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Peak Oil Should Still Worry You: The Hot Air in New Natural Gas Estimates
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The Cavalry is not coming to the rescue us from our wasteful lifestyles
According to an article this week in the UK’s Guardian Newspaper a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency said that the US pressured the agency to be complicit in underplaying the increasing decline of global oil reserves.
In light of this, recently revised estimates of Natural Gas reserves in North America should be taken with a grain of salt even thought they have some people calling the United States the Saudi Arabia of natural Gas. These excited comparisons are based on new techniques that allow natural gas to be extracted directly from Shale formations. Geologists have always known that natural gas exists in shale formations. (You can crack a chunk of shale and hold a match up to it and momentarily get a flame.)
The reason for the recent optimism is that newly developed technique called hydro-fracturing where horizontal drilling is combined with pressurized water to fracture the surrounding rock thus creating millions of cracks that allow the natural gas to seep into perforated pipe at the bottom of the well. There several things to consider when hearing such optimistic projections.
From an environmental standpoint, what is over looked are the thousands of already documented cases of ground water contamination. In the same way that the fracturing of the rock allows the gas to seep into the well it also can allow it to seep into the aquifer. For example, there are instances of towns in Texas where people have been able to hold a match to their tap water and ignite the natural gas that is in the water. People may need natural gas, but they need water more and this technique is dangerous to an already jeopardized water supply.
If somehow undertaken on the scale proposed in these optimistic projections it would almost certainly lead to a public backlash similar to that experienced by nuclear power after Three Mile Island.
The other aspect is the unproven energy economics of taping this resource. Setting certain environmental damage aside there is no certainty that this technique can be done on a wide enough scale to be able to replace oil in our transportation needs. Oils shale has shown to have a very quick depletion rate with many wells loosing 70% of their flow rate within one year. If natural gas is even to have a chance to replace oil in the It would require drilling on an almost unimaginable scale. Keep in mind that drilling a well (through perhaps mile or more of rock) can take up to two years. Quite simply the time required to drill a well, combined with the very high rate of decline in a shale gas well cannot be counted on to come to market fast enough to provide a reliable solution. To get an idea of the kind of drilling that would be required see this Quote from the R-Squared Energy Blog:
“The U.S. currently consumes 390 million gallons of gasoline per day. (Source: EIA). A gallon of gasoline contains about 115,000 BTUs. (Source: EPA). The energy content of this much gasoline is equivalent to 45 trillion BTUs per day. The energy content of natural gas is about 1,000 BTUs per standard cubic foot (scf). Therefore, to replace all gasoline consumption would require 45 billion scf per day, or 16.4 trillion scf per year. Current U.S. natural gas consumption is 23 trillion scf per year (Source: EIA). Therefore, replacing all gasoline consumption with natural gas would require a total usage of 39.4 trillion scf per year, an increase in natural gas consumption of 71% over present usage.”
Additionally, expanding our use of natural gas to remake our transportation fleet will drive the cost of natural gas up for our already existing uses. Additionally, according to www.greencar.com estimates on the cost of converting a vehicle to natural gas range from 12 to 22 thousand dollars. This makes a natural gas vehicle exceptionally expensive during a time when it is harder for more and more consumers to afford.
Other things to consider are:
Historically speaking, estimates of any energy reserve are almost always conflated. How long can Shale gas be expected to last? Extracting gas from these new locations will require the creation of new pipelines which will add to the cost of the gas and add to the time it will take to come to the market. Do we/will we have the resources to create a whole new infrastructure?
All this is to say that while natural gas will certainly be part of the future energy solution, it will not be a panacea that saves us from having to make significant changes to the way we live.
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