Does America and the rest of the world have enough natural gas and oil to replace Russia?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

They can sell what they have to their buddies in China and India.

[gab13by13]

1. I understand you are talking short term but,

50 years ago president Richard Nixon gave a speech proclaiming that the US needs to wean itself off fossil fuels so that we won't be held hostage by foreign governments.

[lagomorph777]

3. Nixon was a librul pinko.

Seriously though, his policies were often to the left of today's "centrist" Dems.

[edhopper]

7. And Carter put in place policies that would do that

Reagan ended all of it.

[Scrivener7]

2. How about conservation? We are petroleum hogs.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

4. We have to transition to green energy

In the interim we need to ween our friends from being dependent on Russian energy. My question is if that's possible.

[roamer65]

5. Rationing will occur due to higher prices.

[ret5hd]

6. All I know for certain is...

at night you can drive by practically any oil/gas field in the US and see them flaring off excess gas.

Gas is SO PLENTIFUL here that it is cheaper to waste it than to transport and sell it.

[DetroitLegalBeagle]

8. I don't think production is the problem

I think transportation is. Natural gas needs to be liquified in order to be transported by ship. Loading and unloading requires specialized terminals at each port. I think the bottleneck is the lack of these terminals in Europe, since they primarily rely on pipelines. I think NYT had an article on this and said it would take 3-5 years to build the necessary facilities. We can helps some, but the capacity is limited by not having enough of these terminals.

[MineralMan]

9. Yes, probably, for now. The real problem is distribution.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

13. TY.

[Wounded Bear]

10. Wrong question...The question should be: Can we wean ourselves from fossil fuels fast enough...

to save the fucking planet in some livable form?

Right now I think the betting money is on "no."

[DemocratSinceBirth]

14. Yes. But at this very moment Putiin is using energy to further his irredentist agenda.

[taxi]

18. Let's go with no as the bet, and bet against it.

[hunter]

11. There's more than enough natural gas in the ground to destroy the world as we know it...

... if we use it as fuel. It's best we leave it in the ground.

The only realistic replacement for natural gas is nuclear power. Nuclear power is a mature 75 year old technology. We know how to do it safely and the danger profile of nuclear waste is much lower than fossil fuel waste and many "renewable" energy schemes.

Germany's aggressive renewable energy schemes, supported by Russian natural gas, were an environmental and political catastrophe that many people predicted. Like the increasingly adverse impacts of global warming it just happened sooner than expected.

[lagomorph777]

17. Hoo boy.

Natural gas was a way to weasel out of renewables.

Nuclear is not renewable.

Solar and wind are way cheaper than any non-renewable source.

More work is needed on storage of course.

[hunter]

20. Um, no.

Hybrid gas-wind-solar energy schemes will only prolong our dependence on natural gas, ultimately increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses that get dumped into the atmosphere.

I've written about this subject a lot here on DU.

I used to be a radical anti-nuclear activist. I'm not anymore.

I'm still a radical environmentalist.

You're welcome to check out my journal here, and posts about energy and the environment going back to 2002.

[lagomorph777]

21. I think you misunderstood me.

You seem to think the only way to handle intermittent renewable sources is by burning natural gas. I am making the opposite of that point. The answer is multiple storage technologies, not just burning stuff.

We've had this debate before though. I get it. You like non-renewable nukes. You don't believe in storage.

[hunter]

22. What sorts of "storage" are you considering?

None of them are viable yet at the scales required, not even enough to support existing wind and solar installations.

I don't think it's wise to bet the future of our civilization on technologies that might exist some day.

We need to quit fossil fuels now.

[lagomorph777]

23. Same as I've said before.

Batteries; at this point flow batteries look promising.
Flywheels
Pumped hydro
Compressed air
Thermal

Each of these is being explored in multiple variants. Most likely, all of them will be used, in different combinations depending on local needs.

Even with current state of the art, conventional lithium batteries can store 24 hours of energy for a house, in a space the size of a fridge.

If you think nuke development (safe nukes that could actually gain approval) is way ahead of storage development, you are probably over-optimistic. I follow nuke stuff somewhat; lots of interesting ideas but not a lot of shipped products yet. Same as storage.

