down to 15C in the living room and not feel uncomfortable at all in my electrically heated bedroom. In this way, I will actually be consuming less energy than if I simply blindly left the thermostat at a higher setting.

Oh well, if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, if you're an admirer of Greenpeace fantasy, just make shit up.

The electrical grid will collapse...

:eyes:

Some people are apparently too dumb to even have a remote sense of exactly how dumb they sound. How exactly does one manage to say such stuff? Like I said, if one doesn't know what the fuck one is talking about, just make shit up. Maybe no one will notice.

I notice.

Many people, myself included, will of course continue to use our natural gas heaters for portions of the day. However it is clear that the higher prices will in fact induce conservation which is, of course, a good thing, irrespective of what consumerist frauds try to tell you. I could of course go out and buy a zone heating system for my house, but I'm not sure that the cost-benefit in either a financial or an environmental sense would represent any savings whatsoever. Consumerism involving the latest greatest toy is not really environmentalism. It's twittery.

The best thing I can do for the environment in my state actually on further reflection, is represented by using to the maximal extent our state's vast nuclear energy resources. An electric space heater heating a small localized space is the best and most obvious way of doing this. I should have thought of it sooner, but I was lulled into complacency by absurdly low natural gas prices. This is a silver lining on the price increase. It makes people think about energy. In spite of what mindless twits who are indifferent to global climate change tell you, the only practical solution to making up for the fossil fuels that are rapidly being depleted is to use more nuclear energy.

I think I'll write my congressman to express this thought. He, of course, probably already knows this. He's a physicist. He used to run the Princeton Plasma Physics lab, a government laboratory for the development of fusion power, fusion power being a form of nuclear energy.

Many people here know this, with the possible exception of Doug Forrester, the psychotic Repuke candidate for Governor here, who unlike John Corzine, opposes the license extension of Oyster Creek, our oldest and smallest nuclear reactor. Oyster Creek, which began operations in 1969, will have its license extended after 2009. It ran in 2003 at 98.9% of its full capacity and has been a very successful plant.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/reactors/oyster_creek.html

[NNadir]

32. The fun of writing last night's "collapsing grid" post aside...

the calculations therein show that it is a relatively trivial (from a technical standpoint) to completely eliminate the global climate change impact from home heating by switching to electricity. This of course requires that the electricity be generated by nuclear or other carbon neutral means.

In some ways wind generated electricity might have some slight advantages were electricity used for home heating. Although I often point out that solar PV is only for rich people, in summer PV power, for those who can afford it, does provide for load leveling - meeting peak loads created by running air conditioning precisely when it is needed - hot sunny days.

Cold days, on the other hand, that require the most heating are often those where cold winds blow. Thus wind farms might serve the same function that PV systems might best serve.

For the record I oppose the NIMBY business of opposing an off-shore wind field in New Jersey.

While I strongly and passionately advocate the expansion of nuclear power, I freely admit that the major drawback to this form of energy is that it is not well suited for meeting peak load demands. Nuclear powerplants run the best when they operate continuously near or at full capacity. They are not ideal for fluctuating power loads. In a putative future where the bulk of energy demand is provided from nuclear sources, of course, existing natural gas plants could in theory be used as peak load generating plants - using nuclear generated DME as a fuel, for instance, or, again, wind farms.

[jpak]

33. What fucking horseshit

Gee - how does the New Jersey grid meet its peak power demand???

With wondrous nuclear power????

nope

Natural gas-fired power plants.

Nationwide, gas production is falling by a few percent per year.

Demand, however, is growing (by double digits is some parts of the country) and most of that demand is for new electrical generating capacity (base, intermediate and peaking).

Katrina and Rita combined have shut >70% of the gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.

As a result, there will be >10% shortfall in gas supply this winter.

What happens in a cold snap?

Gas demand for domestic heating and electricity production increase dramatically and compete with each other for available supply.

(Note: as gas-fired power plants are only ~40% efficient in converting gas energy to electricity, demand for electricity increases the demand for gas far more than demand for domestic heating alone.)

The net result is a positive feedback that will result in either loss of supply to domestic customers or shutdown of natural gas-fired power plants.

This is exactly what happened in New England during the winter of 2004....

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:14Kk2zY0DhMJ:www.negc.org/DOCUMENTS/NATURALGASSTUDY.PDF+forecast+natural+gas+shortfall+winter+2005+2006&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Because domestic customers have priority over utility generators NATURAL GAS POWER PLANTS BECAME "UNAVAILABLE"

This was fact - not hyperbole.

So how will New Jersey meet its peak natural gas demand this winter -

with nuclear plants????

