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The Energy Spectator
People of Plenty
In my book, Terrestrial Energy, I talk about historian David Potter's 1956 book, People of Plenty, which redefined Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis." Whereas Turner said that an abundance of landhad been the defining experience in the American character, Potter argued it was actually an abundance of natural resources.
Following this line of thought, I argued that since our domestic oil production went into decline in 1970 we had entered a new era of American history where we became a "people of scarcity." It was a pretty good argument at the time, but I think now I'm going to have to revise it for the next edition. Once again we have become a People of Plenty -- this time in natural gas.
In a front-page story last week, the Wall Street Journal summed up what has been floating around for more than a year (it's amazing how long it takes these things to reach the public consciousness) -- gas industry roustabouts, wildcatters and innovators in Texas and Louisiana have done it again. They have cracked into gas deposits previously locked up in shale formations and opened Saudi-Arabian-sized reserves. As the Journal summarized, "One industry-backed study estimates the U.S. has more than 2,200 trillion cubic feet of gas waiting to be pumped, enough to satisfy nearly 100 years of current U.S. natural gas demand."
Here's how it happened:
In the 1980s, Texas oilman George Mitchell began trying to produce gas from a formation near Fort Worth, Texas, known as the Barnett Shale. He pumped millions of gallons of water at high pressure down the well, cracking open the rock and allowing gas to flow to the surface.
Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy Corp. bought Mr. Mitchell's company in 2002. It combined his methods with a technique for drilling straight down to gas-bearing rock, then turning horizontally to stay within the formation. Devon's first horizontal wells produced about three times as much gas as traditional vertical wells.
The development of the Barnett Shale almost single-handedly reversed the decline in U.S. natural-gas production. Last year, the Barnett produced four billion cubic feet of gas a day, making it the largest field in the U.S.
Geologists had long suspected there were similar formations around the country, so the new technology sent them scurrying into the field. Before long they uncovered the Haynesville formation in northern Louisiana and the Fayetteville in Arkansas, both as big as the Barnett. Now they've identified the Marcellus on the back of the Appalachian Range, stretching from Kentucky to upstate New York and covering most of Pennsylvania and Ohio and all of West Virginia. Another gigantic formation underlies nearly all of Illinois.
So it's hats off to the oil-and-gas men with their 3-D computerized formation maps, their rented drilling rigs and their dirty hands. Once again, they have provided us with more energy than all the foundation studies, energy blogs, feed-in tariffs, production tax credits and renewable portfolios will ever generate. Only two years ago it appeared the Lower 48 was pretty well played out for natural gas, just as oil has been for three decades. Now it appears we have enough gas to get us through the 21st century.
So what does this do for our current energy debates? Basically, it means the whole renewables-versus-nuclear controversy has lost its edge. Less than a month ago I sincerely believed we were headed for a national disaster by throwing money into renewable boondoggles while neglecting nuclear power. Now we've created a huge margin of error. Whatever mistakes we make, natural gas will pick up the slack. Granted burning natural gas for electricity is a bit of a waste. It's much better reserved for home heating and as a feedstock for the chemical and fertilizer industries. But what the heck, we're Americans, right? As long as we've got plenty of something, we'll probably waste some of it. Right now natural gas is the course of least resistance as far as electricity is concerned and that's probably where we're headed.
What this means is that every state, municipality and major corporation in the country will soon become the next BP, touting their wind and solar projects in magazine ads and annual reports while quietly meeting their needs with natural gas. At least we'll avoid the experience of California. The Golden State stopped building power plants altogether in 1980 on the theory that they could provide everything with conservation-and-renewables. That led to the California Electrical Shortage. The state quickly changed course, tossing environmental impact statements to the wind and throwing up 13,000 MW of natural gas generators in the next three years. It hasn't had problems since. While the nation as a whole gets 20 percent of its electricity from natural gas, California gets 40 percent. Along with siting coal and nuclear plants out-of-state, this allows the Golden State to be "clean and green" and claiming to be leading the nation into a Environmental Utopia. (See Max Schulz, "California's Potemkin Environmentalism.")
