United States Natural Gas Fund, LP (UNG)

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  • commenter
    ART005
    Jun 24 12:24 PM
    Keeping Alternate Energy In Perspective [view article]
    Thank you for the pie chart. Nice to see all that info in one place.

    There seem to be two concepts that overlap and cause a little confusion when it isn't clear which is being addressed. Balancing energy requirements vs. energy investment opportunities.

    I'm not convinced solar PV is economical so I don't follow that industry much. When they get to $1/watt then future build out will be productive. I'm afraid at $5/watt the industry is going backwards as far as adding value to the world. I'm all for subsidized research towards $1/watt but subsidized installation at $5/watt doesn't sit well with me.

    Solar heat (hot water, home heating) on the other hand is below $1/watt.

    Wind is at or below $1/watt. Current world wind energy output is around 32K equivalent Bbl/day. At an impressive 25% annual increase it is adding additional 8K equivalent bbl/day annually to world energy supply. But the world doesn't even respond to Saudi Arabi offering 200K Bbl/day. I think the ongoing world growth rate of just oil demand is on the order of 1 million Bbl/day/year. For total world energy then, using the pie chart, about 2.5 million equivalent Bbl/day/year increase.

    My point is that every little productive contribution is important but as the author suggests, the small parts of the pie can not be improved enough to carry the struggling bigger parts (oil) in the short run. Coal and nuclear are big parts that can be ramped up.

    Conservation on the order of 10% would be huge, moving some energy requirements from oil to electric (coal, nuclear) via the transportation sector as suggested is another big low hanging fruit opportunity. Geothermal ground source heat pumps are another productive transfer of energy load from gas/oil to electric.

    So bigger growth investment opportunities might be in the fashionable alternative energies but the world's energy balance is going to have to come from higher energy density options with large input supplies (coal, nuclear.) Don't forget that oil as a chemical feedstock is very valuable so burning it all up and then converting to alternative energies isn't an option even it was possible.

    The excessivley supportive alternative energy camp needs to realize that while improvements in their camp our valuable, proposing no expansion of coal and nuclear is a death sentance!!     Reply
  • commenter
    David Lentz
    Jun 24 11:45 AM
    Keeping Alternate Energy In Perspective [view article]
    Amen. Reply
  • commenter
    Jed Rothwell
    Jun 24 11:36 AM
    My Website
    Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]
    Mike Wofsey wrote:

    “>> Also, transmutations and so on are mainly at surface levels.

    What transmutations? What is your evidence for claiming they are on the surface?”

    See Iwamura, Miley, Mizuno, Bockris. Depth profiles show the transmutations waning at lower depths.


    >> Enyo and some others have found evidence that electrochemical
    >> overpotential in certain conditions with 1.5 V can produce 10E47 atm of
    >> pressure across areas on the surface. These are atomic-scale areas.

    How did they measure 10^47 atmospheres?"

    Not by direct measurements. If it happens, it would be on the atomic scale, literally a few molecules across, nearby surface protrusions. I don’t know much about this work. It was described in the Mizuno book that I translated, but I did not read original sources.


    “>> Fleischmann thinks it is a bulk effect. (He said some years ago.)

    If Fleischmann things it's a bulk effect, why do "most people" think it's a surface effect? What evidence do they have?”

    Their evidence is helium in the gas, transmutations, loading mainly at the surface and so on. I would put it the other way around: I do not understand why Martin thinks it is a bulk effect. I don’t know if he still thinks so. I will ask him.


    >> Of course they analyze the output gas. They analyze everything. That’s
    >> what most of the expense and effort of an experiment goes into.

    Ah, excellent. And what is the helium increase on a typical experiment?”

    The amount depends upon the excess heat. Sometimes it accumulated for a long time, and sometimes it is a “snapshot” for 20 minutes or 2 hours or what-have you. In every case I know of, after the helium is carefully accounted for and flushed out of nooks and crannies, it comes to the same ratio as plasma fusion: 24 MeV/helium atom.


    >> at 10 to 100 times background, occasionally at a million times
    >> background, but every single one of these was also mistaken?

    There was not a tritium measurement in the paper you sent. Would you please send the link to a paper with the tritium measurement? Please don't tell me to look in the index, I would like to see what you consider to be a good experiment that measured the tritium and/or helium."

