The mad rush to drill every cubic foot of natural gas in the ground has lead to rock-bottom prices for natural gas, making the entire industry a money-loser. But suddenly the price of natural gas is shooting up.
The price in the futures market soared to $5.18 per 1,000 cubic feet Friday, up 10 percent to the highest level in three and a half years. The price of natural gas is up 29 percent in two weeks, and is 50 percent higher than last year at this time.Why?
Record amounts of natural gas are being burned for heat and electricity. Meanwhile, it's so cold that drillers are struggling to produce enough to keep up with the high demand. So much natural gas is coming out of storage that the Energy Department says supplies have fallen 20 percent below a year ago -- and that was before this latest cold spell.
A fire is out after burning for more than 12 hours at the site of a natural gas pipeline explosion near Otterburne, Man., about 50 kilometres south of Winnipeg. But officials say there are now natural gas outages affecting as many as 4,000 people in nearby communities, where temperatures dipped to near -20 C overnight.The explosion did not just affect local Manitobans. Xcel Energy is asking people in three states to curtail their natural gas consumption because of the explosion:
“As a precaution and to maintain system stability, we are asking all natural gas customers to turn their thermostats down as far as possible — unless doing so would pose a danger to their health or safety — and to avoid running natural gas appliances,” said Kent Larson, Xcel Energy’s senior vice president for operations, in a statement. “We expect to know more by midday Sunday.”
It suggested a temperature of 60 degrees for homes, and asked businesses to conserve, too.
Sixty degrees! Man, that is cold. And fossil fuels are supposed to be so reliable.
This shortage comes as debate rages about shipping North Dakota crude on trains in flimsy cars that are not designed to carry flammable liquids:
Far more toxic products are shipped on trains. But those products, like chlorine, are transported in pressurized vessels designed to survive an accident. Crude oil, on the other hand, is shipped in a type of tank car that entered service in 1964 and that has been traditionally used for nonflammable hazardous liquids like liquid fertilizers.People who live near railroads and pipelines are justifiably afraid:
Safety officials have warned for more than two decades that these cars were unsuited to carry flammable cargo: their shell can puncture and tears up too easily in a crash.
Adrian Kieffer, the assistant fire chief [of Casselton, ND, where an oil train recently exploded], rushed to the accident and spent nearly 12 hours there, finishing at 3 a.m. “When I got home that night, my wife said let’s sell our home and move,” he said.
Keystone XL pipeline supporters use the railroad troubles to justify putting in a pipeline. But as the people in Manitoba and San Bruno can attest, pipelines have their own problems.
It's going to be 20 below in Minnesota tonight. So, just when we need natural gas the most, we're suffering from a catastrophic shortage.
That's the usual knock against renewable energy such as wind and solar: they won't provide electricity when you most need them. This is not strictly true: the highest demand for electricity in Arizona and Nevada is when it's hot and sunny -- perfect weather for solar. In Minnesota high winds often accompany weather systems that bring extreme cold and extreme heat -- perfect weather for wind turbines.
Fossil fuels suffer from exactly the same sorts of supply disruptions that big oil says renewable energy suffers from. Every time a major refinery shuts down for repairs or switches production from winter to summer grades of fuel, or political upheavals detonate in the Middle East, there are shortages of gasoline or wild price swings.
Shipping highly explosive materials long distances can have deadly consequences. Sure, we can use our ingenuity to come up with safer modes of transport. But those cost a lot of money, money that railroads aren't willing to invest because the need for all that safety infrastructure is going to be relatively short-lived: after the oil in North Dakota peters out all those expensive bullet-proof rail cars the NTSB is recommending will languish in junk yards, rusting.
Doesn't it make more sense to invest more ingenuity and money in infrastructure for localized energy production that will never become obsolete?
4 comments:
Hi! I am the original owner of this photo, and though I don't mind you using it on here, I would appreciate that you contact me (along with the other photographers whose work you use if this is the case), and provide proper credit. Please provide a link to my flickr photo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jordanmcrae/12130021175/). Thank you very much!
-Jordan McRae
No problem, Jordan.
Wow, I didn't realize how many people would read this post. Makes sense, though, Nikto always gets more hits than I do:)
Wow, I didn't realize how many people would read this post.
Oh for craps sake. You really need to learn how this thing call the internet works.....
Truly, that sounds like an argument for more pipelines. If you only have a few and they're running at near capacity, any breakage will be critical.
Wind mills and solar are fine as supplements, but let's not pretend they're Superfriends of the environment. And they're not, once you factor in everything that goes into making them and keeping them operational. When windmill or solar fields produce enough energy to actually mine, smelt, manufacture, ship, and install more of themselves plus their own replacements over time, plus all the equipment, tools, and infrastructure needed to do so, plus additions to the power grid to carry it from dispersed locations, over and above what businesses and home they claim to be powering, then they would be viable. Solar cells degrade over time and within a couple of decades are producing 50% or less of their potential peak power, while windmills have never lived up to their manufacturers reliability/longevity claims (and their actual power produced over a year is at best about one-third their claimed rated power, as well as expensive to repair, to the point that they're often not). Right now, they're more about harvesting subsidies and tax credits than about harvesting energy. And since we apparently don't like mining, and we don't like smelting, and we don't like what needs to be done to get adequate supplies of rare earth elements, and we don't like the toxic processes that are needed to manufacture solar cells, I guess we need to ... what?
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