Within twenty years, we'll probably be where California is, at 40 percent natural gas. Meanwhile the Golden State will move ahead to 50-to-60 percent. The key factor is this -- environmentalists don't object to burning natural gas. Drillingfor it is something else entirely, but burning it they'll accept. They'll even label it a "bridge fuel" to the world of renewable energy, just as coal was the bridge to the solar utopia in the 1980s. Fortunately, all the new gas fields have been discovered in the flyover states where environmental objections won't have much impact. (In New York, on the other hand, Riverkeeper, the major opponent to nuclear power, has already announced that upstate New York is "inappropriate" for natural gas drilling, so maybe New York will miss out on the bonanza.)
As usual, Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma will remain the workhorses of the nation, shouldering the energy burden while getting rich in the process. Meanwhile, New York and California will continue to explore the possibilities of tapping mid-ocean currents for their energy needs. All this will mean a hefty transfer of wealth from the East and West Coasts to the Heartland, but maybe the Obama Administration can devise a progressive tax policy to redistribute income back again, so Boston and San Francisco don't suffer unnecessarily for their environmental awareness.
Now what happens with nuclear? Despite the extreme skepticism of the Obama Administration, I suspect someone over the next eight years will manage to erect a nuclear reactor somewhere in the United States. By that time Venezuela, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka will have their own nuclear programs so no one will notice much. At that point, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission may decide it doesn't need five years to approve reactor designs that are already operating all over the world and the pace may accelerate a bit. Then around 2025 somebody will say, "You know, natural gas supplies aren't going to last forever." Renewable energy will have proved a bust and by that time we may finally get serious about nuclear.
Whoops, I almost forgot -- global warming. What will happen there? Well, much as I liked to think their alarm over global warming would force environmentalists to rethink nuclear power, it probably won't happen. Instead they'll opt for natural gas. The Obama Administration will pass some kind of carbon cap but it will prove so Byzantine and riddled with exceptions that nothing will be accomplished -- except maybe flattening the economy. All those brave "80-percent-reductions-by-2050" that the politicians are making will go by the wayside, but let's face it -- all these worst-case scenarios for climate change are exaggerated anyway.
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Deborah D| 5.5.09 @ 6:30AM
Isn't just like a liberal state to shoot themselves in the foot. New York could use the revenue generated by natural gas exploration and recovery, but with environmentalists in the way, it should be interesting to see which wackos have their way.
Regardless, this is very good news.
Deborah D| 5.5.09 @ 6:55AM
Wow! Someone has definitely drunk the Kool Aid.
Deborah D| 5.5.09 @ 7:45AM
Global warming -- the biggest leftwing hoax ever perpetrated on humankind. It's about accumulating power, not about "saving the planet." It's about a bunch of Lilliputians tying Gulliver down.
Tim| 5.5.09 @ 8:33AM
Sounds like good news, for a change. The burning of methane CH4 with O2 produces CO2 and H2O -plant food. Of course the EPA recently decided that CO2 is a pollutant...
Freya| 5.5.09 @ 8:51AM
Tim,
As fossil fuels go, natural gas emits the least CO2, so it's the fossil fuel most acceptable to environmentalists. Replace coal-burning with natural gas-burning, and it's progress as far as they're concerned.
Tim| 5.5.09 @ 9:17AM
Heck, you have a gas fired powerplant in say, Arizona, you capture the pure water and sell it. You could infuse the CO2 and make soda pop.
IIRC the average home with a 100,000 BTU gas boiler generates about one gallon of water per hour.
Frey| 5.5.09 @ 9:21AM
Glad to hear that we have that much NG, but there's another thing to consider: how fast can we get it? We currently consume in this country approximately one and a half billion cubic meters of NG every day, of which we import about 300 million. Will NG production be enough to offset that, or a significant portion of that? It's great that we have a lake of the stuff, but it doesn't help much if we only get a trickle out of it.
