Hello. This is another module for Energy 101 and we looked at energy and society
why society wants energy and how we use it.
Now we're looking at the source for that energy that we extract from the earth in
the form of fossil fuels first and then we'll look at renewable energy sources
like wind and solar. So here's the pie chart that we've seen
before, looking at where we get our energy.
Natural gas, we're going to look at today, provides 36% of the total US
energy demand. It's the largest segment of natural
energy supplies. To our society, natural gas.
If we want to look at where it's coming from, what the situation might be with
natural gas, I am sorry I've said 36%, in fact that's almost a lie, it should say
26, that 3 is a is a typo. 26% of our natural gas, of energy, comes
from natural gas. So I apologize for that typo.
that's where we're going to look at today.
Is above coal and below oil and the amount of energy we get from it for our
whole utilization. So what is natural gas? By the way,
natural gas has essentially no relationship with gasoline? Sometimes
there's confusion between natural gas and gasoline.
Sometimes we just say gas. Leave off the natural.
In fact, most of the time, you see it as just gas.
And is it's easy to get that confused with gasoline but when you say, you say
gas and you use the term accurately, then we're talking about natural gas and where
as coal is a solid and oil is a liquid which we're probably already familiar
with, natural gas is a gas, is a gas. It's just like air.
It's invisible, and, and it's it turns out it's odorless.
It has a chemical form, makeup of carbon plus hydrogen, and remember that coal
only had carbon. But natural gas has carbon and hydrogen,
and we call it a hydro-carbon. We even call call a hydro-carbon even
though it has no Hydrogen in it, but just carbon.
So, being odorless is a safety issue. And because if you have a leak in your,
with your stove and the flame goes out, and the, and something happens to the
stove and the, continues to, the gas to spew out, then it'll kill whoever is in
the room or house. Particularly if you're sleeping, if it
happens over a long period of time. So we put odor, odorant in the gas so you
can smell it. That's for safety reasons, methane is
odorless but itself but there's an odorant that is added to the methane
Natural gas too so that we can detect when in't present, since you can't see it
or feel it. so that we'll know where it is and know
that there's a danger situation. It's, as I've already said, it's not
gasoline made from oil. Gasoline is made strictly from crude oil.
So again, where do, how do we get that? Energy app.
And all of these hydrocarbons have contained what we call chemical energy.
And either the chemical mining structure. And we release that chemical energy as
heat when we react it with oxygen that's in the air.
As I've already said, 21% of the air is oxygen, the nitrogen is also there.
It just goes along for the ride. It doesn't interact in any significant
way. But if you, when you react oxygen with
carbon plus hydrogen as the natural gas is, then of course you still, the carbon
gets, goes to CO2, The oxygen joins the carbon molecule, and oxygen also joins
the hydrogen molecule to produce H2O which is of course water.
So again, the CO2 is a global warming gas, the primary one that we worry about.
That's increasing in concentration in the atmosphere.
And we are afraid that that may be causing global warming over the long
term. Exactly when and how fast is a difficult
prediction but something to worry about. But due to the fact that some of the
energy. From burning natural gas comes from
reacting with hydrogen. As well as the oxygen, whereas carbon
coal has only carbon. The CO2 produced per unit of heat
released is about 2/3 for natural gas versus coals.
So. Natural gas is a little better.
It's 1/3 better regarding CO2 emissions from a global warming view point.
So that's something we'll talk about in more length a little later, but it does
have a lower global warming footprint than coal And, you've heard a lot about
fracking and how we're getting natural gas these days and how we may have a glut
of natural gas, which we'll see how that looks in a few minutes.
but the typical vertical well that we always use is shown there with a vertical
pipe on the right. And where it, you just drill a vertical
pipe down into a reservoir of the sandstone or coarse area where na,
natural gas is contained. And it flows up the pipe.
And we, almost never pump it have to pump it out of the earth.
It just flows out of the earth. So it's not like coal where you gotta
have all this equipment to dig it out and haul it out.
And put it on rail cars and transport it as a solid.
It just flows out and we put it in a pipeline, as we'll see in a minute, and
carry it to its destination. So it's a lot easier to handle.
but the, the diagram on the left shows what we're doing lately, in the last few
years, that's allowed us to, to tap Natural gas that is in the earth in what
we call shale formations and that combined with horizontal drilling.
Notice that you drill down vertically until you get to a shale seam, as it's
shown there, and then you drill horizontally through the seam, so that
you can get more exposure. And get more of the gas from the
formation. If you just drill a vertical well, there
will be a very short distance that you get out of the get of the scene, get into
the scene and that will produce some gas and then you'll be out of it pretty
quickly because these scenes are not very, doesn't have, they don't have very
much thickness. So we now can steer these drilling bits
and drill horizontally. But it won't come out very fast.
And not in any productive, economically productive way.
If you just drill that and wait for the gas to come out, in these shale
formations. But if you fracture it.
And fracking is a term that's been around for a long time and we've used fracturing
in wells for many many years. And like 40 years at least.
I went to fracking of an oil well up in West Virginia back in the.
The early 80s. It's a very, it's a huge operation to
pressurize this fluid and force it down, this liquid down in there at a very high
pressure, that fractures the earth. And fractures there, puts cracks in it.
And that allows passage ways for the gas to flow out of those shale formations and
into the pipe, into the oil pipe and up to the surface of the earth.
