cjwirth

Natural Gas: America's Energy Salvation

Regarding the future potential for natural gas as a replacement for gasoline and diesel:

HOUSTON CHRONICLE
August 31, 2009
A little shale gas skepticism from Matt Simmons

This weekend we reported on a perspective that the oil industry's 150th anniversary may be the beginning of a natural gas era in the U.S., thanks to the lower CO2 releases from the fuel and the abundance of gas-bearing shale.

Matt Simmons, (he of Twilight in the Desert) believes the excitement of huge domestic reserves of natural gas in shale is overblown and outright incorrect.

"In the 40 years I've followed the industry I've been continuously amazed at the tangent people are willing to go off on without any data, or by getting the data wrong," Simmons said.

When producers tap natural gas in shale formations the output is very high at first, with as much as 70 percent of the reserves tapped in the first year, Simmons said. Another 20 percent of the total is tapped in the second year while the remaining 10 percent, in theory, plays out over the next decade or more.

Simmons simply doesn't believe all the gas is there that many believe and that the process of getting at it - the water-intensive hydraulic fracturing method - is a huge waste of otherwise drinkable water. A report linking contaminated drinking water to the process could be troubling for the procedure, he says.

"I don't think natural gas will be this bridge fuel to the future," Simmons said. "I don't think the reserves will ever prove up enough to make them viable in the long term."

blogs.chron.com/newswa...

And see:

www.theoildrum.com/nod...

And the EIA concludes much the same, see the section "Substitution of Natural Gas for Petroleum Consumption" a little more than half way down the page:

www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/a...

and then these data about how fast oil supply reduction is occurring for the U.S:

survivingpeakoil.blogs...

The capital for natural gas conversions and supply infrastructure will disappear as oil supply reduction impacts the U.S. economy.

And these article do not even take into account declining oil supplies and how that will impact the economy:

seekingalpha.com/insta...

www.commodityonline.co...

www.guardian.co.uk/wor...

And the IEA indicates that "the oil crisis begins to grip after 2010:"

survivingpeakoil.blogs...

Best regards,

Cliff Wirth