Natural Gas is part of our Renewable Future

22 Comments on "Natural Gas is part of our Renewable Future"

Davy on Sat, 22nd Apr 2017 1:16 pm 



“We’ve successfully transitioned away from coal and added more wind and solar power, but we also rely on clean natural gas to produce nearly the rest of the power we deliver.”
Clean natural gas? Natural gas is not clean so let’s don’t pretend.

“Natural gas provides needed reliability when renewable sources like wind and solar are not available when our customers need energy. “
Yes, gas is a great support for intermittent renewables.

“It has also been an integral reason why we became the first investor owned utility to reach the 33 percent renewable mandate.”
I think 33% is a realistic target for utilities to shoot for. Good work.

Boat on Sat, 22nd Apr 2017 2:13 pm 



Davy,

The U.K. made it a day with no coal. That should be the bar. Then maybe 80 percent renewables at least where there is wind.

forbin on Sat, 22nd Apr 2017 2:14 pm 



dunno , the UK is very happy its on wind nuclear and mostly gas

ok theres a few GW of hydro and pellets around and a couple of GW of imported ‘leccy .

fossil fuel free ? naw !

Will the USA catch up ? who knows

Forbin

Bob on Sat, 22nd Apr 2017 5:26 pm 



We will have to have some gas power as backup; we will have to pay a premium for this. It needs to be kept to a minimum and solar/wind/conservation needs to be maxed out. This is the transition role gas needs to fill. Not using lots of gas and pretending it is OK to do so.

rockman on Sat, 22nd Apr 2017 7:49 pm 



“The U.K. made it a day with no coal. That should be the bar.”. You mean burning no coal in the UK. But some of the electricity imported from the Netherlands is made burning fossil fuels…including coal. Prior 2000 the Netherlands exported no electricity and then boomed to more then 16,000 million kWh by 2015. And while the UK also imports nuclear produced power from France that country plans to reduce that production by 1/3 in the next 10 years. At the same time UK electricity imports are projected to increase 300% during that time. We’ll have to wait to see if the UK outsources proportionally more of its GHG generation to the Netherlands and other countries.

Not a bad bar to PERIODICALLY not burn coal, of course. But not consuming any electricity from sources producing GHG would be a higher bar suitable for bragging. LOL.

rockman on Sat, 22nd Apr 2017 8:04 pm 



And not a criticism but the decrease in UK coal consumption was due more to financial matters then environmental. Especially considering those fossil fuel sourced electricity imports. Not a bad development either way since it makes the higher costs of alt energy a necessary evil…along with a potential frac’ng boom for NG:

“The UK’s top-up carbon tax, the carbon price floor, doubled in April 2015. Three of the UK’s remaining coal plants then closed a year later, in spring 2016. The UK plans to close all unabated coal-fired power stations by 2025.”

Boat on Sat, 22nd Apr 2017 10:34 pm 



It will take decades to switch to renewables. The good thing is the tech for renewables will keep dropping prices allowing more money for storage and transmission lines etc while still beating out coal on price. 10 years from now renewables will grow much faster than they do today. Old solar and wind will be replaced with much cheaper and efficient equipment at the end of their life cycle.

Davy on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 5:11 am 



I keep hearing this price drop thing with renewables but that is limited by the usual technical and market based phenomena of diminishing returns. We are nearing these limits and may have in fact passed the economic one. Many of the fake greens here that talk up renewables especially about dropping prices fail to see that financially we have a repressed cost of money. Real interest rates should be significantly higher per normal business cycles. They should be far higher than normal considering the amount of non performing debt in the world today that would have to be realized through higher rates. Liquidity is artificially bubbly allowing leverage. Governments are monetizing debt allowing subsidies to continue even though they are deep in debt and face huge unfunded liabilities. Huge reservoirs of artificial money created by monetarization supports lending. IOW, we have a house of cards civilization with a Ponzi global economy buying renewables on the cheap from places like China that are producing below cost and way below cost if you consider the damage that Asian country is doing to its land, water, and air. Their land, water, and air is ours eventually. This makes the dirty renewable revolution just another crock of shit like fracking and multiple other arrangements that have benefited from the moral hazard of the post 08 new normal.

We do not have normal price discovery. We are extending and pretending bad debt away. We are facing a day of reckoning yet fake greens trumpet a green revolution ahead and talk cavalierly about dropping prices and increasing renewable penetration without realizing it takes a healthy economy to continue this. Fake greens talk about techno progress and discount its environmental costs. They ignore economic reality except to say hardware is dropping and the economy is improving because of green jobs. I am not saying renewables are bad they are not because they are vital to resilience. This is especially true in a paradigm of destructive change. What I am saying is fake greens are just more of the same status quo delusional thinking of techno progress is all good and will maintain us and improve us. They are claiming more affluence not less. They talk about power too cheap and its transformative effects without including all cost associated with that cheap power. They are ignoring the reality of modernism and that reality is a predicament of more than power it is about a failed human narrative and their fake green world is every much a part of the fake world as coal and oil fake greens want to eliminate.