Long-term, nukes might help for a short while as a stop gap. But they will hang around for millennia as a problem.

[hunter]

24. You can look at the California ISO and ponder how you might remove natural gas from the equation...

... using actual numbers. All the data is open.

http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

I picked California because it has a very well developed renewable energy infrastructure and very significant hydroelectric capacity that can be utilized for grid stabilization, although this hydroelectric capacity is likely to fade as global warming gets worse.

I've imagined a few large scale energy storage schemes myself, mostly involving desalinated water that is pumped uphill, or fanciful geoengineering projects involving California's Salton Sea, but it's clear to me that nuclear power plants could displace natural gas entirely with the smallest environmental footprint.

If certain sites are committed to nuclear power generation for millennia, using fissionable materials that have already been mined, that sounds like the very essence of sustainability to me.

It's entirely disingenuous to say that nuclear power plants can't be built and that used fuel can't be stored safely for future reprocessing when it's already happening.

Sure, I eagerly await the development of Small Modular Reactors that can be manufactured in factories and installed almost anywhere, or fast neutron reactors that can use fuels like thorium or depleted uranium, or high temperature reactors that could be used for carbon neutral chemical synthesis, but those are not essential to my arguments.

[yellowdogintexas]

12. wiki article here with pros and cons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare

There are pros and cons to flaring; one of the most important uses of the process in the field is to prevent rig explosion. In many oil fields the wells are fairly close to one another and an explosion at one wellsite could set off a chain reaction down the line. Plus you really do not want all that gas floating around unchecked in the air around an oil field; it would not be healthy for the workers.

I have this vague memory that the gas is really not suitable for commercial use but I am not certain about that

Something which I did not know until I read this article is the conversion of the methane to C02!

My small home town in KY had a subsurface gas pool; there was a significant flare behind my grandfather's grocery/hardware store. It was very stinky! My dad said it had burned for as long as he could remember; I think it finally burned out during the 80s. There was not enough gas to warrant production and without a flare there was always a risk of gas buildup. I think the gas pool was discovered when the town was drilling for water. The well was capped and the gas vented out.

My husband is a petroleum geologist and he had great fantasies of getting gas or oil out of that pool. It would not have been worth the trouble and expense, and would have pretty much wrecked what remained of the downtown (such as it was).

Yes there are good and valid reasons to not do it, but believe me if gas production were profitable the developers would be right on it.

[ProfessorGAC]

25. To Be Clear...

...everything we use for fuel, petro, natural gas, coal, renewable oils,...become CO2 upon combustion.
Natural gas is actually better on an energy/unit mass basis, in that it releases 44g of CO2 for every 16g of methane, releasing 55MJ/kg. (About 62 moles or 890,000 joules per mole.) About 2.75kg CO2 per kg of methane burned.
Gasoline has a molecular mass of around 114, on average, so around 8.8 moles in a kg. A kg of gasoline releases 45 MJ of energy. But, gas generates 352g of CO2 for each 114g burned. About 3.1kg CO2 per kg of gasoline.
So, we're 3.1 vs. 2.75, to get 81% of the energy.
That's why NG is promoted as greener. Because it is, but it still puts millions of tons of CO2 into the air every day.
It's green-ER, but not green from a climate POV.
But, that conversion to CO2 is not something unique to natural gas. Anything burned, if it is carbon based, releases CO2.

[Spider Jerusalem]

15. No, and we shouldn't try to

the actual question you should be asking is "does Europe have sufficient wind, solar, and geothermal resources to replace Russian natural gas". We have recently had +40C temperature anomalies at BOTH POLES, simultaneuously, which should probably be front page news everywhere but hasn't been because impending climate catastrophe is bad for ratings and doesn't make people want to buy stuff.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

16. Putin is using Europe's reliance on Russia's food and crude to advance his irredentist goals.

Germany is discussing rationing gas. What if Putin splits the alliance? My raison d'etre is to isolate Russia as long as it's a malignant actor on the world stage.

[Zeitghost]

19. Germany closed down over a dozen Nuclear Power Plants

With the result being more green house gases in our atmosphere and more money in Russian pockets as well as more reliance on Russia in general.

Not a great move in hindsight.