Posted on 02/25/2020 10:49:05 AM PST by rktman
I don’t imagine the administration is all that happy either. Trump promised to bring back coal. This isn’t helping.
Yes, that’s how I always thought it was.
I got thrown off track by talk of pipelines and figured someone had created something miraculous.
Natural gas will continue to crush ALL other forms of energy production for the rest of the life of anyone reading this. We already have about 60 years worth of reserves that are easily recovered from conventional and - especially - shale formations. The exploration to production process is now so efficient that it HAS to retain its tremendous cost advantage (and can only get better as the technology gets better - and a lot of that tech is based on microchips which WILL get better, and fast).
For a better synopsis than I could possibly present, read Peter Zeihan’s “The Absent Superpower.”
FYI, I’m not him, nor in his family, nor an employee - I just read the book.
I don’t think Mr. Trump committed the folly of promising to make coal profitable, he just (AFAIK) promised that his government would stop making it unprofitable.It would be easy for a voter to leap from the latter to the former - but while the latter was easy to fulfill, efforts directed towards the former would be subject to the interplay of various behaviors in society (usually referred to as “the market”).
Be nice if someone found significant NG resources close to the coal deposits in W. Va for the folks there to make a living exploiting . . .
I doubt many frackers are getting Black Lung . . .
As to the administration not being unhappy about NG - well, Mr. Trump has boasted enthusiastically about American “energy independence,” lately. And that is all due to fracking.
Modern fracking — horizontal hydraulic fracturing — combines two technologies in a way that only a few decades ago would have sounded more like witchcraft or alchemy than a viable business proposition. It was devised in the late Nineties by Texas entrepreneur George Mitchell, the son of Greek immigrants (his father had been a goatherd), who set out to solve a seemingly impossible problem: how to make the richly abundant but apparently inaccessible pockets of gas trapped in America’s shale formations economically viable.IMHO George Mitchell should receive (posthumously, unfortunately) a Nobel Prize for his work. Certainly a Presidential Medal of Freedom award by Mr. Trump would be suitable . . . and would draw the battle line against the anti-progress “progressives.”After spending $6 million on research and development, Mitchell found the solution. He combined the existing process of fracking (invented in the 1940s) — forcing liquid at high pressure into the shale so as to break up the rock and release the gas — with horizontal drilling. Everyone told him he was wasting his time and money but Mitchell was vindicated. As the Economist wrote in 2012, the year before his death, ‘Few business people have done as much to change the world as George Mitchell.
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