[Tanada]

Do a web search on the term Project Gasbuggy to read about the USA version setting off small devices at depth in tight gas sands in I believe New Mexico.

Sounds like a wonderful way to create radioactive natural gas.

It did do that, however if you used it in a power plant far from population centers the exposure would be very very low. Americans however are terrified by the word radiation and will not accept any level of increase over background.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Reading through the long argument above, what if we try to split the difference somewhere, and assume that we can get say 10 - 20 years of transportation fuel from NG for enough of the transportation system (say half) to GREATLY relieve the burden on peak oil, given the recent huge finds in NG? Looking at the progress specific NG companies have made in NG production technology in recent years, i.e. CHK, certainly seem to make the prospect of relatively large economically viable supplies of NG highly probable.

This would seem to greatly relieve the "shark fin shaped right side of the curve" problem with oil production the doomers frequently cite as the reason they are confident in the "short term doom" scenario.

Folks like Downey in "Oil 101" (c 2009) state that the long term price of NG is very likely to approach that of oil (in terms of BTU's) because of the massive demand required to provide meaningful NG transportation fuels.

If we go to tar sands on a large scale to extend the available life of large supplies of crude - that also requires a lot of energy at the extraction site, and NG is currently often the most practical and economical energy source for that. So that's another reason, IMO, that assuming we have plenty of NG for 1 to 10 centuries is wildly optimistic at this point.

. . .

Anyway, this kind of development is an example of why I'm a moderate. Every energy source like this that buys us both time, and barrels of oil to make more renewable energy sources like solar, wind, waves, etc. (vs. burning in vehicles) improves our chances of getting away from massive hydrocarbon use in several decades without destroying the planet and all its economies.

I may be a moderate, but I do believe that in the longer term, we MUST end up with a truly sustainable resource model for living. Most people will have to be hit in the face with an economic energy hammer (multiple times) to figure that out.

[Maddog78]

Gas glut.
Five years of over supply!
Natural Gas cliff recently predicted is utter b.s.



http://www.financialpost.com/todays-paper/story.html?id=2210081

Gas Glut Drags On Alberta
IEA warning of five-year oversupply more gloomy than energy industry's own

Carrie Tait, Financial Post
Published: Wednesday, November 11, 2009



The global natural-gas market will be awash in supply for the next five years, the International Energy Agency warned yesterday, a call much uglier than the industry's expectations and one that will further batter Alberta's once-flush coffers.

And while tough climate change policy will boost demand for natural gas in the short term, it could eventually hamper thirst in some corners of the globe over the long haul, the IEA predicted in its annual World Energy Outlook.

"This [five-year oversupply prediction] would be a little bit more pessimistic for Alberta" than previous predictions, said Dan Sumner, an economist at ATB Financial. "That is going to have big implications for the Alberta government."


snip....................


The world's remaining resources of natural gas are easily large enough to cover any conceivable rate of increase in demand through 2030 and well beyond," the agency said, noting development costs will rise in the long term.

"The unexpected boom in North American unconventional gas production, together with the current recession's depressive impact on demand, is expected to contribute to an acute glut of gas supply in the next few years," the report said.

snip...................

[shortonsense]

Gas glut.
Five years of over supply!
Natural Gas cliff recently predicted is utter b.s.

But of course....and it was noticed WAY before Hirsch declared the natural gas shortages in the US a few years back.

The stuff was being researched and was known about back in the 70's and 80's ( if not earlier ), those declaring that we were going to run out just had to READ a little. I wonder why they didn't?

http://geology.com/usgs/marcellus-shale/

[TheAntiDoomer]

HA, doomers were teased on the news page with this link:

U.S. natural gas supply may dry up within 30 years, T. Boone Pickens says

only to get this devastating correction:

Clarification: T. Boone Pickens is quoted below as saying the U.S. has 20 to 30 years of natural gas until the country must shift to other transportation technologies. To clarify, Pickens meant other technology will be developed in 25 to 30 years, though the country has enough natural gas to last a century.

Sounds like that reporter needs to clean out her ears.

