Saturday, May 30, 2015

Shale and All Of The Above



President Obama and Dr. Moniz love to tout they have an all of the above energy strategy.  Dr. Moniz posts this on his Facebook page and I often comment on the Moniz Facebook page.


Now let’s see what actually contributed to the all of the above strategy.  We know cellulosic liquid transportations fuels contributed nothing after the billions of dollars of taxpayer money that were invested.  We were supposed to have 3 billion gallons of the wonder fuel in 2015.  We will get approximately 1.5 million gallons this year, or one two thousandth of what was promised by our Department of Entropy.

PV and wind did contribute but we can thank China for driving down PV module costs.  Hence Mr. Obama and Dr. Moniz should include China in all of the above.  The one solar project Dr. Moniz loved was the Ivanpah Project and it is a disaster.  It kills birds, has low availability, and dispatches very expensive electricity to the grid (19 cents per kwh versus 9 cents for PV).  Ivanpah is owned by Google and NRG and should be dropped from all of the above.

Shale oil and gas can actually be highlighted as the major contributor to all of the above.  Shale natural gas is now 42 billion cubic feet per day.  This equals 124,428 times the contribution of cellulosic biofuels.  Yes shale without Mr. Obama’s support was 12.44 million percent more important in the all of the above strategy than cellulosic liquid fuels that received many billions of dollars in his hand out of our money.



Talking of utter failures in the cellulosic bio fool space, there is some news on KIOR.  Next week Wednesday the bankruptcy court will rule if they come out of Chapter 11 or go into Chapter 7 and the dog is finally put to sleep.  Khosla desperately does not want Chapter 7 as all of the documents will then be available to the State of Mississippi that is suing him and his cronies for fraud.  The US bankruptcy watchdog is siding with Mississippi.



In a nutshell shale natural gas contributed 12.44 million percent times as much as cellulosic liquid transportation fuels to the US’s all of the above energy strategy.  As Dr. Moniz spends an hour a day talking about the wonders of the alchemy of making diesel from corn stalks, he should spend 124,428 hours a day talking about the wonders of shale gas.  I doubt I could listen to Dr. Moniz talk for more than 124,428 nanoseconds.  124,428 hours is 3.6 trillion times longer than 124,428 nanoseconds.  US motorists and truckers collectively drive approximately 3.6 trillion miles a year.  One light year is 5.88 trillion miles.  Wow we all drive 61% of a light year each year and none of us have seen the light that the Department of Energy is completely lost in deep space. Major Tom Moniz will soon be making diesel from your lawn clippings.


3 comments:

  1. thanks for this. As i have noted to you before the majority of the reduction in US CO2 emissions is due to natural gas replacing coal. and shale gas has reduced gas prices from $8/MMbtu to about $3 - a win for the economy of $150 to $200 Billion.

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  2. yeah Colin Shale is a boon for the US Economy and also the global economy. LNG landed price in Japan is $9 per mmbtu not $18. The imputed cost of KIOR's diesel is $150,000 per mmbtu. They wasted a billion dollars and made 50,000 gallons of bio diesel

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