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To: energyplay who wrote (46985)	3/4/2004 12:35:47 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Re: We could also use about 6 LNG terminals. Currently LNG takes care of about 1% of consumption in the continental U.S. Adding six new terminals, which are already under construction or deeply advanced into the planning stages, will, at best, double or possibly triple the present capacity. Considering that we had a 5% shortfall in production in 2003, and we can hope to get the new LNG facilities online no sooner than 2008 boosting their share of the overall production to 3% of demand, there doesn't seem to be enough relief coming from that avenue. For the life of me, I cannot figure out the vast inertia with regards to a Prudhoe-MacKenzie-Calgary pipeline. It is the most sensible relief for our supply shortfall. It's almost as if Cheney, Evans and the Blue-Eyed Sheiks of Houston want to give the entire continent "a good sweating", just as they orchestrated a small one (mostly in electricity) in California that helped destroy that state's finances. *** Re: There's a real failure of planning with all the new NG burning plants. In this instance, the failure is a "market failure". Wall Street greedily saw individual NG powered generation stations as nifty profit centers. But their calculation was devoid of common sense as to real market demand, transmission difficulties for electricity over a T&D system that is now an orphan of the industry and the exploding cost of natural gas. The Wall Street marketers were simply incapable of dreaming big enough in order to come up with the $20 to $30 Billion that a Prudhoe pipeline will be capitalized at. This scale of investment used to be the realm of federal government (think BPA and TVA), but we now have some ideological idiots in power who can't see the necessity of society harnessing its collective wealth for a common good. The privatizers are equal parts fools and cleverly rapacious speculators when it comes to the future energy security of the continent. But one thing they are not, they are not wise men in the traditional meaning of that phrase.