Now, the power doesn't stay there after you've drilled the well and it starts
producing. The tower goes away and it's a fairly
clean mundane pipe coming out of the ground with gas coming out mostly by
itself and just goes into a pipe line and you do have to have compressors to pump
it along the, the pipe line. Over long distances.
But that's how we're getting the gas out of shale right now.
And this is showing the footprint when you're drilling these wells.
It doesn't look anything like this when they start producing.
They take all this equipment away. But it's a pretty complex operation with
all the fracking that goes on. You have it bring in many, many trucks
and pumpers they call them, and pump all this fluid down and, and put it at high
pressure to fracture the earth. So it's got a pretty big footprint while
you're drilling the well. And they generally drill a lot of them in
a fairly small area to, to extract all the gas.
this is a picture of the, a typical pipeline this one's above ground.
Some of them are on the ground, some of them are below the ground.
But these are typically three Four feet in diameter and go for hundreds, even
thousand miles with compressor stations along the way that actually burns some of
the gas and gas turbines that drive the compressor that provides a pressure to
force it on through to the next compressor station.
So it's a fairly clean operation particularly once it starts producing.
Okay, so let's look at production. So we talk about all of the big lift that
we've had in the natural gas production. Here's the chart that shows on the
vertical scale the trillions of cubic feet per year of natural gas.
We generally measure natural gas in terms of cubic feet and these are trillions of
cubic feet. Well how much is a trillion? A trillion
is, is one with twelve, twelve zeros behind it.
So it goes thousands, millions, billions, then trillions.
Going up a factor of three every time, multiplying by a thousand.
So those are. 10 to the 12th cubic feet units.
And on the horizontal axis, we see where they chose the production of natural gas
from 1900 all the way to 2011. This day, that goes through the end of
2011. And you can see it builds gradually.
And, and the 50s as they started one, the one, started developing the
infrastructure and reached a peak in about 1972 or so and then it, it, it fell
a little bit and went up in around 1997 or so but has been fairly flat at around
17 or so. Only last year did we actually exceed the
production that we had in 1972 and you can see the rise there from, what is
that? About 2, 2002, 2003 somewhere in there.
There's been a fairly steady rise up to what where we're now producing about 22
trillion cubic feet per year. So we're getting, getting a rise.
Now You don't produce it unless somebody is willing to buy it.
Well where's the extra natural gas going in the last few years? Well, we'll see
the trend at, in a minute but, and where it's all going.
But primarily it's been the increase consumption electric power plants.
I talk about the fact that natural gas burns cleaner than coal from a CO2
viewpoint as well as the fact that it doesn't emit any soot that coal will
produces that you have to have filters basically that clean.
If you take that out, you have sulfur dioxides and nitrous oxides that have to
be taken out when you burn coal. natural gas has very little airy
emmissions, issues with it. So, nat, natural gas power plants is has
been seeing a real boom, particular on using gas, particularly for for cases
where. The price is so cheap as it is now.
The recession decreased the demand for natural gas in the manufacturing
industrial area as well as some other areas and so gas, gas is increasing some
but the prices hit a record low about a 2 months ago it actually fell under $2 a
million thousand cubic feet, million cubic, yeah thousand cubic feet.
About $2 a thousand cubic feet, which is a million BTU's if you want to talk in
BTU's. We'll talk about units later on, don't
worry about the units just the relative size right now.
and, so that, that just shows where we are.
By the way, how much gas is available and it's, I don't talk too much about the
reserves and how much is, still available to get The reason is is a heck of a lot
of speculation and to show how much speculation in it is, two of the major
entities that in our country that, that estimate natural gas reserves reduce the
reserve estimate, the available resource estimate.
That's in Earth that we can get out by 40% earlier in the year.
40% from one year to the next. They actually decreased it.
so the shale gas they decided wasn't as freely available and as much of is as
they originally thought. So, it's kind of reminds of Yogi Berra's
quote, the only time predictions get you into trouble is when they're about the
future. It's a difficult thing to predict.
How much is there? how much of this are we importing? How much of the added to
this production the last July was US gas production? Well here's the top of the
chart there, the blue top. The blue area shows the total
consumption. But we import some to and that's show in
red. You can see the imports are actually down
from 2006 and down from 2006 to 2011. Some of that has to do with our increased
production and some of it has to do with the recession.
But we import. we import about 14% of natural gas.
14%. Not a huge amount, but what's even better
regarding these imports is 90% of these, of this 14% of imports comes from Canada,
which is a friendly North American. Country that we don't have any
significant issues with. So gas, so energy independence we don't
think about as being too big a problem when it comes to importing things from
Canada. you'd like to from a balance of payments
viewpoint. Not have to import it, but from an
independence view point and security view point, this and them possibly cutting us
off we don't consider Canada, we consider Canada to be a pretty safe supplier.
So 98% of the US natural gas demand comes from North America.
About 85% from our own production and then 14% of what we use comes from Canada
of the imports, most of which is Canada. Other countries is are very small, very
small. so gas utilization, where do we use this
gas? Well, we use it in electric power, 34% of it, residential 21%, commercial
buildings 14%, and manufacturing industry 13, 30%.
In vehicles is point 1%. I put that on there.
We do use some for vehicles, it can be done, there's a lot of infrastructure
required and economic issues regarding that.
We'll talk more about that later. So that's how we.
Where we get it and where we get it from, the nature of natural gas and this shows
where we use it in the different segments of our economy.
And so again, we've completed coal and natural gas as the, as energy source,
discussing those and next time we'll start on oil which is a little more
problematic and a little more complicated.
Thank you.