[Maddog78]

[TheAntiDoomer]

:P

I knew you'd like that Maddog. Seriously though that paper should just take down the article at this point to save face. How embarassing to get someones words so wrong.

[rangerone314]

Then what is your plan of action for fixing our solar system? It is inherently unsustainable, your insistence on being concerned with penny-anny microscopic issues is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, get your politicians to sponsor a human diaspora to another solar system. Ours is unsustainable.

I'd say the universe is unherently unsustainable, given entropy.

Its all about whatever time scale you use. I like the Native American 7 generations concept.

I'll worry about peak oil the next few decades.

I'll let someonelse a few million years down the road worry about building a Dyson sphere.

[mcgowanjm]

The entire high decline argument doesn't tend to make much sense from an economic perspective

Once again, the Law of Receding Horizons where energy is the economy.

And of course note how anyone giving anything other than Shale Gas forever, too cheap too meter is fired.

And a btw- the five year contract in the Fayetteville Shale
is over Dec 1. Will be interesting to see how these
contracts are renewed.

[Maddog78]

Who was fired? If you're talking about Berman you're confused.

http://petroleumtruthreport.blogspot.co ... ditor.html

......and anyway if I ran that magazine and advertisers got pissed I would have fired him.
It's a free industry magazine. It's supported by advertisers only.
You lose them you're done and they've lost enough of them with this downturn as it is.


So the Fayetville contracts are interesting to you?
I can just imagine what you will read into them.

There's a glut of gas. Looks like there will be for quite some years.
How about reading that into them?

[mcgowanjm]

Who was fired? If you're talking about Berman you're confused.

http://petroleumtruthreport.blogspot.co ... ditor.html

......and anyway if I ran that magazine and advertisers got pissed I would have fired him.
It's a free industry magazine. It's supported by advertisers only.
You lose them you're done and they've lost enough of them with this downturn as it is.


So the Fayetville contracts are interesting to you?
I can just imagine what you will read into them.

There's a glut of gas. Looks like there will be for quite some years.
How about reading that into them?

And anyway

Umbrage in the Gas Patch
by Steve Andrews

Last week, two remarkable events at World Oil magazine raised the decibel level about shale gas. First, WO columnist Art Berman’s latest shale piece, intended for the November issue, was yanked prior to publication. Berman immediately resigned. Berman and WO editor Perry Fischer issued on-line statements, saying the column was axed due to pressure applied by one or two natural gas companies on the president of Gulf Publishing. Fischer, the magazine’s editor for 11 years, reports that he fought the column’s cancellation, then took two days off. “When I returned I was fired,” Fischer relates. “I wasn’t told why, but neither was I surprised.”

So that IEA whistlblower 'don't make the Americans angry'
had zero effect.

and advertisers got pissed

WorldOil sounds like DeltaFarmPress, and the Press telling
Monsanto that RoundUp/GM doesn't work

This is just a short note, since Tuesday's tend to be my busiest days in class, but I could not help but put up the news best reported by quoting from Arthur Berman's Petroleum Truth Report

In an act of extraordinary courage, a top Petrohawk executive threatened to cancel his free subscription to World Oil if the magazine continued to publish my column. Today, John Royall, President and CEO for Gulf Publishing, cancelled my November column.

I have accordingly resigned as contributing editor.

For those of you who do not understand the import of this, Arthur Berman has been writing for some time about the credibility of long-term natural gas well production claims from the gas shales around the United States.

There has been a considerable hype about these shales (hence the tech series that I am starting to post on Sundays) and the wealth of natural gas that they are adding to the nations reserves. However, through examination of some of the records Arthur has shown that the performance of individual wells is not holding up to the original promise.

[mcgowanjm]

So the Fayetville contracts are interesting to you?
I can just imagine what you will read into them.

There's a glut of gas. Looks like there will be for quite some years.
How about reading that into them?

Then everyone and their dog will be laying out $150/acre.

Looking forward to it. And you can't imagine because you have no empathy.

[Maddog78]

Thanks for the update. I didn't know Fischer had been fired.
Such are the hazards of working for a no subscription fee, advertiser driven publication.
I personally let my subscription lapse quite a few years ago.

