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The Shale Boom Won't Stop Climate Change; It Could Make It Worse
Lasrick writes Energy expert H-Holger Rogner walks through the realities of the shale-gas boom, the 'game-changer' that has brought about a drop in energy prices and greatly reduced carbon emissions. But despite the positive impact on carbon emissions, Rogner points out that the cheap gas brought about by fracking shale may already be affecting investments into renewable energy, nuclear energy, and energy efficiency by offering more attractive investment opportunities: 'At today's prices of $4 to $5 per million British thermal units, gas-fired electricity holds a definite competitive advantage over new nuclear construction and unsubsidized renewables.' But natural gas is still a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide. 'A much higher share of natural gas in the energy mix would eventually raise emissions again, especially if gas not only displaces coal but also non-fossil energy sources. Moreover, methane, the chief component of natural gas, is itself a heat-trapping greenhouse gas with 25 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide. If total methane leakage—from drilling through end use—is greater than about 4 percent, that could negate any climate benefits of switching from coal and oil to gas.'
Nothing will stop climate change! THERE HAS NEVER BEEN CLIMATE STATIS!
Get a grip. Climate change is a religion and not science.
So, will we have 36 years of no warming instead of only 18?
No one said the Nazis could be stopped, but we did it.
On the basis of a could, we are supposed to drop everything and choose the most expensive options. No, thanks.
Unless one's goal is to diminish the Western society, only a fool would fall for the "global warming" rhetoric these many years after none of the dire predictions materialized.
Troll my behind — respond giving examples to the contrary: a link to a dire prediction made 10-15-20 years ago, and a link showing it materializing within 10% of the predicted "bad"...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
... to the abyss. I emit personal methane in the general direction of anybody that didn't recognize this many moons ago. The solution to climate change isn't finding ever-more-exotic carbon to extact and burn - it's to stop burning carbon as soon as possible.
Huh, you don't say.
Bwak bwak
The sky is falling.
Bwak bwak
The ground is burning.
Bwak bwak
The North Pole is melting.
Bwak bwak
Al Gore is coming.
Bwak bwak
( OK the last one is really scary. )
"Breaking news: An oil glut won't make fossil fuel consumption go down - it might even increase."
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
No matter what they do, they won't do anything that will save us anyhow. Our generation will be Ok, but the upcoming generations will have a challenge. Coastal areas as they are now will be uninhabitable, and a lot of people will suffer from a wide variety of things like droughts and inundations and cold or hot. A lot of people will suffer, because we won't do anything to change the situation, but they will get over it eventually. One door closes and another door opens. Places that are considered too cold today will have a moderate climate tomorrow. However, the world's standard of living may drop in the process. This in itself will reduce carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, San Francisco will get the Big One one day not too long from now, and Mount Pinatubo will become a super volcano and cover a third of the USA with magma. Nothing much we can do about that, but USA was headed down hill anyhow.
Yes, we stopped the Nazi and have gotten a bunch of lunatic eco-commie fascists instead!
We managed to burn up a lot of carbon fuel to swap one bunch of leftists with another!
Progress!
Well, we could get lucky and our sun could go supernova waaaay sooner than anyone expects.
DNRTFA:
http://news.discovery.com/earth/global-warming/gassy-cows-emit-more-methane-than-oil-industry-140710.htm
working a shithole job for minimum wage. That's why people sell the stuff.
...not just problem avoidance" — David Deutsch
Switching from oil and coal to natural gas is a positive step in reducing both carbon emissions and other pollutants. We should celebrate progress rather than grumbling that it doesn't solve humanity's problems forever and ever, because nothing ever will. If carbon tax is implemented, natural gas will be more economical than oil and eventually other technologies will be more economical than natural gas.
as they say in America.
Heretic! Only solar-electric is good. Only solar-electric can be praised. To get hot water, we must build huge solar-electric panels and use them to charge big banks of batteries made from toxic chemicals, then electrically heat the water! Simply the water through a black pipe outdoors and allowing the sun to heat it naturally will not do.
Nuclear may be a thousand times safer than any currently available alternative, but it's not solar-electric, so we'll just have to stick with coal until we can figure out which combination of noxious chemicals will make a magic battery for solar-electric. We've only been seriously investing in solar-electric for 60 years - any day now that magic battery will appear, and with it magic components like 100% efficient inverters. Until then, we must burn coal.