Davy on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 5:42 am 



This should sober up those here who trumpet China’s fake 6% growth. This includes all that oil consumption growth people here routinely crow about. There is significantly malinvestment and wasted investment in China that will one day have to be recognized and factored away. If China started to realize all its bad debt that is spread throughout its economy in industrial sectors where excess capacity is, excess underutilized building development, and multiple asset bubbles China’s real rate of growth would be drastically lower. Instead cornucopian Asiaphiles trumpet loudly Asian growth as evidence the economy is healthy. By extension they claim oil growth is solid because of China and India. This is just more fake news and numbers that techno optimist, Asiaphiles, and fake greens rely on for their agendas.

“China’s Credit Excess Is Unlike Anything The World Has Ever Seen”
http://tinyurl.com/nymjnng

“A credit excess is created by the speed and magnitude of credit that is created – if too much is created in too short a time period, excesses inevitably occur and non-performing loans (NPLs) emerge.”

“A credit-to-GDP gap above 10 per cent of GDP is increasingly problematic as any new credit extended above that level produces progressively less GDP and is a source of future NPLs. Out of the 43 countries currently measured by the BIS, China has the largest credit-to-GDP gap (by orders of magnitude) at 30 per cent of GDP. This is equivalent to US$3.1 trillion in excess credit.”

“Finally, to show that the pace of credit creation will necessarily slow, thereby exposing misallocated credit and driving the emergence of new NPL formation, we turn to the deterioration in China’s incremental capital output ratio. This ratio is the measure of the number of units of input required to produce one unit of GDP. For the 15 years prior to the credit impulse in 2009-14, China’s incremental capital output ratio has been consistently between two and four. Meaning that two to four yuan in fixed asset investment created one yuan in GDP. But as a result of the credit-driven economic growth model, and the excessive credit that has been created (and the subsequent excess capacity in the industrial economy), China’s investment efficiency has deteriorated to the point that its incremental capital output ratio is now over 13.”

Davy on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 6:07 am 



“Cheat Or Chump? – You Are Not An Investor”
http://tinyurl.com/ljkp8t5

“These days, every rising asset price, every single bubble, comes at the expense of enormous increases in debt.”

bobinget on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 9:58 am 



Here’s one for Board Friend ‘ShortOnOil’…

Mike Shelman is chosen as the top contributor for Oil Pro. Read the link below as it is fascinating. I follow him closely. I never thought highly paid CEO’s will be so corrupt. US was considered the most honest country when transactions in Wall Street were done by hand signals before 1987. Mike has to say this about shale.

“And thank you, Reno. I think men like you and I have seen our best days in the oilfield. Gone is creating an idea that we were willing to bet most of what we own on, and be willing to live or die by the sword for. Now its little more than assembly line well manufacturing and the hope of making 3% annual rate of return on an $9M investment. The guys running these shale oil and shale gas companies are not oilmen; they are Wall Street financiers, little else. Their level of “creativity” manifests itself in how much sand that can cram in a perforation window. There is no romance in that and not now, but soon, it will be time to leave the oil business behind. ”

“All of my mentors and operating buddies have stayed way clear of shale oil, and shale gas, except to try and find acreage to trade away to bigger companies. The people that make money in the unconventional shale business are mostly mineral owners, whose granddaddies and daddies bought and worked the land, then left their kids with minerals to play with. And as you correctly point out, Wall Street and other lenders; they make lots of money in closing and brokerage fees, and of course interest. By the way, you have done your 10K work well as those loss and interest paid numbers are pretty much the same as mine. Its a debtor industry, the US LTO industry; it cannot stand on it’s own feet without low interest federal stimulus to borrow.

When the debt bubble busts, so goes hydrocarbon demand. We’ll never see oil prices over $100 dollars again, not sustained; the world cannot afford that anymore. By the time the US LTO industry gets through pissing away all of our remaining resources its going to take more that what we can afford to pay for oil, to get it out of the ground. “

bobinget on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 10:25 am 



I can’t agree, we simply throw the entire mess down the tubes if/when ‘the bubble bursts’.

Most oil investors are also into Natural Gas so they believe they are ‘covered’. Almost all of us watch TV.
When was the last time you saw an ad for electric vehicles? Can a person buy a name brand electric pick-up truck? What’s the biggest selling type of automobile?

