Natural Gas. Natural gas is a fossil fuel formed when layers of buried plants, gases, and animals are exposed to intense heat and pressure over thousands of years.
The energy that the plants originally obtained from the sun is stored in the form of chemical bonds in natural gas. Natural gas is a nonrenewable resource because it cannot be replenished on a human time frame.[1] Natural gas is a hydrocarbon gas mixture consisting primarily of methane, but commonly includes varying amounts of other higher alkanes and even a lesser percentage of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and hydrogen sulfide.[2] Natural gas is an energy source often used for heating, cooking, and electricity generation.
It is also used as fuel for vehicles and as a chemical feedstock in the manufacture of plastics and other commercially important organic chemicals. Natural gas is found in deep underground rock formations or associated with other hydrocarbon reservoirs in coal beds and as methane clathrates. Sources[edit] Natural gas[edit] Why Gas Is So Expensive Today (Hint: It’s Not Libya) - Chris Peterson. (tldr: read this ) If you’re visiting this page it’s probably because you’ve come here to read my post about the impact of commodity speculation on oil prices.
This post is gone now (although much of it has been mirrored in many places around the Internet, including here ). I decided to take it down from my blog because I was no longer satisfied with it. What I thought would be the ending point of a polemic became the starting point of a very helpful discussion in the comments of my site, reddit, different messageboards, etc. While I am still convinced that the primary reason for the volatility and height of oil prices is speculative, manipulative behavior on Wall Street and not the freedom fighters in the Middle East, I also realized that my post was conceptually incomplete and analytically insufficient. Fundamentally the point I was trying to make required much more information than I could contain in a blog post. Shaw, Exelon join NET Power to develop new tech for gas-fired power generation.
Gas could satisfy most of South Africa's power needs. This is important because South Africa's industrialisation was built on cheap and abundant electricity supplies, cheap and abundant coal reserves and the low cost of building coal-fired power stations back then.
The future will be different. Nersa, the electricity regulator, has calculated that the likely "levelised" costs (or the all-in price of electricity from a project over its lifetime, including operating expenses) of generating electricity from Eskom's two new power stations will be in the region of 97c/kWh. Eskom claims it is 80c to 90c/kWh. Whereas Eskom's wholesale price was just 44c/kWh in 2010, 97c/kWh is the new benchmark. Eskom's other problem is its environmental record. Coal is effectively 100% carbon, so if you burn one tonne of coal you produce 4.4 tonnes of CO2. We also need to price in carbon taxes. Becoming less carbon-intense looks hard to do. Injustice There is a significant degree of injustice here too.
Nuclear is much worse. Gas can do something else for us too.