by JustmeTX
Ignorance frightens me.
Of course our gas costs at least 8 times more as a way to supply Europe than Russia’s gas supply.
The gas must be liquefied first. That isn’t cheap. they have been building plants to liquefy natural gas all over the US for years. These plants use massive amounts of electricity to run a huge refrigeration/compression process to liquefy the natural gas. Then the LNG needs to be pumped onto special insulated LNG transport ships. Then the ships need to cross the Atlantic. Of course the LNG starts to warm as it crosses the ocean and any evaporation needs to be compressed and reliquefied aboard the ship. BOG (Boil off Gas compressors/reliquefiers). Of course this uses more power still, so some of the LNG is burned to make the power this requires.
Then the LNG refrigerated tanker arrives in Europe somewhere and pumps the cryogenic LNG to LNG re-vaporizers in Europe that have not been built yet, via terminals that have not been built yet. The revaporizers require heat as well, which use, yes you guessed it, more of the LNG to be burned to heat the cryogenic LNG and expand it back into a gas again.
By the way, our gas is a byproduct of our oil fracking. A certain amount must be either sold, flared, or recompressed back underground in order to continue producing the oil.
We have excess, but it is not infinite. So we will run short I believe if we are supplying all of freaking Europe with gas to heat and run their gas turbines to make power. Hence our natural gas prices to US consumers will be driven much higher. Not as high as Europe, but it will go higher. It will also be subject to the same interruption that happened to Texas during that cold winter snap that happened 2 yers ago. Our fracking fields in Texas were not winterized and were frozen, halting gas supplies, which caused our gas turbine power plants to shut down and we had power outages across Texas for 5 days straight. This will be waaay worse if we have Europe sucking on the same supply.
I am not sure, but I think it will take at least 2 years to build the infrastructure in Europe to accept such massive LNG deliveries. By the way, these LNG ships and all revaporization and intermediate storage buffer tanks represent a danger of going BOOM! so most sane folks in Europe are not going to want it near them.
The event of a tank blowing up
is referred to as a BLEVE. A BLEVE is kinda like a nuclear explosion in the scale of destruction. Good times.
SO most people are a little leery of all this equipment getting built any closer to civilization than you would like to be nuked from.
Then there is the issue of the Wobbe index of American natural gas vs the Wobbe index of gas that the European equipment has been designed for. It at least needs to be looked at. this is the energy content per cubic foot of gas, which dictates the orifice size of the burners and the combustion specifics of any commercial power gen units.
To raise the Wobbe index requires a higher C2, C3 content,
The US strips all the C2 and C3 out to recover the higher value ethane and propane, to use as feedstock for polymer plants to make polyethylene and polypropylene plastics. These plants line our gulf coast states and make lots of money and employ lots of Americans.
If that C2 and C3 needs to be kept in the natural gas to get the Wobbe index higher for Europe, it may run these polymer plants short of feedstock, affecting that part of the US economy.
The Wobbe index impacts peak temperatures reached when the gas is burned or combusted in a gas turbine, which then impacts NOX pollution production.
Supplying the gas from the US will cost more. a LOT more.
And this means the PRECIOUS CARBON FOOTPRINT that these nitwits will not shut up about will get MUCH WORSE for everyone. Price = efficiency of supply and usage.
Supplying natural gas directly from Russia is very efficient , cheaper and would have a MUCH LOWER CARBON FOOTPRINT. Russian gas does not need to be liquified which burns extra fuel, then shipped across the ocean, which requires extra fuel, reliquefied en-route, which requires extra fuel.
What we are embarking upon will have a MUCH HIGHER CARBON FOOTPRINT.
Re vaporized in Europe, which requires extra fuel, in equipment that took a vast amount of extra fuel to build.
Also, as we all know, fossil fuels are a finite resource.
Biden wants them all to disappear, so we can all live on magic fairy dust. This will deplete that precious resource about 5 times faster than we are depleting it today. (it scales rather directly with the cost).
This is a crime against humanity.
Using natural gas to make electricity used to be illegal in this country when I was a kid. Then that law was eased and as long as you were using every bit of the energy possible to generate electricity, that was acceptable. So they had what was called PURPA laws that required gas turbine power plants to install a heat recovery steam generator on the exhaust of the gas turbine, which made steam and thence made power with a steam turbine expander.
Then there was still some byproduct low value 10 psi steam that you could not make power from, so it had to be used to drive an absorption chiller running an ammonia or LiBr brine. These were initially required on such power plants.
Then that was relaxed.
But now we are forging ahead into a new era of hyper stupidity, and the captain of this new Colossus Titanic, is Joey “The Nose” Biden.
Depleting our natural gas resources at this new accelerated rate will also greatly hasten the day when we run out of fossil fuels. If we are not all driving nuclear powered cars and living in nuclear powered homes by then, humanity will be screwed.
By the way, here is a short video that shows a few BLEVE explosions.
Here is a plant blowing in China.
Not sure what they where working with, but it gives an idea of the scale we are talking about.