AGW blather aside, shale is only profitable when oil is expensive. Expensive oil encourages conservation, so if shale is being pumped it's a sign that oil is expensive and the move to alternatives is on. Yes, shale increased the supply and suppressed prices--for a bit. It's self-defeating though. If you follow the financial pages, you hear stories that many shale operations are already not profitable at these prices. Markets go up and down. Smart alternative energy companies will ride out the storm, or at least somebody will preserve their tech through Chapter 11 reorg. That sucks for the truly innovative people in this space; but that's capitalism. The (cheap) oil will run out, and then alternatives will be viable. We had a chance to do it in an orderly fashion; but that's not human nature.
I just learned this first hand. I'm typing this on a new computer. I had plenty of warning the old one was going to give out. Overheating, weird glitches in the video... but finally Fan Error on boot, and no amount of dust-cleaning would fix it even though the fan turns. Yeah, it's fixable; but it's a 10 year old laptop and working on them is a PiTA and I needed a new one TODAY. Today. I could have done it voluntarily before I got stranded; but no. It's human nature to put things off. I was standing in line at wallyworld with all the other holiday nincompoops.
What really killed nuclear power wasn't "The China Syndrome" or Greenpeace - it was that the price of fossil fuels didn't continue to increase as expected. That's unfortunate, as while I like inexpensive energy I also believe that we should make ALL of our electricity with nukes (or hydro) and save fossil fuels for applications where nothing else will do (e.g. aircraft). And here's a litmus test: if you're serious about global warming, you've pretty much got to be pro-nuke. No other technology - not solar, not wind, not whatever green scheme you dream up - can produce electricity on a large scale. Wanna save the planet? Push for nukes and plug-in electric cars.
Enjoy, Venezuela. You deserve it.
I'm getting tired of the anti-intellectualism here on Slashdot. But look, I want inventions to come along to where we aren't burning coal to make electricity and paying hundreds of US or Canadian or Euro Dollars in money to put Gasoline in our Cars. It SUCKS! and we need to do what ever it takes to find a way to make electricity generation so inexpensive and cost so little that all we have to pay for is the upkeep of the facilities and infrastructure. But I don't want to see smoke stacks belching smoke, and I don't want to see cars that spew Carbon Monoxide. There must be a way. Figure out what that way is.
Stop listening to the Pro-Fossil Fuel Drivel!
... some idiot try to grab water like he's picking up a ball or something. Every time they squeeze, it just shoots through their fingers and they get nothing.
Capitalist economies are dynamic. They respond. Squeeze in one place and you create pressure that causes the system to adapt to restore equilibrium.
Listen to Bruce Lee... Understand what it is to be water. To flow.
The issue with trying to control fossil fuel consumption is that it fills a need. That need exists. It is a sucking vacuum that will draw solutions to it and will do so in the most cost efficient manner it can find.
For example... that might mean off shoring all production to Asia if you make it too expensive to make things in the West. Very simple to do that. Totally bypasses all the environmental laws instantly. Anything that makes production in the US more expensive then somewhere else will just result in off shoring.
That principle carries over to everything else. A major mistake environmental activists keep making is fucking with prices and expecting the system to not change the way it does things to reduce costs. They think the system will just choose the path they decide rather then keep looking.
Listen to Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Life will find a way. It will not be contained.
Your solutions must be cost neutral or very nearly cost neutral or must be cheaper then existing models.
Or you will have set yourself up as an obstacle. And life will find a way.
You might not like that anymore then the people liked getting eaten by dinosaurs in that movie. But the dinosaurs don't care what you want. They want what they want and you can't really stop them without destroying everything.
If you want to keep the system active and you really have no choice here... then you're going to have to play the game. Learn the rules or lose.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
What does Bennett have to say?
Simply stating that anybody who cites the truth has invalidated everything he has said is nonsensical and absurd; you might not like to face reality, but that does not give you a valid reason to deny reality.