(they're running at full capacity)

:rofl:

with natural gas-fired plants?????

:rofl:

the fucking gas won't be there.

If I lived in the Northeast this winter, I learn how to drain my pipes on short notice...

If we have a prolonged cold snap in the Northern Tier this winter, the fucking grid WILL go down...

[NNadir]

34. Oh, gee. Maybe we should shut our nuclear plants down and replace

them with snow covered solar cells?

New Jersey is not immune from the cost of natural gas because it provides almost half as much at the main source of electricity, nuclear power. But New Jersey is certainly not going to suffer as much as places with no nuclear capacity whatsoever.

Maybe the dopey claim is that it will make New Jersey less dependent on natural gas by doing what retards with poor educations continually insist upon - shutting nuclear power plants.

The idiot contention to which I responded was the ditzy remark that electricity was not an alternative energy source in New Jersey because the power grid will shut down from excess load. This was demonstrably stupid. Like all writhing and crying and specious wriggling attempting to prove that nuclear power doesn't work, it is notable for it's complete detachment from reality.

The argument is not about how to generate electricity, which notably anti-environmentalist anti-nuclear retards can't understand in any sense, since they think that every 200 kilowatt solar power plant is a revelation from heaven where real power plants operate in quantities of thousands of megawatts.

It is true that power peaks are typically served by natural gas. But someone who had a knowledge of real numbers (with emphasis on - gasp, horror, horror - real) would immediately understand that having to provide a few thousand megawatts of peak power is very different than having to provide that peak plus one-half of the base load. It is pretty fucking obvious to any one with a modicum of intellectual self respect, present company obviously excepted, that the solution to the natural gas shortage is NOT to rely on more natural gas to replace capacity that in completely independent of it.

No rational person (with emphasis on rational) is calling for the shutdown of New Jersey's nuclear plants this winter, or this summer. Why? Because nuclear power works.

The sort of thinking that is typical of people who disagree on this matter - irrational people - is about what one would expect from someone who has never held a real job in real productive enterprise, whose attachment to reality is tenuous and based more on recycled, unoriginal, inexperienced reshuffled hack ideology. The production of energy is not an academic exercise that is accomplished by drawing a diagram. It's a technological, industrial enterprise that involves the skills of highly educated and highly competent people working on a scale that is a fuck load bigger than a dopey microscope slide coated with (horror, gasp, terror, fear, fear, panic) a few milligrams of uranium. The production of energy is not a pretty diagram of the band gaps in some silicon crystal on a piece of obscure paper in some largely unread journal for circle jerkers. It involves skills like engineering, construction, testing, operations, and gasp, horror, horror, terror, terror delivery of product on a macroscopic scale to hundreds of millions of people living real lives.

I am not crying. I am glad that people are inspired not to rely on natural gas, because I regard natural gas as a dirty fuel. Why? Because I know what the fuck carbon dioxide is, and I passed junior high school chemistry without cheating (and it doesn't take any more than that) and I know what you get when you burn methane in the presence of oxygen.

Right now the direct (internal) cost (ignoring external cost) of nuclear energy is roughly comparable to that of coal, a few cents per kilowatt-hour wholesale. No other forms of electrical generation come close, certainly not natural gas, especially now. In the new post-fossil fuels world it will be very obvious to industrial types worldwide that fossil fuels - which are horribly expensive in their external costs - will never again be as cheap as nuclear. This will bode well for the nuclear industry and therefore for the environment. This will represent a happy coincidence wherein the best environmental outcome is identical with the best economic outcome. That is a win-win and win-wins are what make the world go around.

For a long time anti-environmental anti-nuclear activists - aka twits - have been representing that natural gas is safer than nuclear energy, that it is an alternative to nuclear energy. Now the crow has come home to roost and their idiocy is exposed graphically for all the world to see. And what do they do? They cry over the gas. Would that they gave as much a shit about the atmosphere as they did about ideology.

I note that nobody, nobody at all, is taking the solar industry seriously in this crisis. The "solar as savior crowd" is mostly crying about the loss of natural gas these days. We've had 40 years of empty promises about the solar potential - 40 years where solar energy has been sexy and cool while many people were grousing about the supposed evils of nuclear - and solar energy is nowhere near ready for this crisis while the nuclear industry cranks along successfully on a grand scale. Why? Because solar energy has mostly thus far been an elaborate scam, an elaborate fraud, a day dream for people who substitute theory for practice. It's not even theory really, so much as it is wishful thinking and religion.

There are people who look at the world http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Galileo.html">as it is and then there are people who think that the world is determined by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Paul_V">repetition of stupid and useless dogma.

