For Those Who Enjoy Discussing Climate Change..... Not Chess Related

[Gary Ruben]

Re: For Those Who Enjoy Discussing Climate Change..... Not Chess Related

Natural gas power plants are good "peaking" plants. They can be started up and shut down extremely quickly when the electricity demand changes rapidly. Carbon emissions from these plants are about 50% that of coal burning plants, so they would become very useful in conjuction with renewables that have varied supply, like wind and solar. Also, as I mentioned in a previous post, the natural gas market is very regional, unlike oil because the gas cannot easily be shipped around the world. If the price in North America was discounted greatly for a long period of time relative to prices in other parts of the world like Europe (for example), then companies would start converting it to LNG (liquified natural gas) and export it from North America to these places.

The slowdown in industry over the last several years has definitely reduced global emissions, i.e. oil demand has dropped from about 86 million barrels per day down to about 84 million barrels per day (a few percent). Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at the following level:

Sept 2009 384.78 ppm
Sept 2008 383.07 ppm
Sept 2007 380.81 ppm

The rise from 2008 to 2009 was 1.71 ppm, a slowing down of the rise from 2007 to 2008 which was 2.26 ppm. This could be due to the recession but it is probably too early to tell. I will address the cooling question in other posts.

I don't want to get into the amounts of natural gas used by any segment of the economy and which uses more or less. It's not general knowledge.

Regarding shipping natural gas, the price at market has to be enough to cover the cost of the seller to drill the well, build the facilities to liquify, shipping, royalties, etc. You also have to consider other nations also have shale gas which will increase the supply, and labour in many nations is cheaper than here. Also, if we start shipping as well it will increase the supply in other nations and moderate the price there. If they can build the infrastructure and ship it economically from here, I say "Go for it!!!".

I'll tell you something for sure. Thermal coal seems to be selling just fine. Yes it does!

With oil, that 2 million barrels a day you mentioned is roughly 1 ship load. Some ships carry more, some less. The U.S. uses, or did use, around 20 million barrels a day. Half they produce and the other half they import.

Here's a site with lots of nice graphs.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/twip/twip_crude.html

I use this kind of information to analyse the economy and direction of some commodity prices. You should be able to whiz this stuff.

[Paul Beckwith]

Re: For Those Who Enjoy Discussing Climate Change..... Not Chess Related

Thanks for the link, excellent stuff; although it is only for the U.S. Do you have this information for global demand?

[Gary Ruben]

Re: For Those Who Enjoy Discussing Climate Change..... Not Chess Related

Thanks for the link, excellent stuff; although it is only for the U.S. Do you have this information for global demand?

For my purposes all I need is the U.S. They are basically the global demand for imported oil. Probably Japan and China come in with less but in total probably import less than the U.S.