The NAZI party was the National SOCIALIST German WORKERS PARTY. Hardly some Ron Reagan/Maggie Thatcher/Ted Cruz/Sarah Palin/Barry Goldwater/etc affair. All the world's "socialist workers parties" have ALWAYS been LEFTIST. Socialism is LEFT WING. Rabble-rousing the masses is a constant of leftwing politics (remember that Obama was a "community organizer". Lenin was a rabble rouser. Union activists are always rabble rousers. Al Sharpton and the "occupy" idiots are rabble rousers - ALL left wing.
The ONLY reason anybody on Earth gets away with calling national socialists "right wing" is because the European political spectrum is so very narrow that it fits entirely between the Leftist national socialists and the further left international socialists/communists (remember: the soviet union was the "union of soviet SOCIALIST republics"). When you are so far to the left that you are left of the national socialists, then those national socialists are to your right.... but it does NOT make them "right wing" it just highlights the political narrowness of your society. Most European parties are some form of "social democrat" and they argue about very little... they generally all agree on huge governments with massive taxes and national heathcare etc but just disagree about the minutia; If there were ACTUAL right wing parties in Europe, there would be active debates about eliminating government involvement in most aspects of life and returning charity work to the churches and private charitable groups from the governments that took all those things over.
Oh, and OF COURSE Hitler lied... lies are a means to an end and all leftists believe very strongly in the philosophy of "the ends justify the means"; it's certainly not the case that non-leftists are incapable of lying, it's just that no true leftist has any philosophical reason to be honest and every political reason to lie if he can get a way with it.
The far right runs around screaming that there is no climate change, while ignoring the science (real bad).
The far left runs around screaming that climate change is an issue due to science (good), but then ignores all of the solutions (just as bad).
So, how can the far left take advantage of the shale boom? Well, right now, the far right wants keystone pipeline.
If keystone goes in, will it lower or increase emission from tar sands? The answer is NO.
If keystone is blocked, will it lower or increase emissions from tar sands? Again the answer is NO.
Basically, keystone pipeline does not help nor hurt emissions.
So, what CAN happen is that the far left can use it to trade to lower REAL emissions. Transportation accounts for a large chunk of the global emissions, esp. in North America. That is very true for commercial vehicles such as semi-trucks, that burn diesel fuel.
BUT, by trading keystone for subsidies for commercial vehicles and large passenger vehicles (suburbans come to mind), that use nat gas at first, and then within 3 years, make it ONLY for Serial Hybrids that use Nat gas. With this trade, it will move large vehicles off diesel and over to nat gas. BUT, within 3 years, the move to serial hybrids allows makers to be using real electric vehicles and being able to switch to say hydrogen fuel cells, or perhaps wireless charging to run these vehicles. With this approach, then the far right gets their keystone, while the far left gets actual emission DOWNWARDS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
29-cent gas in 1967 may sound like a dream but those 29 cents (according to inverse finance law) is $2.05 today.
http://www.dollartimes.com/inf...
I REST THIS CASE!
If a drill site was leaking that much methane, wouldn't it sort of maybe blow up?
Who thought it would?
Come on guys, if you thought it would stop carbon dioxide emissions your life up until now has failed to give you a bullshit detector good enough to avoid getting scammed by the next used car salesman or similar you meet.
The US nuclear lobby ate it's own children. Pushing to scrap the Clinton era thorium project because success would conflict with existing investment in Uranium is one of many examples. Lobbying to halt research into waste management because that reflected poorly on the fantasy that it's "clean" is another. Putting trust fund children and horse judges into management positions and just using nuclear energy as a vector to milk the taxpayer and electricity consumers, without having to deal with any competition, is another reason why you can't have your shiny and wonderful nuke that does what is promised.
Give it a few years and you may be able to buy one from overseas, but the US nuclear industry is a couple of decades into the long coast down with no chance of revival, only a chance of replacement with completely new players.
Burning methane has about half the CO2 emissions per unit energy as coal, basically all carbon. Add in the effect of 2% losses from drill to furnace, and you have the same greenhouse effect as using coal for the same job.
For residential use, there's no question that many handling processes, storages, and miles of ever-smaller pipes has losses well above that.
Even for heavy industrial consumers connected straight to major supply pipelines, it's surely over 2% loss; from leaks around the wellhead to every stage of the plant processing to pipeline joints, leaks happen.
