spec - Bless you for posting. HO offers such great work on tech issues even when they aren't on everyone's lips...at least not at the moment. Often his great Sunday efforts seem to go unnoticed. But hopefully he does have good readership that tends not to comment. I tend to respond only when he screws up. Obviously a very rare (if ever) occurence.

Oh we need gas until the food system radically changes. Corn prices are way up because of a short crop, and demand from ethanol (the largest gas-to-liquids process around).. This has in turn driven up ammonia fertilizer prices from $500-$550 a ton (farm delivered) to $750/ton for fall in Iowa because of demand for fertilizer.

If shale gas (and the entire drilling equipment supply chain) goes as the futures markets predict, we'll at least keep the input costs for ammonia low.

The danger is that if there's any hiccup in the gas supply chain (say a scandal about overstated reserves because a supposedly major reserve runs out), and gas goes up, we will then get hit with another spike in ammonia prices that will either push up the price of corn and food, or cause some kind of a serious mess in agriculture (repeat of the 80's farm crisis?). Nobody except the farmers noticed the farm crisis then because the economy seemed to be pretty healthy, but if it hits now, it will likely tip over a lot more than just agriculture.

Alan: nuclear power plants need some 10 years from inception to the first generation. And two Russian made nuclear power plants in Venezuela will put somebody more nervous than one in Nathanz, Iran.

On the other hand, in my conversations with Venezuelan friends, it is not so clear if the hydropwer shortages were just ddue to the effectively existing severe draught or also to lack of maintenance of turbines and other key pieces in the dams, apart from stealing HVAC power lines. Hard to say.

Thanks to HO for his contribution in the oil and gas prospects for Venezuela.

My compliments as well. This is shaping up to be an excellent series for those of us who want to understand energy issues at the national level.

The world is a very heterogeneous place and peak oil & gas will play out very differently depending on where you look.

Jon

Ha! Politicians "getting" the need for rail? Fat chance! Toronto just ran an election for mayor, and the main plank of the winner's platform was to "tear up all the electric streetcar tracks, to improve auto traffic lanes".

There's a huge amount of public informing remaining, and not as much time IMHO (no matter how far in the future the changed attitudes of voters may be required, BAU politics will ensure that the discussions and information will happen too late).

Battery energy storage down-sized to mass and volume of gasoline and diesel is bomb-like... Analogous devices, electric capacitors are known for blowing mechanics arms and hands off! LNG even with its problems still makes much more sense than batteries intended as prime movers in commercial vehicles, farm equipment, etc.

I was told that taking one of those huge capacitors found in amplifiers and the like, tying its leads to a standard 120V AC cord and plugging it in will cause a rather nice bang. Haven't tried it yet, myself. Probably dumb to do so in this paranoid post-911 climate. Come to think of it, anyone else think that the choice of day for 9/11 was just a sinister parody of the US emergency phone number - "let's give the infidels another reason to call 911!"

You'll see it start in California first. "Bottled air". Just like water.

And of course there are major explosive dangers with large volumes of NG at a work site.

I was thinking about the explosive dangers of LNG, well, actually, my lack of solid knowledge the dangers of LNG. What are the dangers of a LNG storage site - are we talking about a (I seem to remember the reference) "daisy-cutter" effect should one develop a leak - some kind of future super-catastrophe? What kind of regulations shall there be for rolling LNG tanks through towns? The US rails are so ill-maintained, should I be picking up my family and moving farther than the two miles from the tracks we already are?

why not just use AIR for this purpose?

oxygen combusts with fuel at a partial pressure above about 1 atm. insitu combustion has/is being used in a limited number of applications. and then there is that thai process for recovering bitumen from canadian oil sands.

Why not use carbon dioxide for pressure maintenance and reservoir flooding, instead of NG?.....But is it simply a question of local CO2 availability?

yes availability at an economical price is the problem.

Why is NG used for maintaining reservoir pressure?

ng is used for pressure maintenance, but the real benifit to ng injection in an oil reservoir is the superior recovery when ng is used to displace oil at a pressure above miscibility pressure. at high enough pressure ng becomes miscible with the oil and displacement is very efficient. the same is true of co2 flooding, displacement efficiency is high above miscibility pressure.

you also mentioned nitrogen and nitrogen is sometimes used for pressure maintenance. nitrogen has also been used for miscible displacement of oil at high(above miscibility) pressure. nitrogen can be generated cryogenically from the air, but that too consumes natural gas.

most of the ng used for pressure maintenance or miscible displacement, either one, is not lost and is recovered at the end of the project. sometimes called blow down.

it all boils down to maximizing present value of the resource. maximizing present value does not generally mean maximizing recovery.

Why not use carbon dioxide for pressure maintenance and reservoir flooding, instead of NG? I realize that CO2 is already used in some such cases. But is it simply a question of local CO2 availability?

Well I can't speak to Venezuela's situation, though if the country is getting 73% of its power from hydro (see Alan's comment) it would seem large volumes of CO2 may not be available or at least not available anywhere close to the oil fields that need the pressure.

On the North Slope, natural gas is what is there. It is found near the oil so its relatively cheap to pump out of one hole and into another nearby one. The only talk I've heard about getting a CO2 supply to Alaska's North Slope was when it would be a byproduct of a plan to develop more Alaska coal by setting up liquefaction plant/s. It seems big, long (hundreds of miles) loop/s of pipes and some hydro were all in the presentation on the subject when it was given to the state legislature last year.

joss - The simple answer is that if you don't have CO2 available at a viable economic cost you can't use it. Yes...the purchase price of buying CO2 from a generator might be cheap...maybe even free...might even pay you to take it. But the potential several hundreds of millions of $'s to lay the pipeline from the source to the field is what will typical kill such a plan. You can generate or acquire it but that will be an economic cost. On top of that acquistion cost is the injection cost. The compression of any gas to a sufficient level to inject into the higher pressure reservoir often represents a major expense. So if the NG exists at a higher pressure than CO2 it has that additional advantage. Another big advantage is that eventuall much of the injected NG is recovered and sold. And then what do you do with the CO2 produced with the oil: release it to the atmoshpere or spend money to dispose of it properly?

N2 is a good choice if the economics work. Mexico's Cantarell Field has the largest N2 generating plant that has ever existed. But forget air. Two problesm with air. First the little one: it takes a huge amount of energy intensive horse power to raise air at atmospheric pressure to the appropriate injection pressure. I know those economics well due to my experience with the really big problem with air injection: it DESTROYS THE OIL. This is actually an enhanced oil recover method developed in the 1960's. Air is injected into a pressure depleted oil reservoir and the result is "in situ combustion". The air oxidizes (burns) the oil. This also produces a multiple volume (of the injected air) of combustion gases, including CO2, and increases the reservoir pressure. The process consumes around 15% of the oil in the reservoir. While it can greatly increase recoveries in certain types of reservoirs it is probably the most complex and difficult reservoir management method ever attempted in the oil patch. So difficult that the majority have been net money losers. I tried for years to talk several companies into trying it but frankly it scared the hell out of them. N2 injection is more expensive (and only works well on a very large scale) but is much easier/safer.