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Politics : The Donkey's Inn
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To: Mephisto who wrote (8429)3/12/2004 3:24:03 PM
From: Raymond Duray  Read Replies (1) of 15516
 
Hi mephisto,

Re: We certainly have a shortage of natural gas and gasoline now!

I hate to play Jeremiah here, but I'm afraid that the minor shortfalls we see today will seem like a golden era in a few years.

I'm not quite so worried about gasoline, though the Prudhoe oil shipments to Anacortes have been dwindling and will continue to do so.

But the real conundrum is natural gas. That is what is so worrying. Production in the continental U.S. fell 5% and production in Canada was even worse. Now there is a huge inflation in the cost of tubular goods, so production costs on new gas will be significantly higher, while in the meantime prospects continue to dwindle in the conventional natural gas fields and the environmental concerns with the development of coalbed methane are troubling.

LNG could save us, but today represents only 1% of supply of NG. Four new plants are under construction, which will double our LNG supplies by 2006(?). But this still leaves us short of natural gas. A good cold winter and we could see major disruptions in the market with the speculators going crazy, force majeure being declared by some suppliers and no where to turn for many Northern communities who have become nearly totally dependent on natural gas for space heating.

We got a taste of the future up in Redmond earlier this winter when several customers of the local utility suffered low pressure on their gas supplies and had their furnaces, water heaters and stoves cease to function though there was no "outage" per se. Simply not enough gas in the system to keep up the pressure.
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