Gas is a cleaner-greener fuel in that all the other bad stuff in coal emissions are not there; coal kills perhaps 24,000 Americans per year - but the greenhouse impact of gas is certainly worse than coal, or oil.
There is no real left or right paradigm; it is an illusion, like in the book Flat Land or the film The Matrix. It's at least 2 dimensional: up/down and left/right. The "far left" today doesn't even get press coverage - the Democratic party doesn't represent them; just tries to sucker them for votes. see http://politicalcompass.org/
Characterizing the correct answer as left/right is ignoring the whole problem and debating empty propaganda.
Keystone helps sell shale oil cheaper. You just buy into the defeatist propaganda of the corporations to stand to gain (along with your so called "right" who were purchased and some "left" also who were purchased. The real reason lawyers make good politicians is they argue whatever position their boss wants like they believe it themselves.)
Higher costs for shale will delay it; hopefully, long enough to address demand with cheaper alternatives or enough sanity to ban it... Asbestos is cheap and we stopped using that! Assuming that oil is going to burn is as foolish as keeping the asbestos mines open in the middle of that debate (which was settled in science years before politics caught up; thank the vested interest lobby...) The cynical and wise strategic move is to STALL it out as long as possible so they don't invest in more expensive alternative routes - making it even less cost effective when keystone is stopped. That strategy does the most to stop them. (note: I'm not saying Obama's clever. It is a really clever plan and he just happens to be doing the same thing, so far.)
Extremists are never happy; don't know why you think giving each something they want is going to change anything!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
And today yet another alarmist warning that the sky is falling.
The "right" will fight all alternative power like they have ALWAYS DONE no matter what deals you give them today. Extremists don't give up.
With a growing industry with more lobbyists the alternatives sway the "right" (and "left") a little bit. The entrenched powers DO NOT want there enemies empowered; the unequal footing they have must be maintained. The "right" in this case is not actually extreme they are just the most corrupt on this issue. I guarantee they will shift when the $ moves in the other direction.
What needs to be done for progress is to drag the opposition kicking and screaming forward so over time they'll adapt and shift to new kinds of fear mongering after all their nay saying proves false. It has been done before (slavery, civil rights, introducing min wage, banning child labor, weekends off, etc.) Now with civil gay marriage all the straight civil marriages are not ending plus we are not surrounded in bestiality and pedophiles either. After the fear proves empty (and some more old people die) then we'll have gay Republicans will be demanding we ban Atheists from adopting children. It'll happen. History rhymes.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
OPEC will keep oil prices low, until there is no fracking industry left. Looking at the financials of many of the companies involved, it doesn't look like it will take very long.
LOL. If you mean that, why don't you say that? Why do you keep saying 'climate change', which is a meaningless term, and is SUPPOSED to be taken as meaning 'catastrophic man-made global warming', even though it clearly doesn't.
www.climatedepot.com
One concern that I don't think is being addressed is this...
Eminent domain on people who don't want to sell their land for the pipeline.
The problem is not carbon, nor climate, nor coal, nor natural gas, nor fracking
The problem is human
I have read the (almost the) same discussions since the late 1980's, first on fidonet, then The Well, then AOL, then the newsgroups, then net forums all over --- same old arguments repeated ad nauseum, while everybody and their old grandma keep depending on fossil fuel to survive
From driving cars (even if you do not have a car, you still take buses/trains, don't you?) to electricity to cooking to heating up the house during winter, we are burning fossil fuel
Heck, even the act of posting this message on /. fossil fuels have been burned to generate electricity to power my computer and all the servers that keep the Net alive
On one side there are people who pooh pooh the idea that the world is going down the drain because of our unsatiated appetite for more fossil fuel
On the other side people running scared like headless chicken bawking, but still, these people oppose Nuclear. Germany is a case in point
The country of Germany gobbled up so much electricity and yet they have closed down all their nuclear power plant. They do so because of political correctness doctrine that nuclear is bad, but by closing down their nuke plants, they burn fossil fuel, more of it
I do not see any light at the end of the tunnel, I simply don't
We humans are turning this planet into a hellhole, and the only thing we can do is talk, and then, talk some more
The left is about central control
So, you're implying that large corporations, like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft (or Redhat for that matter), are basically a bunch of commies?
