CCE 6 Final

This is Episode 6 of "Climate Changes Everything" discussing ancient solar energy in the form of natural gas. The episode explores the complexities, benefits, and costs of natural gas, as well as its application in gas-fired power generation. It delves into the history, life cycles, and ecosystems of natural gas, as well as its environmental impacts and economic benefits. The episode also touches on the transportation and conversion technologies used for natural gas. Overall, it analyzes the potential for natural gas to play a role in a post-coal world and raises questions about its environmental impact and future opportunities. Hello, and welcome back to Climate Changes Everything. This is Episode 6, Ancient Solar Energy Part 2. In the last episode, we dug into a common form of ancient solar energy in the solid form of coal. Its stark realities, its tremendous benefits and tremendous costs, its surprising complexities, and we dropped a big hint at actionable opportunities for a prosperous, equitable post-coal world. White hats, black hats, gray hats, and a lot of them. Today, we're going to start to drill down on the gaseous version of ancient solar energy, methane, a.k.a. natural gas, and its application in the climate pivotal power system in the form of gas-fired power generation. For simplicity's sake, I'm going to call it natural gas or just gas. Not because I think that's a great name. I think fossil gas is more accurate, and methane is even better than that. But most of us are used to the name natural gas, and this stuff is complex enough without also renaming things. That said, I'll probably touch on the branding aspect of the name natural gas as we go along. Natural gas is relatively new to the power system, but has quickly emerged as both the swing vote in the race to decarbonize electricity and as a high-impact, multi-position player in the power system. As we'll see, gas is a relatively simple form of energy in and of itself, but that's pretty much the only simple thing about it. A lot of necessary complexity, a lot of compromises. In fact, the necessary complexity of natural gas, its compromises, its white, black, and gray hats make coal look positively simple by comparison. So we're going to take at least a few episodes to work across the history, life cycles, and ecosystems of natural gas, the technologies used to transport it and convert it into electric power, its value to the power system as a whole, its environmental impacts during operations and pre- and post-operating life, local job creation, ancillary economic benefits, and local environmental justice issues, and some perhaps surprising opportunities going forward. Will natural gas end up wearing a white hat, a black hat, a gray hat, or perhaps all three stacked awkwardly on top of one another like a NASCAR driver? Let's drill down. So what is this stuff, really, that most of us rely on but very few of us energy geeks like me accepted know much about? First and foremost, natural gas is a fossil fuel. Remember the combination of ancient organic matter, pressure, and time that begets the coal we have today? Natural gas is an adjacent branch on the same family tree. In other words, the inputs and processes that form natural gas are fairly similar, differing from coal and oil for that matter in what the source materials are and under what conditions they're converted from organic matter to coal, oil, and or natural gas over geological time. These processes are complex and fascinating, but alas, beyond the scope of this podcast. And if any of you still have the circle of life singing in your head, my sincerest apologies. So after the same few hundred million years, the result is a colorless, odorless, and highly flammable gas, basically methane, that turns out to be incredibly useful for making things, cooking things, and over the last few decades in particular, as a fuel for making electricity. Like its own dinosaur era feedstock, it is pretty much found all over the world at varying depths, sometimes together with coal or oil, and sometimes not. Depending on those conditions, it often needs some processing to remove a lot of the non-methane elements. The end product is then really, really useful for all that heating and making. It's amazing stuff. And like coal, human beings and natural gas go back a long, long, long time. Thousands of years ago, the ancient Persians built religions around the eternal flames that sprung from the seeps like those in what is now Baku in Azerbaijan. Over in ancient Greece, the famous Oracle at Delphi was located right above a gas seam. That naturally occurring leak kept the Oracle's eternal fires burning and, according to some theories, fumes that helped induce the Oracle's visions. If that's true, and given how seriously the Greeks seemed to take those visions, I wonder what ancient history, and thus much of our world today, would look like without methane-addled visions shaping policy decisions. Of course, it wasn't just cool eternal flames. In 211 BC, the Chinese drilled the first recorded natural gas well. 211 BC, apparently 150 meters, or about 500 feet deep, which is absolutely mind-boggling for the time. They used bamboo poles to channel the gas, which was then burned to make heat, and with that heat, boil off valuable salt from saltwater. Given how much gas must have leaked from those bamboo poles, I have to imagine that those salt workers were feeling pretty visionary as well. So the heating properties of natural gas were well known. Effectively harnessing natural gas, though, was a different matter. Unlike its cousin coal, it does not come in convenient chunks. Unlike its cousin oil, it does not sit nicely in a bucket until we're ready to use it. So, apart from some limited applications, it was basically a nuisance until, historically speaking, quite recently. It literally got in the way of the valuable stuff, which was oil and coal. So, at the time, any gas that happened to come up was burned off right then and there in a giant torch. The industry term is flaring, and it's very descriptive, a massive torch lighting up the sky. Now, environmentally, flaring is better than simply letting the gas go unburned, as methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, after all. But that big burn with all the greenhouse gases and uncontrolled chemical and particulate nasties that that entails. Another example of being able to do it better, but not necessarily being able to do it well. But if it was just gas, back then, with no way to get it to an end user, it was quite rationally just left in the ground. The value was obvious, but