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US faces critical gas shortage


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Many new electric power plants have been built to use natural gas as fuel. Costs associated with the purchase of power in the form of natural gas will in turn impact the cost of electricity.

By Sheila McNulty in Houston

Published: June 8 2003 20:13 | Last Updated: June 8 2003 20:13

Natural gas supplies in the US have reached critically low levels in recent months and may be inadequate to meet demand during a hot summer this year.

Spencer Abraham, the US energy secretary, has called an emergency meeting of the National Petroleum Council this month amid calls for the administration to deal urgently with the shortage.

Mr Abraham said the US had 696bn cubic feet of gas in storage at the end of March, the lowest since 1976 when record-keeping began. By the week of April 11, levels had dropped to 623bn cubic feet.

"Storage has increased since that time, but it is still only half the level of a year ago, and 42 per cent below the previous five-year average," Mr Abraham said.

On Tuesday Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan is to testify before the House energy and commerce committee on threats to the economy from the shortage.

Prices are reported to have increased as much as 700 per cent over the past three years, provoking industries from steel to petrochemicals to call on the government to address what they call "the other energy crisis" because it is less well known than the domestic oil shortage.

"No company, no industry, no consumer can absorb a threefold increase in major raw material prices and continue to compete in the global marketplace," said Greg Lebedev, president of the American Chemistry Council, the largest industrial users of natural gas.

The problem arose after the US government encouraged natural gas as an environmentally friendly fuel but refused to open what Mr Abraham said were about 40 per cent of the potential gas resources on federal lands.

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Every projection we hear about this, and with what we have witnessed in California and all about the world just screams more and more that we need to find a new alternative form of energy or to really need to increase the efficiency of our consumption. Here's where we get to shout, it's all about the oil and mean it. Oil companies that championed deregulation that allowed less effecient machines and wasteful factories, understaffing of EPA which allowed more companies to slip under the radar as far as being up to safety, efficiency, pollution codes, declawing (agencies) of their fangs as far as fines go, the lobbying efforts that led to supression of monies for research or even use of alternate energy sources for decades, etc.

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California is a different case, its own rules and laws brought that on itself. But it is true, hydrogen would make a better feul. But I won't buy it intill a hydrogen or alternative feul system can out preform the existing gas cars. And that may be awhile since I like Trucks.

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Whoa - Ed Begley Jr. clones! :D

panel,

What specific policies are you talking about here in California? The ones on the refineries? California's failed MTBE experiment?

:doh:

If anyone would like to move to Kern County or just south of it - you would understand the need for cleaner burning fuel in California.

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Funny, but wrong type of gas Henry. The issue here is natural gas not gasoline. There aren't much in the way of nat. gas reserves in this country and it's difficult to transport/import.

This could very well turn out to be a real economic problem....and in the near term, not 50-100 years from now.

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panel,

Every time I hear somebody extole hydrogen as a fuel, I keep asking where they intend to get it. I know, for example, it's possible to get it from water, but extracting it from water takes more energy than you get when you burn it (to make water).

Just like when I hear people talk about encouraging use of ethanol in gasoline: It takes more energy (and creates more polution) to make it than you get out of it. (But, it does mean a lot of money for the company that owns 40% of the world's corn.)

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My Dad has been a natural gasline installer/inspector for 30+yrs. According to him, the main reason that a lot of the necessary infrastructure and development, needed to enhance the efficiency of the entire natural gas program in this country, is not up to par over the past 10-15 years is because of the environmentalists.

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Boy, them oil companies are powerful. I tried to post something negative about them and when I hit submit I got bumped offline and it disappeared.

Larry,

Think about a car that was designed in 1915. How was the miles per gallon? How was the pollution emmission? We are at the infancy stage with many of these alternate energy forms. Hydrogen is the newest baby, but it's not the only one. THink how practicle a solar powered car would be in Arizona and Nevada. The oil company is very proprietary when it comes to control of energy. They have maintained their advantage through bribery, collusion, and threats. I believe that there is more we get from solar, geothermal, hydrogen, and even wind than we currently do. Overreliance on this more limited energy source has kept us hostage and has damaged us. Look at Texas. Look at how we are kept politically ensnared, maybe even held hostage to the Middle East.

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Ax,

That's possible, even probable. The problem with idealists is that they tend to be long sighted (sometimes closed minded) and sometimes because of this are self-defeating. I do find it interesting how "environmentalist" has been turned into a bad word though. Isn't there a negative connotation to it? Great spin job. In theory, shouldn't all of us be for preserving natural resources and reducing the ammount of pollution we need to eat, drink, and breathe?

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Burgold,

The problem with the "It'll get better" theory is this:

The reason it takes more energy to get Hydrogen from water, than you get when you turn Hydrogen into water, isn't that the technology isn't developed enough: It's because there's a Second Law of Thermodynamics. (If it were possible to take water, seperate it into hydrogen and oxygen, then allow them to re-combine into water, and wind up with more energy than you started with, then you'd not only have a perpetual motion machine, you'd have an energy-producing one.)

Now, I'll admit, there may be a reason why hydrogen may make sense, even if it does result in a net loss of energy. Different forms of energy have different properties. (Electricity is very cheap to deliver to the point of use, and can be converted into various other forms of energy, like mechanical, with almost perfect effeciency, but requires a fixed, in-place infrastructure to deliver it to the point of use, and is difficult to store. Chemical energy is much more storable, but has to be physically delivered to the point of use.) If the energy defecit caused by using hydrogen comes from some cheap source that (for some reason) can't be used to run cars (say, nuclear), and if (this is a big "if") the logistics of delivering it are less than they are for gasoline, then hydrogen may make sense. But it's not a magic cure-all, it's just a slightly different form of gasoline.

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