Tim Cook, the current chief of Apple, has just danced his "come out of the closet" routine not that long ago, and them "closet come-outter" are hardcore lefties
Burn it all as quickly as possible.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Shale gas isn't being exploited because it is cleaner than oil (though it is). It is being exploited because we are trying to get oil, and all the easy-to-get oil is about gone. Oil and gas often co-exist in the same formations, so if you are digging hard for oil you tend to get a lot of gas.
We've had some technology breakthroughs that let us extract this gas and oil from shales which will keep things going for a while. Enjoy it while it lasts, because after it is gone, it's gone.
The tragic thing is that the temporarily low oil and gas prices do make it difficult to transition to renewable technologies as it removes the cost impetus. The problem is that many renewable infrastructures will require decades to construct, while oil and gas prices will fluctuate wildly in the space of months or a year. When it runs out, fuel prices will go through the roof, and we'll be sitting a decade or more away from a replacement energy system.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
for at least 500 years - plenty of it too. It is 100% likely that renewables NEVER meet our energy needs. We should be expanding oil extraction everywhere and completely ignoring things like solar and wind (won't ever work) and building more coal and nuclear plants.
Screw hippies - do things that actually work and remove any government interference insisting on green initiatives - which have been shown time and again to never work. No oil company should ever pay a tax.
I mean, seriously, you are still blowing CO2 previously bound in the earth into the atmosphere. Just because you take your carbon from a short-chained molecule instead of a long-chained one does not fundamentally alter whats happening.
All of these "Climate Change", "Climate Terror" "Climate Trumps Everything" stories, which are just "spank my bitch up" have no place here.
Bad news for those believing in global warming. But for the rest of us we just laugh, because money is not going to the groups they support, the "clean" energy companies. Their global warming scare tactic has been used for too many years now and is losing its grip.
Sure, right after we determine which descendants of African-Americans slave owners should be paying reparations to the descendants of the African-American slaves.
Get back to me when that is complete.
Climate has not changed in 10,000 years
The shale producers are highly leveraged. China will buy all of them, pennies on the dollar. Congress will have a fit. Oil exports won't happen. Oil prices will rise. All it takes is that threat of US domestic production being foreign owned.
It is being stalled and will continue to be for a little while longer. No, it's not completely stalled but it could be moving much faster than it is. I have a hard time believing Tar sands is economical at $40 / bl. I've never heard that low an estimate before. I remember when fracking was getting wonderful estimates and they ended up losing $ when higher more realistic numbers came out. (fracking is still cheap... although they leak so much doing it cheaply it does more harm than coal does. responsible fracking is much more costly; deciding on a compromise and transition scheme is tricky and the ideal compromise can't be done because of politics and selfish voters.)
I didn't discuss natural gas or H2.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You probably believe that renewables can never compete with carbon energy on price alone -- unsubsidized. The simple truth is that after subsidies are removed, only gas can compete with renewables. Gas wins handily, for now. The main obstacle for renewables in that the USA needs more high voltage capacity -- blocked by the nimby crowd -- to move electricty across the country. With more high voltage power lines, it would quickly start to cost more to mine and ship coal to existing coal power plants than build wind power. Solar is close behind, and the prices are coming down fast.
Now it is not true that the above pricing estimates are purely subsidy free. Coal, oil and natural gas are still given huge subsidies in the calculations: private profits, socialized losses. You see, coal/oil/gas does not pay for the significant health burdens, or the trillions in wars. And that is leaving aside using the atmosphere as a free waste tip.
If your main concern about climate change action is "ruining the economy", then pull your head out of partisan news sources, and go look at the actual figures that businesses and governments use to make decisions. Most economists believe that climate action costs are negligible, but that not doing anything will cost a lot -- starting with all the beachfront property on the East coast, which will have moved in land within 100 years.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
kind of a silly question given that it doesn't exist.
I linked to reviews of actual, direct evidence by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and The Royal Society (U.K.) in their joint publication (PDF), and another review of evidence by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science.