If solar power actually worked the conversation about nuclear energy would be totally unnecessary, since everybody would be happy.
But the world is not a fucking twit theory. The world is based on experience. Dogma does fine in simple times when nothing is demanded. But when the shit hits the fan, the shit flies and just makes for more mess. The fan is what keeps working.

[jpak]

36. Yup

New Jersey residents with a couple of pellet stoves, a solar hot water heater and a PV array are going to look "pretty dopey" come January...

:rofl:

[rustydad]

37. Question NNadir

I respect your understanding of the principles of power generation and fuels. But I have heard so many conflicting calculations (or lack of) on the Energy Return on Energy Investment of modern nuclear plants. If one takes into account all energy inputs, birth to death, including the fuel mining, processing and disposal, do you see nuclear as energy positive? And as to using nuclear as a source of electric resistance heat for buildings isn't that a looser from the efficiency standpoint. Isn't ellectical resistance heating way down from say a water well type heat pump? And even better why not put small nuclear reactors near towns and pipe the waste heat to buidings using insulated hot water pipes? And is there really any time left to make huge changes in our energy infrastructure before it all comes down? Bob

"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties.. if that is what they mean by a "liberal" then I am proud to be a liberal. ": John F. Kennedy

[amandabeech]

18. My mom swears by her electric heated mattress pad.

She gets the bedding all warmed up and can then turn it off when she gets into bed. She says that it warms things up better than an electric blanket.

I've tried wearing a hat indoors. A person loses a huge amount of heat through the head. My current place has lots of old-fashioned charm, but it also has lots of old-fashioned drafts. In the coldest weather, a knit hat keeps me much warmer indoors.

[kestrel91316]

29. Insulate!!!!!!! Insulate!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Insulate!!!!!!!!!!!

[whatever4]

30. Many thanks for the responses nm

[Porcupine]

38. Greenhouse with water barrels painted black on south wall

The greenhouse doesnt have to be perfect. The barrels can be any old watertight steel barrels that you paint black. In the barrels goes a mixture of water and antifreeze. You add top and bottom vents to the greenhouse so you can harvest the heat during the day.

Mother Earth News has a thousand variations on the theme.

Other than that I would recommend electric mattress pads. They keep you toasty for 25 cents a night.

Renters are screwed.

[madrchsod]

4. i read the journal of petroleum technology

every month and it seems the oil and gas industry are discovering new fields every month but these fields are more challenging to recover. the Norwegians just built a compete gas recovery system that is totally under the sea with a 1200km pipeline to england. it is more technologically challenging it is to recover gas and oil deposits and cost` a lot more money..

[Dogmudgeon]

27. Deleted

Oops -- wrong section.

--p!

[brokensymmetry]

11. Kicked & Nominated.

I think Christmas 2005 is not going to be a happy time....

[phantom power]

19. Christmas is definitely going to be interesting.

I predict the holiday shopping season is going to put recent inflation into sharp, ugly relief. We'll see yet more stories about how everybody is "shocked" at the decrease in holiday spending, and how nobody could have predicted it, yada yada...

[Dogmudgeon]

24. Temporary solution: Electric space heating

We live in an apartment with gas heat; the landlord always inflates his cost. If gas increases even 15%, the electric space heaters will become a cheaper choice -- and allow us to choke a few dollars off the landlord's windfall.

I also forsee no local grid-frying since most of the neighbors won't think of it, and the local community depends on cheaper gas and fuel oil. But if there is a HUGE price increase, like Ruppert forecast in 2003, all bets are off.

In the longer run, I'd like to buy a house and get off the grid as much as possible. However, with several years of poor health and financial ruin in the last decade, I'll probably end up in a public shelter. Or one of those "Socialist" countries in Europe.

--p!

[Dogmudgeon]

28. Those new petrochemical finds -- plus TWO Bonus Rants!

They are uniformly small and poorly productive. The larger finds are the "deepwater" fields, oil fields that are under deep sea beds, and they would be extremely difficult (as in "extremely expensive") to produce.

Small-scale alternative energy development would go a long way to help keep people warm in the winter, but would do nothing to take the pressure off a world economic system dependent on oil and gas. So staying warm is actually a fairly small concern. In the long run, if the industrial system runs out of gas, we're effectively thrown back to 1851 -- but with 21st century needs and requirements. (We can keep the Internet, but we'll have to get by with 55 baud modems -- for broadband).

Coal and nuclear are the only viable sources of energy that will be available for powering the modern industrial system after oil's coming scarcity makes it unusable. Coal is horrendously dirty, and nuclear is still hobbled by a hundred dumb-ass problems (but see below). Nuclear energy, as it's now developed, is also on a limited schedule; without a recycling plan like some of the systems NNadir has described, easily-mined fissile material won't last fifty years, and far less with extensive nuke building.

