Methane Abundance
No, it’s not the title of a new Howard Stern skit.
It’s what Rockefeller University’s Jesse Ausubel calls the world we live in today, over at Dot Earth, where Andrew Revkin is asking if this new shale gas report from EIA
completely ices the case that gas is now (more than was already clear) a fundamental game changer.
862 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas in the uS sounds huge.
We currently consume 24 trillion cubic feet per year in the US.
Lets convert 50% of our coal fired facilities to natural gas. That’ll only use up an additional 10 trillion btu’s per year.
Let convert 50% of our cars to run on natural gas.
1000 cubic foot of gas contains 1.02 MBTU’s. 1 barrel of oil contains 5.8 MBTU’s.
50% of our oil = 9 million barrels per day * 365 = 3,285,000,000 bbarrels per year * 5,8MBTU’s = 19,053,000,000 MBtu’s.
So we would need to use an addition 18.67 trillion cubic feet of natural gas to do that.
We are really rolling now….no more imported oil…1/2 the coal plants gone.
But wait…our total annual consumption is now 24 trillion we use now plus an additional 10 trillion to convert 50% of our coal fired plants plus and addtional 18 trillion to get off of imported oil. We are up to 52 trillion cubic feet per year.
862/52 = 16.57 years.
The life expectancy of a new automobile is currently 17 years. The life expectancy of all those residential natural gas furnaces is 30 years and the life expectancy of the gas plants is 50 years.
We don’t have 50 years worth of ‘technically recoverable gas if we replace 50% of our transportation and 50% of our electricity from coal with gas. We only have 17 years.