Can natural gas sustain us?
That’s the question that Robert Rapier asked this morning when he posted How Much Natural Gas Do We Have to Replace Gasoline? on The Oil Drum– a forward-thinking, clean, green, truth-finding blogsite.
Like us in our search for understanding of the discovery of the Haynesville Shale in northwest Louisiana, The Oil Drum tends to look at all sides of the discussion to ascertain reasonable and surprising results.
As we similarly explore in the energy portion of our film Haynesville, Rapier tries to mathematically understand our nation’s reserves of natural gas (and other resources) to gague what we really are dealing with when it comes to new finds and increasingly efficient recovery technology. Here is an excerpt from his article:
“A number of people have rightly pointed out that a 100-year supply implies usage at current rates. But it got me to thinking about how much natural gas it would take to displace all U.S. gasoline consumption. So in the spirit of my year-ago essay Replacing Gasoline with Solar Power, I will do the same calculation for replacing gasoline with natural gas. The big difference between this calculation and the earlier one is that solar power still has some technical issues to resolve (e.g., storage) and electric vehicles are not yet ready for prime time. On the other hand we are perfectly capable, today, of displacing large numbers of gasoline-fueled vehicles with natural gas.”
Even if CNG (that’s compressed natural gas) cars are a point of contention for those thinking of the ultimate clean energy transportation picture, it certainly is interesting to see the energy potential stored in natural gas- for whatever purpose.
-Chris Lyon, Editor of Haynesville
Read “How Much Natural Gas Do We Have to Replace Gasoline?” on The Oil Drum