But I don't blame the "No Nukes" movement for the nuclear paranoia as much as the nuke industry. I think they realized that they would have to put a lot more money and effort into their industry than they were prepared to invest, and decided to drop the project. There would be no instant profits, and most investors don't want to wait five or ten years to see profits. It became a simple process to stoke popular nuclear paranoia and leave their smaller investors holding an empty bag. They knew that in the future, they could always use Jackson Browne as the boogey man if they had to.

Of course, a mere billion-dollar investment in 1970 would be worth well over a trillion smackeroonies now, but that's an investment opportunity lost, like when I passed up on an opportunity in 1994 to buy stock in a company making penis pumps. But I digress. Compare this with the long-standing knowledge that the levees in New Orleans needed about $100 million of improvements. The federal government didn't want to make the investment, so now they have a potentially $200 billion disaster recovery to underwrite. A 2000-to-1 risk-to-investment ratio that they gambled on and lost. (Even a $50 billion loss is a 500-to-1 mistake.)

When the world's population of 7, 8, or even ten billion people are dependent on a system that suddenly can only support 750 million or 1.25 or 2 billion, you can guess what will happen. And it will probably only take three to five years. After the destruction of so much of the world's real wealth and (more to the point) living people, it will be impossible to just "bounce back".

A penny now, or a dollar tomorrow. How comforting to know that our leaders in business and government are looking out for our pennies.

The anti-nuclear faction is right, too, about the dangers of nuclear energy, but that's a part of the exact same calculation. It takes money to reduce the health risks of any technology, which is more investment the companies didn't want to make. And to re-initiate the nuclear program would require a radionucleide recycling program, which has never been developed on a large scale, which means even more long-term investment, risk ... and the possibility of lost careers. But the public is largely oblivious to the risks of coal and unaware that the cost of reducing those risks will be quite high.

Notice that our efforts in developing space have suffered from the same economic short-sightedness, although no catastrophe was attached (except for 14 hapless Shuttle riders and a three-member Soyuz crew). As we moved into the 1970s, financiers realized that it would take a lot more money and time to develop private projects in space, so they just quietly shelved their plans. Space, of course, is the best location for industry, and has a lot of potential for agriculture and, eventually, habitation. But the Gospel of "Greed-Is-Good" was being preached, and the great Capitalist Sawdust Trail led to quick bucks, Ronald Reagan, and the Yuppie way of life.

No expensive cars, no hanging out with movie stars and athletes, no fine clothes and trophy spouses. No special privileges, no legal lubrication for those lost cocaine weekends and firearms "accidents" and accidents of the cute kind that require monthly payments.

Well, then, fuck the world! Let them eat Rollerball!

Business has become allergic to the truly Big Projects that yield world-changing improvements in life and major increases in real wealth. Those require big investments, tolerance for tangible risk, the ability to be patient for several years or even decades, and the kind of visionary thinking that corporate minds do not have. The modern business critter wants to build empires not out of stone and wasteland and iron and glass, but out of broken lives, submissive prisoners, and stacks of fungible paper and ink (or toner).

The business community wants the State to underwrite all its risks, and then complains that it needs tax "relief"; it wants its governmental Nanny to keep its workforce and clientele in line, then agitates for "Free Enterprise". As a result, the only real large-scale technological advance we have made since the 1960s has been computer and information technology, because the advances have been made in a number of less-expensive steps. But building a durable and reduced-risk energy system, as well as developing space for human use, have proven too demanding for the past three generations of the Captains of Industry who covet their command more than their opportunity to master the seas. The sails remain fresh and crisp and white -- and unused. The slaves in the galley groan and suffer as their masters safely hug the coastline and kiss up to as many local officials as they can.

With such an attitude, the future New Worlds will continue to be Unknown Countries; no lamps will light unbuilt golden doors, the lightning will flash unharnassed across a frightened land, and though the Four Horsemen will come to the Old World, they will depart a dark, quiet planet.

--p!
It's what I can get away with -- while the heater still works.

[4dsc]

35. nice rant...

Did you see that natural gas went over the $13 dollar mark?? Depression is on the way...

When the world's population of 7, 8, or even ten billion people are dependent on a system that suddenly can only support 750 million or 1.25 or 2 billion, you can guess what will happen. And it will probably only take three to five years. After the destruction of so much of the world's real wealth and (more to the point) living people, it will be impossible to just "bounce back".

Cannot find many people who look at our current situation in a realistic way.. Good insight..