    Unfortunately some of the best papers in helium and tritium are not in the library because of copyright restrictions. For tritium in the early papers (which is mostly what we have), I think most people would cite Will and Cedzynska, or Bockris et al and the people at BARC. You can look up the indexes as easily as I can. For helium, see Miles (China Lake), McKubre, and the people using the enormous mass spec machine shown here:

    lenr-canr.org/Experime...


    “I can't say anything without reading the paper.”

    True, but many people do, and you had a lot to say previously.


    >> this was the most difficult experiment he ever replicated. The difficulties
    >> were obvious to these people from the moment they heard about it.

    That explains a lot, because at the time, perhaps due to F&P's paper, it was perceived as something fairly easy to do.

    “Percieved” by people who knew nothing about the experiment and had no business guessing about it. I have never heard an electrochemist say that.


    “Helium is nonreactive, you should just be able to grind the cathode apart and check for an increase. Would you link to a paper that measured the helium from the cathode?”

    Mainly they don’t find it. Only a tiny bit. Arata’s latest papers is the exception, but that’s in the powder. My guess is that it comes off the surface of one particle and is trapped by another.


    ">> How likely is it that cloning mammals is an error, and Dolly the sheep
    >> was not actually a clone of her mother?

    Off the subject, but I don't understand the allure of cloning. Mother Nature's technique is far more advanced, she gathers together the best aspects of each cell and makes a new one, and with her method, the likelihood of DNA error is so much smaller."

    I agree but it was an amazing accomplishment, and even if it has no practical application I am sure it will teach us much about biology.

    Back on the subject, how much are you willing to bet that every single cloning experiment has been an experimental error? Do you really think that is possible? And do you seriously, really believe that people cannot measure 100 W with absolute confidence? All this talk about “noboby is ever certain in science” is pure B.S. in my opinion. There is nothing more certain than a replicated experiment. No human knowledge is more solidly based or more certain than what we learn of natural laws & phenomena by experiment. You can bet your life that calorimetry works. You do, in fact, bet your life on such things, every day, in a thousand different ways.


    “>> Cold fusion has no significant waste products.

    The containment facility is bathed with neutrons and becomes radioactive as surely as any fission plant.”

    No, it isn’t. If cold fusion produced neutrons I would be dead, along with several hundred other people. Cold fusion does not produce a measurable level of neutrons. Cold fusion will not require a containment facility. If it works at all, you will be able to use it to power a heart implant. It does not matter what you think or what you predict – the experiments prove that there are no neutrons. Period. Full stop. You can’t argue with experiments.


    “>> Of course. But you do not even need a microscope in many cases. You
    >> can see with the naked eye why many cathodes fail.

    Why? Why do some work and some don't? What is the surface feature that allow some to work but not others?”

    The ones that do not work swell up, crack, or disintegrate. Or they are covered in filth. (I saw one with cat hairs galvanized onto the surface, in one memorable example.) See Storms, “How to produce the Pons-Fleischmann effect.”


    >> Who knows why? There is no significant increase, and that’s all there is to
    >> it. In my opinion, cold fusion probably produces no neutrons directly,

    “Fusion is fusion, plasma or otherwise, it produces neutrons.”

    No it doesn’t. You can’t overrule Mother Nature on this.


    “Perhaps Cold Fusion is actually a high-level effect but is actually not fusion then.”

    It is, because it fuses deuterons to form helium-4 and 24 MeV of heat. Most scientists I know say that makes it fusion. Perhaps you have some other definition.

    - Jed
     Reply
  • commenter
    captbob
    Jun 24 11:31 AM
    Keeping Alternate Energy In Perspective [view article]
    Just the definition of the word renewable tells you it will be 100% of the chart someday.
    The only variable is time. Do we want to transition gradually in replacing each of the finite sources before they arrive at the "Crisis" stage oil is today, or twiddle our thumbs and hold hearings till we're at crash and burn when the clock runs out on each??.
     Reply
  • commenter
    Mike Wofsey
    Jun 24 11:22 AM
    My Website
    Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]
    Say Ytterbius,

    I don't know anything about LDK, do they own I.P. on the films they are producing?

    By the way, you are 100% right on your analysis, you think clearly, and should consider finishing your physics education. Go for the Ph.D., there will be a lot of opportunity in research for nanophotonics and quantum dots. The efficiencies that we are currently seeing will be dwarfed by the next generation of photovoltaics. When we are able to confine the results of the photoelectric effect to 1 and 2 dimensions, I suspect PV efficiencies will rise above 50%.     Reply
  • commenter
    paulk8756
    Jun 24 10:38 AM
    Keeping Alternate Energy In Perspective [view article]
    For those of you too young (...I don't know if you qualify, I hope you do) to know what a serious economic downturn is like, you're now witnessing the beginning of one. I can tell you it's not going to be pretty going on from here.

