Pops wrote:yellowcanoe wrote:We don't know yet know how high natural gas prices will go but rest assured that if people find they are paying considerably more for home heating and electricity they will take out their anger on the Biden administration.
Which is why you have Biden begging OPEC for its nonexistent spare capacity at the same time he's begging Mansion to please subsidize offshore wind.
It should be starting to dawn on people that Murphy's Law, i.e.The Energy Trap is a real thing. This has been my biggest worry all along, will we have enough time and money to transition before we run out our string? We need to invest large amounts of fossil energy into deploying renewables, which of course will make fossils more expensive—even before fossils begin their decline. But here at peak oil .com we are worried about the cost of our airline ticket and getting in a hit on the libtards.
Pointless trolling aside, or maybe to the point, humans have a short horizon. Doesn't matter that we're condemning our kids and grandkids to GW & PO without coming together, out past a generation—25 years or so— we just don't care. Kind of why the threads here nowadays are carping about Democrats, investing, stock markets, etc; for the old men here that is all that matters. After all, fracking made us Saudi America, right?
Fossil companies own enough of congress to impede progress on their own. They've been fighting global warming science for decades already, they have been fighting any talk of limits even longer. It is tobacco all over again except now it isn't just smokers and nearby breathers who will die.
What is worse, I'm going to say existentially worse, is the political reality of "stacking"— in which people increasingly accept party orthodoxy whole cloth, lest they be thought of as RINOs. And, since there have to be sides, the right is on the side of fossils. Of course whatever the right is for the left is against, so they undermine fossils at every juncture even though a renewables build out depends on fossil energy.
I've always been kind of an optimist, I figured we'd figure out a way to get by, some of us anyway. I'm not so sure anymore.
The energy trap has also been my greatest concern with the whole PO process from start to finish but I expect things to go a bit differently than the cited article does. For one thing it is not mandatory that all replacement energy must come from a specified source. IMO what is most likely to happen is first the freak out as the USA Petroleum and Natural Gas reaches world parity. We are seeing some of that right now as USA prices are rapidly rising to meet world prices. Heck in all honesty if I could get twice as much selling my X to Europe and Asia as I could get selling it to my fellow countrypersons I would be sorely tempted to do so. In the days before the Oligarchy was running things the feds used to pass laws limiting exports to influence the prices here in the USA. Today congress critters are all "globalists" and F-U to your fellow citizens of your nation state when there is money to be made.
The thing boils down to will Joe6P accept the new situation or will there be enough frothing at the mouth for Congress to require Natural Gas exports can only be done when certain price conditions for USA population are met? After all as recently as 1981 Natural Gas prices were regulated by federal wage and price controls. There is no reason the feds couldn't reestablish those same standards of control today. As a culture we seem to go through a cycle of more and less federal regulation since the 1860's swinging from extreme tight regulation on one end to loosey goosey lack of regulation on the other end. That was how we got the Roaring 1920's and the boisterous 1990's when the attitude was "we won the war now we party all the time". The regulatory structure put in place in the 1930's never really went away, it just got set aside so well connected persons could get uber wealthy. Some regulation came back with the 2008 crash but not nearly as much of it as could have.
Without that level of regulation the next logical thing is for Coal to come roaring back into use in power production. In 2010 coal power plants were running at a 70% capacity factor because they were still the cheapest fuel source for the utility companies to use. In 2020 with the shut down that fell to an all time low of 40% because when demand goes down you cut the most expensive bits off first just like an airline in a slow down parks its least fuel efficient airplanes first. In 2021 however the price of Natural Gas has rapidly climbed and as a result Coal capacity factor is back over 50%. Put that in relative percentage terms and Coal use has increased 25% over the low point from 2020 and is now back over the levels we had in 2018 earlier in the decline when Natural Gas was still freaking cheap to burn.
Environmentally minded folks can start screaming and gnashing teeth but the real reason coal declines so much from 2010-2020 was purely economics. Once fracking for Natural Gas kicked into high gear in 2005 when prices made it worth the effort and the government was all in favor of it the price crash was truly epic. In 2004 my Natural Gas price went up over 11, by 2006 it had fallen to 2.50 and all the money I spent in a new HVAC system in summer 2004 went from a 3 year pay back to an 11 year pay back on my investment.
Now prices are headed sky high again but this time it is to match world prices. Why should Columbia Gas or Consumers Power sell Joe6P Natural Gas for X when he can get 2X for selling it in Europe and 2.5X for selling it in Asia? Which market they sell into is based on transportation costs, not patriotic fervor.
The sick fact is while the EU faux-greens crow about their use of renewable energy what this means is in addition to planting solar panels and windmills everywhere they have decreased coal consumption by replacing the coal burning in some cases with wood pellets imported from Canada at huge expense. It is one thing to pelletize wood scraps and sawdust left over from making lumber but it is quite a different thing to harvest virgin forest for the purpose of turning every bit of woody material into manufactured pellets that are easy to ship and burn in power stations originally designed to burn coal.
The USA has not sunk to that level of insanity quite yet and the rebound in coal burning is substantial evidence of that reality.