Oil & Gas

We have so much natural gas that we could power the entire country for 300 years, yet we don't use hardly any of it. Why? Because we don't the distribution infrastructure and the use case for wholesale use at the personal level. What if we created gas pipe lines all over the country to all cities and then trucks could distribute to local gas stations with natural gas pumps? What if all power plants were converted to natural gas (no nuclear or coal needed). What if we then would then sell oil and coal to other countries and use that revenue to pay down our debt and be self sufficient? How many millions of people would be at work making the steel for the pipe lines, and the tanker trucks, and making the pumps, and the gas liquification plants and the fences and the earth moving equipment that would be needed and the technology to meter the gas and car companies to develop new gas turbines and retrofit existing engines at the factory and mechanics to retrofit existing on the road engines to natural gas? Talk about a stimulus!

Category:

Education

Tags:

• energy
• policy
• natural
• gas
• oil
• coal
• power
• economy
• stimulus

[MrShawn305]

@tonkacaptain I see what you mean, I totally agree with you about corn based ethanol and things like that. Not only does it take alot to produce, but it cuts into our already artificially sustained food supply.

[tonkacaptain]

@MrShawn305 Thank you for the response. You are making sense. I agree a engine well tuned is the best way to make efficient use of the fuel it uses to operate. My point stemmed from the idea of using a fuel like corn based Ethanol which takes more inputs to produce a output. I guess my main point is I wish we as a country would use the energy sources available to us that have the most BTUs and let free markets determine that.

[tonkacaptain]

@dectiri Agreed. Thank your for the articulate response.

[MrShawn305]

@MrShawn305 difference in stored energy. If you are talking specifically about the efficiency of an energy source as a whole, I agree with you that NG is the way to go. It seems like it requires less refining and burns very clean. Am I making any sense?

[MrShawn305]

@tonkacaptain I agree with you, however the only thing BTU content affects is not really efficiency, but instead power output. Efficiency really depends on how well the engine can take advantage of that BTU content. A well engineered and well tuned engine will be fuel efficient regardless of the fuel it is running on (as long as it is made to run on that fuel.) The same engine running on CNG will take more fuel to produce the same power output than if it were run on diesel fuel because of the...

[dectiri]

@tonkacaptain If these comment boxes were not so limited, making it necessary to cramp wording, it would make it much nicer to write normal articulate answers that detail an argument or story. If anyone finds out how a channel owner can modify that limit, let us know. Otherwise, you're stuck filling in articulate missing phrases and patching together boxes needing to be daisy chained as mine were.

Other websites vary, some more generous, some less. tweeting is not for depth & normalcy

[tonkacaptain]

@dectiri If your comments were better written they would make a your argument easier to understand....

[tonkacaptain]

@MrShawn305 Your comment about BTUs is so important, glad that you made it!. How efficiently a energy source is used and how much energy a source contains are two totally different matters!!! Not many can recognize a difference. These days it seems net inputs and outputs are not realized, only good intentions of ideas

[MrShawn305]

@SCRedoubt Caterpillar makes huge spark-ignition engines that run on natural gas as well as methane. Gas compressors in the fields use huge Waukesha engines that run right off the gas coming from the well the compressor is sucking from. Now diesel fuel does have ALOT more BTU content than natural gas does.

[greg2000ad]

Great video Sal..