Son Of Sam| 5.5.09 @ 9:28AM
While I am happy as a clam that we have begun tapping into our own resources instead of resorting to Unabomber technology-hating nonsense like "Earth hour" and driving cars that look like they were made by Fisher Price, I think that this article misses a fundamental point: the most important resource we have is right between our own ears. Today,we use petroleum in a myriad of products,everything from the gas that goes in our cars to the plastic on the dashboards to the tar that paves the road they drive on, but petroleum by itself is not a resource, its this black goo that mucks up your water wells. Its only when people figured out a use for this stuff did it become a resource. Those wildcatters and explorers didn't FIND resources out in Texas: they brought them there.
The only limits on what we as a nation can do are the ones we impose upon ourselves.
stand strong until freedom dawns
Son Of Sam
http://www.geocities.com/samadamssos
Frey| 5.5.09 @ 9:29AM
Started my last comment on page two of the article, so I couldn't check the Barnett figure. Four billion cubic feet is 110 million cubic meters (per day). If we could get a few more of those, not only would we be NG independent, we could export the stuff or expand NG use here at home.
owyheewine| 5.5.09 @ 9:35AM
Don't forget that simular technology is being used in the Bakken oil formation in Montana, the Dakotas and Canada. If the government would get out of the way, companies would find an extension of the technique to start recovering shale oil. Damn those oil companies, their geologists and engineers. Just when the oil alarmists start to look semi intelligent, they come up with another innovation for finding and producing oil and gas.
Tim| 5.5.09 @ 9:51AM
Fools! Only a nation riding in three wheel electric tricycles will ride boldly (albeit slowly) into the bright Socialist future...
1Freeman| 5.5.09 @ 10:35AM
So here is really good news allowing us to begin to break free from the dependence on foreign energy. Politicians will try and cheat or steal the producers out of their revenue but free Americans will prevail. We may have some breathing room to reintroduce us to nuclear energy. Did you know a coal plant releases more radioactive pollution into the air that a nuclear power plant? Yep. We don't use graphite cooling like the russians used to and our power plants mirror designs currently running in Europe. Safe, effecient, powerful, dependable. Only the brainwashed liberals (like DM above) who are easily frightened and spooked don't want nuclear power. Talk about a win-win for humanity. Nuclear materiel is plentiful and will create amazing power with little waste. Sounds sane, reasonable and financially sound... explains why the liberals don't want it: it could strengthen this great nation again.
NOTE: See how the troll DM always has some nasty thing to say. Will this jerk ever get a job? ... or is he working now.. you know.. as a shill for the libtards?
trurl| 5.5.09 @ 11:25AM
Dave,
The Bible is actually very optimistic about humankind's (cough) future, or at least opportunity for it. Have you read the Gospels??
BTW I am myself an agnostic but that doesn't excuse you from being a total smeghead.
Speaking of Gospels, this article couldn't help but put me in the mind of Eli Wyatt from Atlas Shrugged.
Tony in Central PA| 5.5.09 @ 12:31PM
The realities explained in the article remind me that I had my own personal experience with the baloney of " green " energy. We built a house a couple of years ago, not big, just about 2100 sq. ft. The contractor left our yard such a mess, I should have taken him to court, but I thought it would take too long and cost too much. About this time, NG prices were soaring and we had some friends who had and loved their ground source ( geothermal ) heat pumps. I decided to have a system installed, after which I'd get the back yard regraded and fixed.
The first month we had the system, NG proces spiked 22%. I was patting myself on the back telling my wife what a Visionary she married. It was all downhill from there. Gas prices started dropping. During particularly cold winter months, it began to cost more to heat the house with the geothermal system than our GFA furnace. The system contractor, it turns out, had provided us with an undersized unit. Also, he never returned to fix the mess he left in the yard despite being under contract.