[MonteQuest]

Actually, "at current rates" applies very well to the case of coal in the US.
There's no growth at all in coal usage because new coal-burning plants are being mothballed, and enviros are waging an all-out assault on the substance.

Bald-faced lie, JD.

EIA projects US consumption will increase at about 0.7% per year through 2030. 43 new coal-fired plants are either already under construction, near construction or permitted.

Isn't it funny? When I joined this group in 2004, the scare du jour was the impending natural gas cliff. In fact, Matt Simmons said that natural gas armageddon was a certainty by Aug. 2005. And here we are 4 years later, swimming in veritable seas of the shit. LOL. What a stooge.

Sorry, JD. That cliff is for conventional gas, not unconventional.

[MattS]

In fact, Matt Simmons said that natural gas armageddon was a certainty by Aug. 2005. And here we are 4 years later, swimming in veritable seas of the shit. LOL. What a stooge.

Sorry, JD. That cliff is for conventional gas, not unconventional.

Hubberts concept was one of aggregation. He did not offer up a peak profile for only conventional oil in the US and compare that to one of unconventional oil...he offered up an aggregation of all oil production.

JD is quite reasonable in applying Hubberts concept to natural gas....US natural gas ( pink, green, conventional, shale, biogenic, thermogenic, shallow and deep ) peaked back in the early 70's... and we are swimming in it right now, as we have referenced elsewhere.

Here is the gross withdrawals graph. Notice the peak...notice the cliff....notice the complete reversal starting back in the 80's ( yes Virginia, that was some shale gas too ) and the most recent peak.

[MonteQuest]

Hubberts concept was one of aggregation. He did not offer up a peak profile for only conventional oil in the US and compare that to one of unconventional oil...he offered up an aggregation of all oil production.

Including oil shale and tar sands? I never read such.

[MattS]

Hubberts concept was one of aggregation. He did not offer up a peak profile for only conventional oil in the US and compare that to one of unconventional oil...he offered up an aggregation of all oil production.

Including oil shale and tar sands? I never read such.

In 1956 Hubbert quantified the total fossil fuel "heating energy" of nearly everything in the United States. According to Hubbert in that work, the US contains something like 1/3 of the worlds total "heating energy" of fossil fuels, and a minority fraction of that was conventional crude oil and natural gas.

It appears, and this is an interpretation on my part, that he quantified in his bell shaped curve concept only that fraction of the resource pyramid which could be seen from 1956. He certainly counted everything, but I don't think he was explicit about what would compose the flow rates he envisioned in the future,

For example, many unconventional resources ( by modern definitions ) were already in production and being counted in the US total when he did his work. Fields like the Big Sandy and Devonian shale production in the Appalachian Basin, the unconventional oil of the Sprayberry trend, the unconventional oil of the Sanish ( Bakken ) in North Dakota.

The heavy oils of California alone were already being measured in the billions of barrels produced by 1956, and Colin Campbell certainly considers these types of resources as unconventional, and Hubbert did not withdraw them from his bell shaped curve in 1956.

[leaflight]

For the masses or present civilazations?

[TonyPrep]

Here is the gross withdrawals graph. Notice the peak...notice the cliff....notice the complete reversal starting back in the 80's ( yes Virginia, that was some shale gas too ) and the most recent peak.

Here is the dry gas production graph, which shows that the decline wasn't completely reversed. The monthly figures show a jagged decline after March this year.


Dry gas production is what gets to the end consumer and isn't flared off or used in natural gas extraction operations.

[shortonsense]

Dry gas production is what gets to the end consumer and isn't flared off or used in natural gas extraction operations.

Gas which is produced, for whatever use,is produced. If they choose to flare it instead of sell it, that is still produced gas. And if its used to run compressers and whatnot, again, it still must first be produced to be used in this manner.

The end consumer volumes also don't include pipeline lineloss, certainly that is also produced gas which never makes it to the consumer and deserves to be counted.

In either case, the graphs strike me as clear. Unconventionals have completely reversed the US production decline some years ago, and have been upward trending for better than 2 decades now on such gas.

I consider the US fortunate that it has so much of something so useful, available, and obviously inexpensive ( on an energy basis compared to oil in particular ).