0:07
Okay, so let's take a brief look at what
have been some of the implications of this technology.
You know, this was something that I think Mitchell
Energy started playing around with in the late 80s, early
90s, and really everybody kind of feels like, we figured it out by
2000 or shortly thereafter, maybe, maybe mid-2000s.
Well, look at what has happened in all of these gas related slides.
So, here we have, in the top left
corner we have US energy production and consumption.
This is trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
[COUGH] So we used to have total consumption in excess, of
production, okay?
What we see by, basically, we see a
downtrend in these net imports beginning in the mid-2000s.
And we're now to the point that we have, you
know, we're almost self-sufficient when it comes to natural gas.
And we currently project something like the latter
part of this decade to actually be fully self-sufficient.
And certainly, thereafter to actually be a net exporter of natural gas.
The US will be a net exporter of a hydrocarbon, which is pretty remarkable.
Something I wouldn't have expected in my life.
1:52
this is sort of US natural gas imports and exports, but by location.
So, again, down here you can see that up until
you know, by mid to late-2000s we were actually producing not only significant
amounts from Canada but we actually, you see this little sliver down here of LNG.
We were producing liquified net, or we were importing liquified natural gas.
We're importing from Canada and very limited exports of, to Mexico and Canada.
Some of the adjacent states where transportation issues
made it, you know, as we talked about,
sometimes it makes sense to, even if you're
a net importer to actually export some gas.
3:15
So, what we see up until 2000, see
now coal, really the dominant fuel for producing electricity.
But since mid-2000, rapid growth in use of natural
gas, you know, all of a sudden we have these
new plays that are being developed around the US and
people start looking for ways because it's stranded, it's cheap.
We start looking for ways to make use of it.
So, massive growth in utilization of natural gas, in particular, for electrical
generation, actually is expected, electrical generation by gas is expected
to be equivalent to that of coal by 2035.
So, another, what is that, another 20 years or so?
4:06
And then lastly it's a little subtle in this chart, but in the bottom right we see
carbon dioxide emissions associated with these various fuel types.
And we see, you know, emissions associated with
coal since 05 dropping, you know, reasonably significantly.
4:34
Natural gas is just a lot cleaner fuel, even though it
is a nonrenewable, it is a lot cleaner burning than coal.
So, not a tremendous expansion in the
emissions associated with natural gas and certainly
much less than what we've gained in ground on from reduction and utilization of coal.
[COUGH] So with the increased cost of,
of regulation and technologies to keep coal competitive.
Natural gas is just making it very hard on coal
to remain a dominant producer of electricity in the US.
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Michael J. OrlandoLecturer