I finally begged the one honest contractor I know to come back and fix everything he could. Price ? $ 13,000. We didn't pick him to build the house because he was " too expensive. He joked after we built the house that he'd get us on all the fix - ups. I feel so used.
My only consolation at this point is that our liberal friends think more highly of us. In reality, our carbon footprint difference is probably negligible or maybe even worse because our " green " geothermal system has to use a backup electric furnace to heat the house whenever it gets much below freezing, which was basically the entire winter last year. If P.T. Barnum were around today, he'd be in something " green ".
Marc Jeric| 5.5.09 @ 12:50PM
1) There was first in the 1970's the globaloney cooling scam (see e.g. Newsweek April 28 1975 on the internet); the government-paid scientists (90% of them are rejects of private enterprise) recommended to fight the new ice age by sending our war planes to cover the polar ice with soot in order to increase solar heat and prevent crushing of New York skyscrapers by the new glaciers;
2) When that did not work we had the globaloney warming hoax in the 1990's, proclaimed by mainly the same government-paid scientists (Dr. Hansen of the NOAA, for example); to prevent the massive heating, fires, flooding of coastal cities, disappearance of Florida, California, and Caribbean islands, massive hurrucanes, global famine, and other catastrophic events we should nationalize oil and gas and coal and electricity companies;
3) after 11 years of considerable cooling we are now faced with the climate change flimflam where whatever happens with our climate we should nationalize oil and gas and coal and electricity companies; and why not our banks, car companies while we are at it. To prevent this catastrophe the best vehicle presumably is international agreements enforced by the United Nations world government.
As for the influence of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas: on a normal day the atmoshere contains 10,000 ppm (parts per million) of water vapor and about 300 ppm of carbon dioxide. The government-paid scientists say that an increase of 100 ppm of CO2 over the next 50 years will result in a catastrophic warming. The thermal absorptivity of water vapor is 4 times larger than that of carbon dioxide; it follows that the CO2 increase will increase the overall thermal absorptivity of the mixture by about 1/4 of one percent. The production of methane from livestock and the swamps (or as the enviro-nazis call those "wetlands") vastly surpasses the influence of CO2.
There is the Global Warming Petition Project (see Internet) where 31,478 US independent scientists declared that there is no anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming; of these 9,029 are scientists with PhD degrees. Our enviro-nazi tried to sabotage this effort by submiiting phony names withphoney degrees - and then claimed the whole effort by the Petition scientists was a fraud. It took us 3 years and a lot of private moneyt to verify the credentials of all the signatories and clean up the Petition of those saboteurs. See also Manhattan Declaration with more such signatories, plus a large number of scientific groups from other countries who state the same.
I am one of these signatories, MS and PhD degrees from UCLA, with majors in thermodynamics and heat & mass transfer.
I think to fight this communist attempt to secure a world government should not be fought on the narrow grounds of more taxes - that is the losing proposition; where about 50% of the population is on some kind of welfare we will always be outvoted. The battle should be fought and won on the firm scientific basis.
SCAM - HOAX - FLIMFLAM!!! Notwithstanding creepy trolls like this a**hole David.
Marc Jeric, Las Vegas
Tel. (702) 242-0780
Roger| 5.5.09 @ 1:21PM
The news gets even better when you consider that the technology exists to extract hydrogen from natural gas and use it in fuel cells that combine hydrogen with oxygen to produce electricity and water, no CO2. The fuel cells are twice as efficient as burning natural gas to produce electricity. Fuel cells are also being used in Europe to power city buses.
Also, cars and trucks are easily converted to burn natural gas. The energy future looks good!
Anna Mac| 5.5.09 @ 1:52PM
While the Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways, I find it more difficult to argue that we don't deserve it! U S A! U S A!