While Jane is reading those reviews, he should also consider addressing this issue with his basic thermodynamics:
I'm not the only one insisting that power in = power out through any boundary where nothing inside is changing. Once again, that's a fundamental principle called "conservation of energy". Here are some introductions: example (backup), example (backup), example (backup).
As you can tell, conservation of energy is a fundamental physics principle. Assumptions of "perfect conversion and no entropic losses" aren't applicable, and anyone who mistakenly thinks they are should read through those examples to learn about conservation of energy.
Jane seems to be saying that at steady-state:
net electrical power consumed = net radiative power out
But net radiative power out of a boundary around the source = "radiative power out" minus "radiative power in", so the equation Jane just described also says:
net electrical power consumed = "radiative power out" minus "radiative power in"
However, this new equation doesn't match Jane's earlier equation:
Notice that Jane's earlier equation doesn't describe net radiative power out, which is why it violates conservation of energy. Is Jane retracting his earlier incorrect equation, or does Jane dispute the definition of the word "net"?
So the "ice age is coming" of the 1970s becomes "global warming" in .... like CHANGE! For goodness sake climate is always changing and humans for all their arrogance have very little to do with it. Urban heat island is proven and CO2 might have a 1 degree C change for each doubling.
the 1980s/90s and has now morphed into "climate change" because the warming stopped 14-18 years ago. "Climate Change" is so nice because they won't have to change their scam's name every time the climate does something they don't expect
A question for everyone who thinks that CO2 controls the climate. How long with rising CO2 and flat or falling temperatures before you admit your theory is wrong? 20 years? 30? Never?
All 5 of the major datasets (RSS, UAH, HadCRUT4, GISS, NCDC) show no warming for between 14 and almost 18 years. In that time CO2 has risen 8-10%.
Here are 2 predictions. First I predict that CO2 will continue to increase because China and other countries don't care about CO2. They don't even care about real pollutants much less CO2. Second I predict it will get colder over the next 20-30 years. Why?
Dr Libby in the 1970s said that "looking forward it will stay cold until the mid 80s (it did), then it will warm by about 1/4 degree F until the end of the century it did), then it gets cold". When asked how cold she was predicting a 1-2 degree F drop with an outside chance of a 3-4 degree drop.
Dr Easterbrook in 2001 said the PDO was done it's positive warm cycle and that we were in for 25-30 years of cold weather. How cold? We have his good, bad and ugly predictions based on previous negative cold phases of the PDO.
Why do I join with them and side with their predictions? While past performance is not a guarantee of future correctness it is a lot better record than the IPCC and their dozens of models of which none have been accurate. They are all based on CO2 controlling the climate and the other 2 are all cyclical natural cycles. I'll go with those who have a good track record at predicting future climate. Dr Libby is the most impressive as her prediction is 30+ years going and still accurate.
If you want to read a great explanation of why the IPCC models are broken beyond belief there was a great article describing that and all the other problems with climate science by Dr Brown of Duke university
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/06/real-science-debates-are-not-rare/
JevonÃ(TM)s Paradox: as technology progresses, the increase in efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Um no. If you're serious about climate you're anti nuke because nukes will not save us. Recall how much energy it takes to build a nuclear power plant. And think about the fact that without electricity and water, nuclear power plants tend to melt down. And do you have a solution for handling all that waste?
The only solution to climate change is one: end industrial civilization; two: drastically reduce the world's population.
Neither of those solutions is palatable to anyone, which is why we don't do it.
So... humanity will be mostly over by 2100. Time to face reality.
"Although the extent of the US experience is unlikely to be replicated elsewhere, and US estimates of economically recoverable quantities remain a matter of debate, shale gas has the potential to become a widely accessible global fuel."
Only the last part of that sentence is true. US estimates of economically recoverable quantities are conservative if anything. In reality, with the proper gas and oil prices, the US has far more than official estimates from EIA, IEA, or USGS, all of whom are dependent on access to data, most of which is proprietary that they will never see. Economics changes reserves estimates each quarter, so whenever someone says economically recoverable, they are confusing the issue and not really telling you a number that is related to total resource. Over time most resource that is uneconomic is likely to become economic, so those number are always "debatable" by definition. He is being disingenuous with this statement.
