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.