George Bruce| 5.5.09 @ 2:23PM
This is not the half of it. We have between 800 billion and two trillion barrels of oil equivalent in oil shale formations in the Rocky Mountains. That is three to eight times the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. This stuff can be recovered now using recently developed technology. For the future there are huge deposits of methane hydrates off all of our coasts. Once we learn to recover that, the total will dwarf the NG finds discussed above.
Thom| 5.5.09 @ 3:41PM
I lived through all the hoaxes of the 60-80s concerning how man kind was going to destroy itself by either over populating, running out of food, water or freezing to death in the next Ice Age. The solution to the Ice Age thing was to burn more CO2 to insulate the earth’s Atmosphere better…. I get a kick out of asking Global Warming nut cases what we should do now that that Ice Age is finally showing up. When I mention the above solution I typically get that deer in the head light look…..
I figured out a long time ago that Fraud on a large scale pays very well in our society. What is the downside of it today? Lost income and a diminished life style are about it. Back in time there were serious consequences to fraud like this but not any more. Government is supposed to protect you from force and fraud but today Government is the source of that force and fraud. You don’t need a PHD to understand the basics of climate (and weather) but far too many people think the scope and complexity of the climate can be modeled. It can’t. Far too many variables to contend with and there are many variables we don’t understands or even know about. That the best “models” can’t predict the past should be enough to run the charlatans into the swamps as far as I’m concerned. I’ll be more than glad to help heard them that way. Ranking CO2 as a pollutant ranks right up there with doing the same with water vapor which is far more a greenhouse gas than CO2 could every be. Walk into your typical “greenhouse” on a hot summer day and you will find an abundance of both gases and life in full force within that environment. Since virtually every living thing exhales CO2 as a byproduct of cellular combustion 24/7 how are we going to control Human and animal production of CO2? Cap and Trade on Human stock now? Why is it just energy production and transportation that is targeted? A person with common sense already knows the answer.
Just as all these “models” can’t explain where all that upper atmosphere/ocean heat went and why hurricane activity has fallen off significantly in the last few years, common sense can easily see what is going on here. If the true scientific community wants to remain a viable part of humanity it had better step up to the plate to repair its credibility else it will eventually acquire the reputation of politicians, lawyers, used cars salesmen and whores. Time is short however. The real science is going against the charlatans and they are getting desperate… Desperate people can be dangerous. Meanwhile the most powerful computer complexes on the planet using the most advanced mathematical “weather” models every devised can’t predict tomorrow’s temperature within three degrees on average and in my area there are at least 5 weather forecasts that all differ from one day to the next…. One will be close and we think we can predict the climate a 100 years into the future…. How arrogant.
Algore Kazynski| 5.5.09 @ 3:55PM
You mean Americans won't have to live like the Flintstones?
William Tucker| 5.5.09 @ 4:37PM
Thanks for all the comments, most of them very positive. I'd like to say one word about Roger's remarks about using natural gas for hydrogen. The only reason I respond is because this is Amory Lovins' old saw, about how his hydrogen-powered car was going to solve global warming and "bring an end to the coal and nuclear industries" by burning carbon-free. It's true natural gas (CH4) can be "reformed" into hydrogen and the hydrogen can be burned cleanly for electricity and water. But the carbon doesn't go away. When it splits from the hydrogen it combines with the nearest thing, which is usually atmospheric oxygen. The result is CO2. You can't burn natural gas "cleanly" - if by clean you mean eliminating the CO2. You still have to have some kind of carbon capture. The advantage of methane is that it has about twice as much hydrogen per carbon atom as coal and therefore produces only half as much CO2 per unit of energy. But there are still carbon emissions. The real advantage of natural gas is that it doesn't have a lot of sulfur and other things that cause the real air pollution from coal.