    We have the natural resources in this country to begin to work our way out of this mess, thank God. We also have the technological prowess to develop new and alternative sources of energy. We need to do it ALL while there's still time left to save ourselves.

    I doubt I'm going to change your mind, though, so do this much. Copy this post and read it again when we're broke because we sent another few trillion dollars of our money overseas and your lights go off.



    Reply
  • commenter
    paulk8756
    Jun 24 10:24 AM
    Keeping Alternate Energy In Perspective [view article]
    Now how is petroleum "painful"? This could only be so if you are putting your politics ahead of you common sense. Without oil we could not have built our economy or won two world wars.

    Let' me tell you what's going to be really painful. The permanent economic downturn and the reduction in our standard of living if we don't find more oil and build nuclear plants.

    But you won''t have to wait long, it's already begun.     Reply
  • commenter
    Jim
    Kingsdale
    Jun 24 09:41 AM
    My Website
    Keeping Alternate Energy In Perspective [view article]
    First, the problem is not where energy comes from. The problem is that we use petroleum to power transportation and we much transition that to electicity.

    Second, the greatest new source of savings in electricity in the short term is conservation. For example, if we changed out all the light bulbs to CFL's or, better, LED's (which are not quite here yet on a competitive price basis but soon will be), we could save about 15% of all the electricity now used. That is huge.

    Third, it's been estimated that we could power some 80% of cars with electricity just by using hybrid efficiencies and, more important, by refueling during nightime off-peak load periods when there is plenty of spare electrical capacity.

    The focus on sources of energy is not getting us anywhere. We need to focus on transforming our transportation system to electricity. In my humble opinion, of course.     Reply
  • commenter
    David Lentz
    Jun 24 08:28 AM
    Keeping Alternate Energy In Perspective [view article]
    I think you miss the point entirely when considering the amount of energy produced from green sources. While petroleum is by far the largest source of energy today, it is also the most painful, and the one that consumers most desire to avoid. Only those with an extremely short investment horizon, or a very nimble portfolio, invest in oil. The same applies to coal, natural gas, and nuclear -- with the scale of undesirable attributes diminishing in each of those. Solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources offer the (distant) promise of large amounts of energy with a low or diminishing cost, whereas the traditional energy sources all have increasing costs.

    And the markets have responded accordingly. If one looks at the growth rate in megawatts of installed solar capacity, it is approaching a near-vertical slope, with no shake-out in the markets yet, ANY producer can sell all the product they can make. Wind power has a considerably higher unit cost (for generation units), but that too is being built out at a very rapid clip. One does not need to see T. Boone Pickens plunking down $2B to invest in wind farms to know it is a big deal -- just go out and drive across the country, you cannot avoid seeing huge wind generation installations going up all over. There is still a lot of space that is excellent to install windmills, and we really have not even begun yet to do offshore wind power in this country.

    My point is that the very narrow slices of your energy production pie chart is where all the growth is occurring. This is both a good thing (there is great potential for gains) and a bad thing (investment prices have been bid up so high as to raise the risk to nosebleed territory).

    At this point, green energy is more of a candidate for Seeking Beta than Seeking Alpha, but (apparently) there's still a lot of "alpha" to be had.

    I'm not sure where you were going with the chart of national energy consumption per unit GDP -- perhaps a chart showing the national trends over time (with lines for each nation listed) would indicate growth markets for "conservation memes" or "green memes", but a single point in time perspective (and 2004 may as well be 1904 with the rate of change in the energy sector) shows very little. Too many things can account for the relative ranking of nations in their energy consumption for a single view to make sense of them.     Reply
  • commenter
    Andy1234
    Jun 24 08:23 AM
    The 'Peak Oil' Myth: New Oil Is Plentiful [view article]
    as oil production goes on and we spend more energy on getting the oil....NG is going to have one hell of a ride up. NG is used for oil sands production.....tar sands, bio-diesel refining, ethonal refining, etc.

