A Natural Gas Price Spike in the early 90s?
Posted on 02/24/2014 5:18:11 AM PST by thackney
No no and hell no. Fracing is not relatively new. It’s been around since 1947. Almost 67 years. I have worked on more then one frac
The article talks like this is a huge problem.
Actually, this is progress on a large scale in a backwater place in America.
New England was my home for 6 years 30 years ago. Back then, there was almost total dependence there and in NY upon heating oil. Natural gas pipelines were not allowed(they were trying to bring in the Iroquois p/l back then) due to NIMBY).
Coal was rarely used due to its particle discharge so utilities like ConEd barged in oil to burn for power generation.
To alleviate demands, two nuclear power plants, one on Long Island and one near Boston, had been constructed at costs of $3.5bn and +$5bn but were not allowed to start due to environmental lawsuits.
The only way to heat was to use heating oil. This caused the entire area to suffer from the whims of oil pricing. It is recalled that every year Congress would pass huge subsidies specific to these states to offset the cost of hearing oil.
Now with natural gas, there is cheaper energy and mixed supply. No longer are the subsidies needed. And people are getting high-paying jobs in Pennsylvania to extract and transport this gas.
Also, we have freed up oil to be used in transportation and lubes/plastics sector.
This is all good, for New England and America.
That's strange. I have read that the opposite is true.
It’s only liberals that create this problem.
Years ago, I worked for a small company in Western New York. After the energy bill got too big, they simply went to the parking lot, put in a gas well for about $10K, hooked themselves up and never paid for gas again. In fact, the gas company pays them for any excess that they put into the pipeline.
The Great Lakes Area is lousy with natural gas, why it isn’t being utilized is the fault of the liberals who block every energy production venture there is, with the exception of bird killing windmills, and bird frying solar panel farms that cost more in the long run than they are worth. They only work with subsidies.
This article is a fine example of how New England style cram downs are done.
1. Induce a capacity constraint through regulation.
2. Cause pain to one and all through invented “problems”.
3. Create roadblocks to any solution until the chosen solution is the one desired (in this case the wind project).
4. Implement over a 10 year time span using tax payers money.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
It will only be good until the price of natural gas skyrockets. We’re ignoring the price spike in the early pert of the 90’s and the reason that happened. We’ll see the same thing in the future.
A Natural Gas Price Spike in the early 90s?
In contrast, Fisher noted, the cost of renewable energy development is only up front because the fuel generating electricity, like wind or solar, is free and cannot be depleted.
Wind powered generators need lots and lots of maintenance to maintain even good operating efficiencies. That gets to be very expensive in the long term.
Solar cells are great when the sun shines. Not being in new England for a long time now I wonder how many solar productive days they’ve had for this winter and over a ten year average.
Lastly reliance on just one or two types of ‘fuel’ for producing electricity makes for easy bottlenecks in the transport of those fuels to the electrical producing stations.
My solution for these people? Diversify your means of producing electricity even more and take care to have the means of producing your own heat and electricity in case the power grid has ‘problems’.
Also it’s a lot easier to freeze to death in New England than it is to ‘bake’ and have massive heat stroke deaths in the population at large.
The Greens in Vermont wanted Vermont Yankee closed. Now they get to pay for it.
And yet they do everything in their power to make it hard to obtain it......the idiocy of the Northeastern liberal is astounding!!!
Any idea how to get older data for electrical utility consumption?
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n3045us2a.htm
Some older data in this presentation.
http://www.eia.gov/pressroom/presentations/sieminski_06052013.pdf
Heating with oil and propane is still the most common method outside the cities. We have a natural gas line here in Nashua, NH and north through Manchester and up to Concord. There is also a line that runs from Canada down through Maine right along the Atlantic coast. However, everyone else has the choice between heating oil and propane. Therefore, most people have some other kind of supplemental heat source for their home. Wood stoves and pellet stoves are the most popular.
In the last few years some companies have come out with wood pellet furnaces. These are fed by a hopper that is installed outside of your home. Therefore, you need a delivery company that can blow the pellets through a pipe to the location of the hopper.
Lastly, the least expensive fuel(unless you have free wood like me)is anthracite coal. Coal has become a dirty word and companies promoting it do not call it that anymore. None of these heating system alternatives are cheap to install. They can run from $2000(for a cheap stove) or $15K for the pellet furnace/hopper system. There have been state and federal tax credits available to help subsidize the cost. There is even a town in northern NH trying to get hundreds of people to switch to support the local pellet mill in their town. They are offering specific tax incentives to help subsidize the pellet furnace installation.
Wood pellet heat is much more common in Europe than it is in the US. There are many electric generation plants in EU using bulk wood pellets to fire their plants. There are several wood pellet plants planned for construction along the eastern US coast just to supply pellets to be shipped to Europe. Europe has mandated that their CO2 production must decrease. Therefore, coal consumption is going to go down. They will switch the electric generation fuel to either natural gas(from Russia or the ME)or wood pellets from North America.
I agree with your observations.
In my 50 years of living in Connecticut and Massachusetts, constant protests (even door to door in rural areas) were active against nuclear power, although it was the cleanest of all.
The huge majority of homes in the New England countryside use home heating oil (diesel colored differently than that at the pump, so it can be identified for a different tax bracket). Another 5% use wood stoves, but now the EPA is trying to regulate those.
Go figure.
They also do not want the Northern Pass power line from the Quebec through northern NH to go through. That is because Quebec had to flood lands and build dams to generate that hydro power that costs $.00005/KW. Seriously, they will probably end up having to bury a lot of this new proposed line because the people up north do not want it in their backyard/front yard because it will effect their view and property values. Honestly, I can’t blame them. I would not want a high tension power line in my back yard either. Therefore, PSNH(the local electric utility)will have to spend more money burying the line in some sections to get the new right of way through the NH house.
I was just looking at that. The utility industry went on a buying spree when they added natural gas fired capacity starting in the early nineties due to a need for more reserve capacity. Enron was rumored to have contracted for 200 units from GE before they went bankrupt.
From the graphs it looks like even though the utilities increased their generation capacity to a current 30% from natural gas today, they’ve taken advantage of using the plants as on demand sources.
Thanks for pointing out my error! What happens when the utilities replace the coal fired base load power plants with natural gas to maintain capacity in the face of EPA mandated coal plant shutdowns?
In the past coal was still there to allow the natural gas fired units to be used on a discretionary basis/only as needed.
IOW are the utilities moving to a point where they will be forced to rely more heavily on natural gas? The question then is what will happen to pricing?
There was a much older price spike (late 70s?) when the oil price controls ended and the oil embargo time. What was essentially a subsidy towards oil fired electrical generation went away and there was a big push to move more to natural gas.
But that price spike was a better sign of why government interference, either for or against any select energy source, is always a bad idea.
This also provides some info of older data:
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/showtext.cfm?t=ptb0802a
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