US shale gas can be replicated elsewhere and will be. Russia currently has little openly expressed interest in shale gas, but probably has more reserves than North America. Saudi Arabia is pursuing shale gas. Argentina's shale gas and oil has been very successful, but the government has made outside investors nervous and slowed the process. China has the resource, but because of lack of infrastructure, will be slow to move forward. India likewise has shale gas but currently has a regulatory regime that makes it uneconomic. Regulations and politics are the primary obstacle of shale gas in many countries. Those may be hard to change but do not represent impossible obstacles. Shale gas will become a worldwide phenomenon, it is just a matter of time, probably decades. Shale gas has the potential to free much of the developing world from dependence on imported oil and gas and allow them to develop industrial bases of their own. All that is needed is the political will to allow it to happen.
"Some of the other categories of unconventional gas—tight gas, coal bed methane, aquifer gas, and gas hydrates—dwarf shale gas in magnitude." Not true except for gas hydrates, which so far have not proven to be recoverable in commercial quantities. The difficulty is their lack of concentration, as well as their location primarily below permafrost and the continental shelf. He forgets to mention, while pointing out the methane emissions of the oil and gas industry, that coal mines are actually some of the largest emitters of methane. The recently published methane hot spot map of the US showed the largest methane emissions in the US are from the largest strip mine in North America, in the Four Corners Region. Coal emits methane as soon as it is uncovered, and continues to emit methane during transport in open rail cars, and in the large storage piles where it is kept near power plants.
"Moreover, methane, the chief component of natural gas, is itself a heat-trapping greenhouse gas with 25 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide. If total methane leakage—from drilling through end use—is greater than about 4 percent, that could negate any climate benefits of switching from coal and oil to gas." This is a very misleading statement. Methane has a half life of less than 12 years, and only has the multiple he refers to if considered over a 100 year period. Basically this is statistical manipulation. In any case, coal emits more methane than natural gas drilling (yet he mentions the "huge" potential of coal bed methane) so switching from coal to natural gas will always result in a climate change benefit.
"Accounting for the climate impacts of methane leakages eliminated all climate mitigation benefits." The only studies that have concluded this have all been discredited by later studies, often based simply on the methodology of obtaining the methane leakage numbers. One study actually included emis
Really, who gives a fuck anymore about global warming or climate change other than control gaia freaks. We argue incessantly about this subject and get nowhere. The reality is, is that the world will not give up on petrofuels anytime soon and we have a cleaner environment than ever before. At least in the US and some EU countries. So what is the incentive other than leftist redistributive taxation schemes that the world can deal with? Frankly none. As long as those countries who through their own ingenuity have to succumb to having their citizens foot the bill for the less well off countries to try and come into some sort of compliance, then nothing will happen. And really the dirty little secret is, is that no one really gives a shit about countries like India or China's climate or environment. They created it themselves and asking others to pitch in their money to help them is a non-starter.
If total methane leakage—from drilling through end use—is greater than about 4 percent
IF?? It's a lot more than 4% now. Companies are not properly regulated, and do not properly report when they blast a few thousand cubic meters of unprocessed gas straight into the atmosphere. All of your speculation and statistics is for naught. Get away from us. We only want news, not spin doctors. I thought this site was about InfoTech not people stupid enough to chain themselves to a tree and believe its going to stop big business. We all know what dollars can do to an industry because we all see what Microsoft and now Apple are doing to ours. Go back to your tree.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
What us lefties were too afraid of has already come to fruition: We introduced laws making your redneck ass go to school and git sum lernin' but you still refused. What we have now is that bullshit you just posted that purports to be grammar. I can't even believe someone bothered to mod that dreck up! If only we could limit how much the population grew! You'd be the first nominated to take one for the team, I assure you!
Sit around a goddamned campfire singing Kumbaya, eating our free range locally sourced antibiotic gluten free chickpeas, while ignoring how shitty the world is because we're too fucking stoned to do anything but sit around a goddamned campfire singing Kumbaya, eating our free range locally sourced antibiotic gluten free chickpeas, while ignoring how shitty the world is because we're too fucking stoned! Doesn't that sound, like, great, doooooode?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/18/new-study-two-thousand-years-of-northern-european-summer-temperatures-show-a-downward-trend/