    As the EROEI declines....More NG will be used.....you can see that NG inventories are building less slowly than proceeding years.....either from more demand from the public, more from oil companies, or a mixture of both. Should be interesting if we produce vast quantities from oil sands in the future...what effect that will have on NG prices...and the inventory of NG. NG production is declining in the USA....and I am willing to bet Mexico and Canada will start declining soon. LNG prices are higher than $13/MCF....going higher.     Reply
  • commenter
    ruckrover
    Jun 24 06:52 AM
    The 'Peak Oil' Myth: New Oil Is Plentiful [view article]
    The big Brazilian off shore oil field is Tupi - it is under 3 kilometres of ocean, 2 km of rock and 2 km of salt. Drilling it will have to contend with super-boiling oil, super-pressurised oil, salt corrosion of pipes, barometric pressure on pipes, and just deep deep water.

    These new big fields are not the good ol' Texan or Saudi gushers under ya feet.

    There may be more oil - there is no more easy or fast or cheap oil.     Reply
  • commenter
    ja right
    Jun 24 03:38 AM
    The 'Peak Oil' Myth: New Oil Is Plentiful [view article]
    I'll be convinced if the author's argument only if the world production rate suddenly jumps to 95mbd.

    FYI it's been stuck at 86mbd for the last 4 years and hasn't gone any higher. That sure sounds like a peak to me.
    Reply
  • commenter
    ytterbius
    Jun 24 01:24 AM
    My Website
    Investing In a Resource-Constrained World (Part V) [view article]
    I have a BS in physics, and I know absolutely nothing about cold fusion. I do know quite a bit about Solar, though, and you're wrong on it.

    Ok, there are a tremendous number of arguments that could be used to support Solar, and in particular, Silicon-based Solar, but I'll stick with one directly related to your article; Peak Oil.

    You want to support thin films over Silicon, but that contradicts your peak-based reasoning.

    Which is a stronger company in a post-peak world?

    Would you bet on super-high-tech company depending on rare elements from the corners of the world, as well as incredibly specialized equipment and infrastructure for the development of their product; or would you rather support a company that uses well-known technology (silicon-based), and the second-most most abundant material in the Planet's crust (silicon) for the production of their product?

    The particular Silicon-based company that I mention is LDK Solar. They're building the World's largest Polysilicon Factory in the World. They've got local supplies of raw Silicon to process. They even are buying their Ingot Crucibles from a Chinese Company right across the street, as opposed to ordering them from Europe or the US, as other companies do. Plan has LDK capable of producing 2 GW of Wafers per year after 2009 (much sooner than any cold fusion process will produce a GW). You can bet that if any company will be insulated from the problems of Peak-whatever, it's going to be LDK.

    When you're talking about peak-resources, the obvious solution is to make best use of the most common of resources, as you well know by your assaults (deserved INO on FSLR for their Te dependency).     Reply
  • commenter
    sopocistudio
    Jun 24 01:02 AM
    My Website
    The 'Peak Oil' Myth: New Oil Is Plentiful [view article]
    Hmm....one thing I'm noticing is that there's been NO mention of geopolitics and their effect on oil prices. Early on, a commentor mention Iraqi reserves being revised sharply upward, for example. Does anybody see things getting "peaceful" there anytime soon, allowing for this oil to be produced?

    Somebody else mentioned declining production in Russia, without noting that Putin had applied punitive tax rates on the oil industry there (which are being lowered to help "stimulate" production).

    In short, there's a WHOLE lot of stuff involved in the price of oil, regardless of whether one believes oil comes from dead dinosaurs, or whether the "oil fairy" comes along every so often to slip more in the resevoirs.

    jan     Reply
  • commenter
    King of
    Sanity
    Jun 23 11:32 PM
    The 'Peak Oil' Myth: New Oil Is Plentiful [view article]
    Thank you Jason!!! Thank You!! You are the "John the Baptist" that is giving us the truth of the oil situation. You are so dead right on the money. The so called oil crisis is much akin to man who built his house on sand. When you expose the so called crisis, is has no legs to stand on. We have more oil on this planet than we have mosquitoes. Yes, we will run out of oil one day. But by then, our great-great-great-grea... grandchildren will have technology available that far surpasses our wildest dreams. We were duped in the early 70s with false shortages, and we are being duped today by those whose main goal is to shake down the average motorist while they can before being exposed for what they really are. The speculators are 90% of the problem. A great way to bring this theft to a grinding halt would be to enact a tax that would cost speculators 85% of their profits for anything over $65.00 per barrel. I have heard that over 70% of the infamous speculators come from the good ole USA. Some may say that this is interfering with the free market economy. Speculators are the ones that are abusing the free market concept in the absolute worst way. Reply

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