Wednesday - April 09, 2014

One Lump Or Two?

Speaking of natural gas and coal ...

Go figure. Ya know, I don’t think anybody really understands real world economics.

[2/14/2014] This wasn’t supposed to happen. Cheap natural gas was supposed to be the answer to our dependence on dirty old coal. But now, it seems, coal is making a comeback. The bitter winter, the coldest in 30 years, has pushed natural gas prices to some of their highest levels in four years, and that has made coal attractive to utilities again.

Electric companies are generating more than 4.5 million megawatt hours a day using coal, the most since 2011, Bloomberg reported, citing government data. As a result, coal’s share of power production rose to more than 40 percent from 39 percent last year.

Cheap and abundant natural gas supplies from the hydraulic fracturing boom had made natural gas a cheaper and cleaner alternative to coal for the past several years. Economics, though, had to catch up at some point. With demand for gas rising this winter, pushing prices as high as $5.56 per million British thermal units at the end of January, coal is looking more attractive.

The downside: the increased coal usage means U.S. carbon emissions are expected to rise this year after falling in 2011 and 2012. 

Actually, what I had heard was that the price of natural gas in the US was so low, that every possible last bit of it got put on ships and sent over to Europe, where it makes a much higher profit. So when more was needed here due to the awful winter we had, there was much less of it around than what we usually had on hand before the fracking boom, so this drove the price up. Shortage during a massive supply growth. Because evil capitalist running dogs sell to the highest bidder, and the marketplace is global.

USA: Natural Gas Boom Caused More Coal Exports[March 26, 2014] Thanks to the natural gas boom, carbon dioxide emissions dropped in the United States. But those emissions savings were probably completely undone thanks to U.S. coal exports.

That’s the finding from new research by CO2 Scorecard, which looked at how the U.S. coal industry increase its exports in order to deal with the rise of natural gas in the nation’s power market.
...
... the coal just went to other countries.

The researchers used data from the Energy Information Agency (EIA) to tease out how much coal-fired generation was displaced by natural gas versus other sources of electricity from 2007 to 2012. They then looked at how U.S. exports of coal behaved over the same period. From 2002 through 2006, those exports remained relatively steady. But then they spiked after 2007, following the arrival of America’s natural gas boom.
...
As CO2 Scorecard notes, U.S. coal is relatively cheap on the global market. So it’s possible coal exports from other countries declined in reaction because they couldn’t compete. Unfortunately, EIA data also shows that global coal consumption rose steeply over the 2007-2012 time period, suggesting the primary effect of U.S. coal exports was to drive down the fossil fuel’s global price and encourage demand.

Don’t worry if the above doesn’t make too much sense. It’s from a progressive greenie AGW web site. To their amazement, the world is hungry for energy of whatever kind they can get; if the USA brings more natural gas to the market it gets sold and used. If we have more coal to sell they buy it and burn it right up. You’d think they know that shivering in the dark while squatting on the morae high ground is good for Planet Gaia, and we’d all be happy to suffer.

Sure, I want cheap and clean energy, just like everyone else. Which is why I’m in favor of building about 300 new nuclear reactors in our country, and pouring all kinds of stimulus cash into the power grid infrastructure, so that we can run as many things as possible on pure electricity. [sarcasm]Well, once those evil greedy capitalist monopolistic power companies cut prices down to the real bone, so that all of us 99%ers can benefit.  Nationalize Now!  [/sarcasm]

Posted by Drew458     on 04/09/2014 at 09:28 AM   
Filed Under: • Oil, Alternative Energy, and Gas Prices •  
• Comments (0) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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