U.S. Gas Fields Go From Bust to Boom, or perhaps not quite.
BradGuth
A new found reserve estimate or interpretation of 2.2e15 cf isn’t
nearly as impressive as you’d think, especially when world demand and
consumption is always specified in m3 makes it equal 62.3e12 m3, and
then taking into account the greater energy consuming process of
extracting such difficult natural gas, and realistically accommodating
the ever increasing commercial, institutional, private and residential
demand that’ll soon enough go through the roof once coal burning for
the making of steel and electricity is discontinued unless utilizing
full CO2 sequestration (a spendy alternative at best), and not that
consuming natural gas doesn’t create nearly as much CO2 per kwhr or
per therm (100,000 BTUs), not to mention continued fresh water
consumption in order to minimize exhaust elements of CO2 and NOx.
This revised cache of methane, helium and a few assorted other
elements that are mostly bad for the environment and detrimental to
human DNA is good for at most 50 spendy years, and because it’s simply
not going to ever be like cheap gas, along with little actual
reduction in creating CO2 per unit of energy or work, and then what?
Add the binding of H2 to that rock and shale sequestered methane, and
now you got something to write home about. According to William Mook,
by injecting his green and commercially dirt cheap H2 into the ground
is what can expedite the extractions of other elements, including
oil. So why not apply H2 in order to expedite the methane gas, in
order to further reduce the wellhead volumetric cost of such hard to
get natural gas?
Wonder what Steven Chu might have to say about all of this.
~ BG
BradGuth
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124104549891270585.html
A new found reserve estimate or interpretation of 2.2e15 cf isn’t
nearly as impressive as you’d think, especially when world demand and
consumption is always specified in m3 makes it equal 62.3e12 m3, and
then taking into account the greater energy consuming process of
extracting such difficult natural gas, and realistically accommodating
the ever increasing commercial, institutional, private and residential
demand that’ll soon enough go through the roof once coal burning for
the making of steel and electricity is discontinued unless utilizing
full CO2 sequestration (a spendy alternative at best), and not that
consuming natural gas doesn’t create nearly as much CO2 per kwhr or
per therm (100,000 BTUs), not to mention continued fresh water
consumption in order to minimize exhaust elements of CO2 and NOx.
This revised cache of methane, helium and a few assorted other
elements that are mostly bad for the environment and detrimental to
human DNA, is good for at most 50 spendy years, and that’s because
it’s simply not going to ever be anything like cheap gas, along with
little actual reduction in creating CO2 per unit of energy or work,
and then what?
Billing itself as "Blue Sky.Clean Air," the Hythane Company, LLC,
based in Littleton, Colorado, has engineered a fuel that blends 20%
hydrogen with 80% natural gas (primarily methane): "hythane". Though
20% H2 blend is perhaps technically doable, generally 5~7% H2 is as
good as it gets unless someone like William Mook says otherwise.
http://www.edenenergy.com.au/pdfs/20061101%20Hythane%20presentation.pdf
Add the binding of H2 to that rock and shale sequestered methane, now
you got Hythane and something impressive to write home about.
According to William Mook, by injecting his green and commercially
dirt cheap H2 into the ground is what can expedite those extractions
of other hard to get elements, including oil. So why not apply H2 in
order to expedite the flow of methane gas, as well as to boost the
average energy/m3 and to further reduce the wellhead volumetric cost
of pulling out such hard to get natural gas?
A recent do-everything pie in the sky effort for his version of a
mostly hydrogen economy, though well enough intended, apparently
didn’t exactly fly off the table.
http://www.ohiochamber.com/governmental/pdfs/William%20Mook_021308.pdf
I happen to agree with the bulk of what Mook has to offer, with the
minor exception of being restricted to his vast space consuming solar
energy, and for otherwise I’d like to divert a portion of our
renewable and geothermal energy into producing h2o2 (hydrogen
peroxide), at perhaps an initial volume of 100 million tonnes/year of
<70% purity to start with, that which we’ll soon enough need to
produce one way or another as is anyway, especially as other
utilizations for h2o2+Al and 2o2+synfuel become mainstream accepted.
There’s actually a good many R&D efforts related to the H2+CO2
combining, as well as several liquid and natural gas fuel related
composites that could use as much H2 as can be affordably produced
without involving fossil energy or even conventional nuclear energy
for obtaining such H2 in the first place.