Thom| 5.5.09 @ 4:51PM
William, as a “nuclear power advocate” going back to the early 70s what you’ve reported here is old news in the “business”. That’s one of the downsides of letting our narrowly defined passions blind us to the big picture. Friends of mine have been working 24/7 at times over the last decade running NG pipelines from “down that way” because it was known more “product” was coming on line. While I’m a Nuke advocate I’m also a realist and believe that every available energy source should be used where practical and profitable. I believe in a “tool box approach” of competitive products to protect our economic future and insure against one technology or the other suddenly drying up on relative short notice. I don’t see a problem with a healthy mix of energy products competing against each other on a level playing field. I see nothing but problems with putting all our eyes in one basket, regardless of source via government decree. Places like West Virginia, Southwest Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and South Eastern Ohio will dry up and blow away if you “kill” the coal industry just for the hell of it. The rail roads that serve those industries will cease to be profitable with that large a loss of “bulk” cargo. That’s the tact many in the environmental movement take with their drug induced visions of Utopia. Everything has an economic cost which is closely tied to a human capital cost. Government manipulation of the energy market is going to produce the subprime equivalent. Places like France didn’t have a choice in the matter. Not a rational choice at least. Nuclear power properly utilized is an important component in our energy mix without regard to trying to produce enough electrical energy to power over 230,000,000 vehicles. There is nothing wrong with a dedicated program to add large scale nuclear power plants to add new capacity and replace older coal or oil fired plants as their useful lifetimes expires but trying to force the premature end of a economic investment via government decree is foreign to the founding principles this Nation was founded on. Nuclear power is still the best long term solution for large scale production of electrical power and NG is still a more expensive solution for a given KW. It will be far easier to shut down NG power production than nuclear when all the risks are compared. The more practical energy sources the better. Like the child’s game of scissors, paper and rock each has its strengths and weaknesses and each has its place in the scheme of things.
John Navratil| 5.5.09 @ 5:03PM
Fuel cells are more efficient in converting their fuel into electricity than internal combustion engines producing torque, but twice as efficient is stretching it. Half the energy is converted to heat. Also, fuel cells are most efficient at low power densities. Couple this with the inefficiencies of converting electricity to propulsive force and I suspect the greater utility for fuel cells will be in fixed locations where electricity is desired, weight isn't a problem and where waste heat can be used. There is something about 125,000 BTU/gallon which make auto fuel very desirable for distance driving. LPG has a similar energy content by weight, but requires almost 50 percent greater volume.
Thom| 5.5.09 @ 5:24PM
The best examples of “gas” powered vehicles I’ve seen do date, be they NG, Hydrogen powered or straight fuel cells only provide for a range similar to that you get with the Tesla all electric car or about 220 miles at cruising speed. The problems with all these “gas” solutions are as John Navratil and others have pointed out before, density of energy. I get up to 500 miles on less than 84 lbs of gasoline. That same range would require a substantially larger or higher pressure tank than is currently used in NG or Fuel Cell vehicles. The math isn’t going to change because the energy ratio to weight isn’t going to change. Can most people get by with a 200 mile range vehicle and reasonable refuel time (vs electric vehicles)? Probably but there is still a considerable trade off having to find fuel every 3-4 hours on a long trip or filling up twice as often as today. Liquid fuel is far and away more useful else we wouldn’t just see electric, NG, Methane powered vehicles in use primarily on Golf courses, factory floors and intercity fleet vehicles. Increasing gas pressure to increase range is problematic for obvious reasons; more space given up to carry more “gas” is similarly a problem. No silver bullets here or in the near term.
Pingback| 5.5.09 @ 6:23PM
People of Plenty - American Spectator | DFW EnergyOptions.com links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
ds80| 5.5.09 @ 11:47PM
It's Bush's fault we have all this new gas supply.
Oh ,wait ...
james wilson| 5.7.09 @ 11:30AM
The process of learning from our mistakes should have lead you to not assume again that we will be running down natural gas reserves by the end of the century. But you didn't do that.
There is no limit to natural sources of energy. We too easlily associate the necessity of a thing with scarcity.
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