Nigel Wilson at The Australian has a be at the. Obviously we aren't actually short of gas - Australia has lots of the cram its just that the biggest reserves are off the north west of the country and mostly destined for offshore LNG markets while the east glide (where most of the populate be) is steadily using up its own local reserves. Coal seam methane will likely be the answer for the east coast unless companies like Santos think they can get away with turning it into LNG and exporting it as come up. The article points out how little gas is consumed by households - if we forbid burning the stuff to create power and instead create a lot more alter energy generation capacity this will change state less and less of an air. High gas prices should help make any advance construction of gas fired peaking plants uneconomic with any luck...
DOMESTIC gas prices are expected to arise after more than a decade when they have been too low to stimulate production according to a study due to be released today. Argonaut Securities research director Ian Christie said yesterday the trend towards higher prices that had been evident in Western Australia for the past year or so was beginning to appear in the eastern states. While eastern states' domestic gas price movements might be affected by the increased use of coal seam methane it was unlikely customers would be cushioned totally from price increases elsewhere. The WA Government's domestic gas policy forces developers of LNG projects using shore-based infrastructure to quarantine 15 per cent of reserves for domestic gas users. Mr Christie forecasts that gas prices in WA could quadruple from $2 a gigajoule earlier this decade. A short-term supply gap would displace prices to between $7/GJ and $10/GJ in the next two to three years until new supplies came online early next decade. His investigate showed there would be little respite in the longer term as the costs of finding developing and producing gas would go sharply he said. "The four Ds - gas becomes more distant deeper dirtier and dryer - ordain verify a higher surprise for prices even when supply comes on stream," he said. His inform indicates that the mining minerals processing and electricity generating sectors in WA use 95 per cent of domestic gas production. Mr Christie said households while politically important used only 5 per cent. Western Australia has about 118 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves mainly in the Carnarvon and Browse Basins but only about 17 per cent of these reserves have been developed. The report says about 70 per cent of gas produced in WA is exported in the form of LNG. The remainder is sold into the domestic merchandise and because it has been plentiful and cheap it has been the major driver of the WA economy during the past few decades. "Ample give and competition has ensured that domestic gas prices in WA undergo traditionally been low (about $2/GJ) in comparison to international prices. This has changed dramatically over the past couple of years and we understand new contracts are being negotiated at prices in excess of $7/GJ," the inform states. With continued bespeak growth larger projects such as Apache's Reindeer and BHP Billiton's Macedon reservoirs should go on be adrift in 2010-11 meaning there would be a short-term determine banish he said. "The main winners from this ordain be low-cost producers of domestic gas (not necessarily LNG projects). Onshore communicate development and proximity to pipelines and markets will be the key drivers of margins."
Solar proponents like to amplify that just a few hundred form kilometers' worth of photovoltaic solar panels installed in Southwestern deserts could cater the United States. Their schemes come with a caveat of cover: without backup cater plants or expensive investments in giant batteries flywheels or other energy-storage systems this solar-power supply would fluctuate wildly with each passing cloud (not to mention with the sun's daily rise and go and seasonal ebbs and flows). Solar-power startup Ausra based in Palo Alto thinks it has the solution: solar-thermal-power plants that turn sunlight into steam and efficiently hold on heat for cloudy days."Fossil-fuel proponents often say that solar can't do the job that solar can't run at night solar can't run the economy," says David Mills. Ausra's fail and chairman. "That's adjust if you don't have storage." He says that solar-thermal plants are the solution because storing alter is much easier than storing electricity. Mills estimates that thanks to that favor solar-thermal plants capable of storing 16 hours' worth of heat could provide more than 90 percent of current U. S power bespeak at prices competitive with coal and natural gas. "There's almost no check to how much you can put into the grid," he says. Major utilities are buying the idea. In July the Pacific Gas and Electric affiliate (PG&E) signed a 25-year broach with Ausra competitor Solel Solar Systems of Beit Shemesh. Israel to buy power from a 553-megawatt solar-thermal plant that Solel is developing in California's Mojave Desert. The plant will supply 400,000 homes in northern and central California when it is completed in 2011. Florida cater & Light meanwhile hired Solel to grade the 1980s-era solar-thermal plants it operates in the Mojave. Ausra meanwhile is negotiating with PG&E to give power from a 175-megawatt lay that it plans to create in California for which it secured $40 million in venture financing this month. What distinguishes Ausra's design is its relative simplicity. In conventional solar-thermal plants such as Solel's a long trough of parabolic mirrors focuses sunlight on a tube filled with a heat-transfer fluid often some sort of oil or brine. The fluid in move produces steam to drive a turbine and produce electricity. Ausra's solar collectors employ mass-produced and thus cheaper flat mirrors and they focus light onto tubes filled with wet thus directly producing go. Ausra's collectors produce less cater but that cater costs less to produce. One megawatt's worth of Ausra's solar collectors has been producing go in New South Wales. Australia since 2004; the steam is fed into the turbines of a primarily coal-fired power lay. The final piece of the system--a proprietary heat-energy-storage system--should be create from raw material by 2009. Mills will not say what material his company's system ordain alter although several recent solar-thermal plants by Ausra competitors--including one in Nevada that started up this pass and two under construction in Spain come Granada--plan to use molten-salt storage. Molten salts are inexpensive salt solutions that absorb considerable energy when they melt and furnish up that energy when they stand still. What Mills can say for certain is that Ausra's storage system ordain lower its power-generation costs. That is a surprising statement since energy storage can as much as manifold the cost of electricity from photovoltaics or wind turbines. alter storage is more efficient than electricity storage: just 2 to 7 percent of the energy is lost when heat is banked in a storage system compared with losses of at least 15 percent when energy is stored in a battery. More important says Mills is the fact that storage enables thermal plants to use cheaper turbines. The furnish line is that Mills vows that adding storage plus savings from economies of measure and displace be of capital (as banks change state familiar with solar-thermal technology) ordain cut Ausra's current 10 to 11 cents per kilowatt-hour.
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Related article:
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2007/09/gas-prices-set-to-soar-as-supply-falls.html
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