The Methane Economy
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0410/S00063.htm
So, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak. Question
now is, can we do any of this skinning without killing the cat?
G Cornelius
> U.S. Gas Fields Go From Bust to Boom, or perhaps not quite.
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124104549891270585.html
>
> nearly as impressive as you�d think, especially when world demand and
> consumption is always specified in m3 makes it equal 62.3e12 m3
So Brad, does restating the article's estimate in different units
make it less true?
Does it make it less true that it amounts to 100 years of current
U.S. consumption?
If you want to shift to rational units, I suggest a GJ. You'll
actually find natural gas quoted in effectively that unit - i.e.,
MMBTU or millions of BTU's - at sites like oilnergy.com . It is
foolishness to discuss energy in anything but joules these days,
i.e., the true metric unit. No one knows what a m^3 of gas is
in barrels of oil, but GJ or millions of BTU's, actually translate
from one energy type to another without going to an energy
calculator site.
George Cornelius
Don Lancaster
Actually, since nobody has the slightest idea what size a Joule is (it
is sort of a lame foot pound), use of watt hours or kilowatt hours makes
infinitely more sense. There are 3,600,000 Joules in a kilowatt hour.
http://www.tinaja.com/glib/nrglect2.pdf
--
Many thanks,
Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073
Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552
rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml email: d...@tinaja.com
Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com
Fred Kasner
Most of the world is metric not "English" units. So 3.6 MJ = 1 kWhr
FK
G Cornelius
> G Cornelius wrote:
>> If you want to shift to rational units, I suggest a GJ.
> Actually, since nobody has the slightest idea what size a Joule is
A watt second. Not too difficult to imagine.
> (it is sort of a lame foot pound)
Geez, Don, I never thought you'd be a bigot for English units. I
would expect an electrical engineer to be accepting of the metric
system since that's where all of his units are.
Agreed, the Joule means nothing to the general public. That might
actually be an advantage (along with the obvious fact that there is
no oddball factor of 3.6 present).
The Joule has little excess baggage attached to it. I have no
problem talking about heat content in Joules, but when I measure
in kwh I want to measure electrical power. A calorie - now there's a
metric unit for you - would seem a bizarre way of measuring kinetic
energy, and is almost entirely confined to heat measurement. There
are only a few units that are 'connotationally' neutral, and the
pure metric energy unit is one of them.
Sure, kwh is OK. But the press, and a large fraction of the public
I'm afraid, thinks it's a kilowatt _per_ hour, and when it comes to
measuring in days, weeks, whatever, you still have stange time
conversion factors to deal with. So I would argue that computationally
it's not really better than the base MKS unit, just different.
And, of course, my initial motivation: as a practical matter
natural gas is measured in GJ (or millions of BTU's) anyway.
George Cornelius
G Cornelius
> a Joule is [...] sort of a lame foot pound
Lame joke.
A horse working at 74% capacity might put out 550 joules/second instead
of 550 foot pounds/second.
George Cornelius
Don Lancaster
Actually, there was a fudge factor in "horsepower".
They REALLY picked a lame horse in the first place.
Not sure what the factor was anymore, but I think it was .667.
My point was that (1) nobody in the general public has the faintest clue
how big a Joule is, but everybody knows how big a kilowatthour is, and
(2) If you had to visualize a Joule, it is rather smaller than a foot
pound, but close enough to be roughly comparable.
BradGuth
wrote:
> BradGuth wrote:
> > U.S. Gas Fields Go From Bust to Boom, or perhaps not quite.
> > http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124104549891270585.html
>
> > nearly as impressive as you’d think, especially when world demand and
> > consumption is always specified in m3 makes it equal 62.3e12 m3
>
> So Brad, does restating the article's estimate in different units
> make it less true?
>
> Does it make it less true that it amounts to 100 years of current
> U.S. consumption?
>
> If you want to shift to rational units, I suggest a GJ. You'll
> actually find natural gas quoted in effectively that unit - i.e.,
> MMBTU or millions of BTU's - at sites like oilnergy.com . It is
> foolishness to discuss energy in anything but joules these days,
> i.e., the true metric unit. No one knows what a m^3 of gas is
> in barrels of oil, but GJ or millions of BTU's, actually translate
> from one energy type to another without going to an energy
> calculator site.
>
> George Cornelius
So, how much of that deep and hard to get natural gas is it going to
take (all inclusive) for getting a given GJ to the consumer?
~ BG