distance was the enemy of opportunity. No technologies existed to efficiently transport it to a city or a factory where that value could be realized. The value was so obvious, in fact, that many places processed coal into a kind of natural gas called town gas, where it could be used for streetlights and other urban uses. So the curse of distance kept natural gas at the margins. Through the 1800s, coal and oil were our dominant energy inputs. Then pipeline technologies really started to advance in the early 20th century, allowing more gas to be transported over greater distances as technology innovations allowed pipe diameter to increase, along with innovations in pipe fabrication, technologies for effectively coupling sections together without leaks, and reliable pumping to keep everything moving. Then came the oil crises of the late 60s and 1970s. We'll cover oil in our next ancient solar energy segment. It's the liquid kind of ancient sunlight, after all. But for now, suffice it to say, it was the end of the world as we knew it, and we did not feel fine. Hydrocarbons had been weaponized against the economies and societies that had come to depend on them. Not unlike Vladimir Putin in Europe today, with natural gas as it happens, but we're not quite there yet in our timeline. Slowly but surely, as other forms of energy like oil became more expensive, natural gas went from nuisance to product, from cost to be avoided, to revenue to be gained. Hundreds of millions of years after it began to form, and thousands of years after it was first recognized by humans, natural gas finally got off the bench and into the game. And what a game it is. First and foremost, those large, long-distance pipelines have gone a long way to mitigate the curse of distance. In a self-reinforcing cycle, access to markets via those pipelines beget additional exploration and production of natural gas to create more supply. No longer a nuisance getting in the way of oil production, natural gas became a truly valuable commodity in its own right. More supply to more places beget bigger markets as the full potential of natural gas as both a source of heat and a key raw material for industry became to be realized. To make vital things from modern life, plastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, fabrics, stuff, food, clothes, and medicine, to put it another way. Soon, a different curse, call it the curse of accessibility, joined the curse of distance. As on the production side, the easiest to access gas was understandably getting scarcer and scarcer. There was more gas both in hard-to-reach areas and deep underground, but we lacked the technology to cost-effectively access it. On the transportation side, those finite pipelines themselves became a choke point. Pipelines can go a long, long way across continents and increasingly undersea between landmasses where conditions and technology permit. Continental and multi-continental markets, like Russian natural gas being piped across to Western Europe, North African gas going under the Mediterranean to Western Europe, Alaskan gas coming down to the contiguous United States. Changing the global economic and geopolitical landscape along with it as every nation in the value chain became hooked on their link in that chain. Consumer nations for their societies and economies, seller nations on their revenues, the employment, the economic soft power, and the often regime-legitimizing subsidies and regime-maintaining arms and armed forces. Global investors, lenders, and financial markets on the huge infrastructure investments that were required. And of course, national real estate, like otherwise empty deserts that were suddenly strategic assets. So a lot like oil, except that it was not a global market, a truly global market, not yet. Oceans, big oceans, were still barriers to supply and demand. Then three letters changed everything. LNG, liquefied natural gas. As often happens, insatiable demand drives up prices, higher prices make less accessible reserves more economically attractive, and human ingenuity figures it out. In LNG's case, literally how to convert natural gas to a transportable liquid, albeit under very specialized circumstances. It was a game changer. As long as market prices were high enough to pay for it, so long cursive distance. Here's a quick overview of how that works. First, chill the gas, like really chill it as in minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, which is colder, even colder than the Chicago winters I grew up with. As it gets colder, it gets denser, meaning that a lot of gas, a lot of heating value could now fit in a much smaller space, as long as it was kept wicked cold, of course. Those spaces in turn are massive and of course very specialized and expensive ocean going ships. Liquefying the gas to put it on a ship and deliquefying it on the other end requires massive and of course very specialized expensive terminals. But the numbers penciled out pretty quickly, in infrastructure terms at least, natural gas was a global market. The curse of distance had been obliterated. In hindsight, it's funny that when massive easily accessible natural gas reserves were discovered in the Gulf State of Qatar in the 1970s, the Qataris were upset that it wasn't oil. Fast forward a few decades and gas exports have made Qatar one of the wealthiest nations in the world and the hosts of the World Cup along the way. So why were they upset back then? It was a classic case of the curse of distance. There was simply no way to move significant quantities of natural gas cost effectively from the gas fields of Qatar to the markets in Asia and Europe. Plenty of gas, easy to access, but the curse of distance. Building a pipeline wasn't feasible, too much distance and too many competitors and outright enemies along the way. Then LNG changed everything. The Qataris and their customers invested in all that infrastructure, liquefaction, specialized ships, offloading and regasification. Suddenly the Qataris were and are making an absolute mint, selling massive amounts of gas to Europe and Asia. Like 9.2 billion dollars of the stuff in just the first eight months of 2022. That's just one example, but it's a vivid one. So natural gas had markets galore, but the easy gas, easy to access gas, was getting scarcer, so prices became higher and more volatile. In the next episode of Climate Changes Everything, we'll work on that curse of accessibility, courtesy of the wonder twin technologies of hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, and horizontal drilling. Thanks for listening and I'll see you then.