A casual look at first world nation, Venezuela, tells us,
in spite of triple digit inflation, we go down swinging.

Eight billion people can’t go back 200 years to a time when human and animal labor grew food for one billion. We can’t feed our current 7.6 Billion if there were equitable distribution.

How does one throw a war w/o oil?
Oh, we could destroy 22 million people (in N.Korea) say, but “then what?” (we may soon find out)

onlooker on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 10:28 am 



When the debt bubble busts, so goes hydrocarbon demand. We’ll never see oil prices over $100 dollars again, not sustained; the world cannot afford that anymore. By the time the US LTO industry gets through pissing away all of our remaining resources its going to take more that what we can afford to pay for oil, to get it out of the ground. “—-
That is what some still refuse to understand, it was never about ALL reserves but those that could be accessed in an economically/energetically net positive manner.Venezuela is the perfect illustration of that

Boat on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 12:19 pm 



Onlooker,

The same thing was said about US shale oil. It will collaspe without $85. Since July us shale has added 800,000 pd to production.
I would hazard a guess if US producers had the Venezuela hoard they would have no problem getting that oil to market. Briazil, Argentia and Mexico changed course and opened their oil to international producers with better terms. Watch over the next few years as production grows.

bobinget on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 12:19 pm 



Before that ‘bubble bursts’ we get hyper inflation.
Only Venezuela is exhibiting truly hyper inflation.
(Syria’s inflation is under 35%)

Lenders demand higher (lending) rates, (as is the case for nations like oil producers; Angola’s 16% or Nigeria’s 14% Brazil’s 13%, Venezuela’s INFLATION rate is 500%. with a bank interest rate of 24%

HOW on earth can any one of these oil producers borrow money to find/produce more oil? (@$50)

The answer, of course, China.
No way is this a warning. China already done gobbled up oil producing states in South America and Africa with USD’s supplied by North American desire for low cost consumer goods. In effect, WHEN CHINA DESIRES, China (working in collusion with Russia) China can raise the price of oil as high as what China believes markets will handle.

As everyone here should already know, Venezuela won’t collapse as long as China and Russia are in control. It’s not in China’s interest today to see oil prices @ $60 or higher. By squeezing Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, OPEC in general, China is de facto,
the boss. Russia picked China as partner because the oil ‘game’ is a ‘long game’, Russia has more to gain LT.

This is China’s century, get used to it.

.

Davy on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 1:24 pm 



Bullshit Bob, Do you not read my comments on China? I doubt it becuase you are so far off into la la land on China why bother. China is some of what you describe. Bob, your problem is makati-ism. It is an extremism of agenda and a hyping of facts to that end. You really have very little understanding of global economics and it shows by you failed predictions.

onlooker on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 1:32 pm 



The problem with you optimists Boat, is you cherry pick info and have a short term time reference. Debt and legacy fields are keeping the Oil Industry viable. Want to bet what happens when either or both those supports end as they will? Then the Oil Industry will need to resort to fairy dust. Oh hope everyone had a happy Earth day

Boat on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 2:19 pm 



Onlooker,

It’s not optimism, just looking at the data. The Permain for example has raised production for the average well from around 100 bpd to 660 bpd. They now drill wells 33 -50 percent faster. All this change within the last 4 years. This is why 10’s of billions are now flocking to Texas. This is why drilling rigs are returning to the fields. I think you like to talk oil but not actually follow it. A doomer trait. Read the drilling productivity report and then look at where it was 2,3,4 years ago. You will see the progression.

onlooker on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 2:58 pm 



All that means Boat, is the will get the gettable oil that much faster and they need too given their solvency situation. But then what?

Boat on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 3:42 pm 



Onlooker,

Lol, your a trip. So when the gettable oil is gotten faster and the wells eventually get gotten these companies hope they will be positioned to drill in another area that be among the lowest cost producers that survive. The highest cost producers die off. It’s a jungle out there. This is called business, this is called capitalism, this is called filling a demand wanted by consumers.

makati1 on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 6:20 pm 



BobInget, you are correct in your summery. Ignore Davy’s anti-China bullshit. He has not accepted that America’s time is over and the East is rising to take its place. The sooner the U$ collapse’ the better for the rest of the world. Bring it on!

Anonymouse on Sun, 23rd Apr 2017 8:25 pm 



Retard says

“So when the gettable oil is gotten faster and the wells eventually get gotten these companies….”

Get gotten all that everyone?

Like reading the disjointed ramblings of, I dont know, a retard maybe?

Do you talk like a retard in person as well boatard? Because you definitely write like one.