Natural Gas, Russian Propaganda & The Environmental Movement

2019 photo of natural gas drill rig in Lancashire - Cuadrilla/PA

Some people are painting Russia as a big bad villain for invading Ukraine. I think the invasion was an entirely predictable response to our pushing to add Ukraine to NATO. Anyway, Putin has done it and now people are crying for sanctions, like not buying any more natural gas from Russia. In the middle of winter, when Russia supplies something like 30% of Europe's supply. 

Now, how is it that Russia got to be such a big supplier of natural gas to Russia? Could it be that they funded environmental groups to protest against anything that would make Europe energy independent? Does that sound like one of those crazy theories about Russia meddling in Western affairs that some people have been pushing? 

Michael Shellenberger (Twitter) and Matt Ridley (The Critic) seem to think it's real:

The Russians also lobbied behind the scenes against shale gas, worried about losing their grip on the world’s gas supplies. Unlike most conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in Western politics, this one is out there in plain sight. The head of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the Russians, as part of a sophisticated disinformation operation, “engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations — environmental organisations working against shale gas — to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas”.

The Centre for European Studies found that the Russian government has invested $95 million in NGOs campaigning against shale gas. Russia Today television ran endless anti-fracking stories, including one that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”. The US Director of National Intelligence stated that “RT runs anti-fracking programming … reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability.” Pro-Russian politicians such as Lord Truscott (married to a Russian army colonel’s daughter) made speeches in parliament against fracking.

Makes me wonder if this whole Ukraine debacle was engineered to maximize Russia's profits from natural gas because some guys in the international billionaires club have a big stake in Gazprom*, the Russian natural gas company.

* Gazprom has their own web page, but for some reason it's not loading right now. You don't suppose somebody cut the wire, do you?

Via ZeroHedge

Ukraine

Russian military engineers install a pontoon bridge over the Oka River

This photo is from a Russian military exercise on the Oka River. The closest it comes to Ukraine is about 200 miles when it goes through Volgograd on the way south to the Caspian sea. It looks cold. The photo accompanied a Defense Blog post about a similar bridge being setup on the the Pripyat river in Belarus. That river runs by the Chernobyl disaster zone which is only about 70 miles north of Kiev. Belarus and Russia are allies, so if you were a paranoid conspiracy theorist (or even just an amateur war gamer) you might take this as evidence that the Russians are indeed preparing to invade Ukraine.

For a while I was taking Putin at his word that he had no intention of invading Ukraine, but then I heard from California Bob who studied Russian in college and worked in Eastern Europe for a year or two. He says Russians are liars. Duh (smacks forhead). Of course they are. The ones we are hearing from are politicians and diplomats and you know the old saw about how to tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving. Why should we expect eastern politicians to be any different than western ones? Of course he is lying.

This morning it finally struck me why Russia would want to invade Ukraine. Up till now it made no sense to me. Why would he want to start a war over this place? But now I realize that it is the continuous provocation by the USA that has prompted this response. They asked us to leave the Ukraine alone, but we keep pushing to align Ukraine with the west. You keep poking the bear and eventually the bear is going to come out of his cave swinging his big bear paws.

I don't quite understand why we (the USA) are pushing NATO on Ukraine, other that we want to pick a fight with Russia. It's kind of weird. Maybe somebody is thinking long-term strategic planning for world domination, but then I read other reports that say Russia is on the ropes with a falling population and GDP. I suspect there are some people who just can't bear the thought of having a competitor. Kind of reminds me of the mean old son-of-a-bitch from There Will Be Blood - "I have a competition in me. I want no-one else to succeed." It's not enough to just beat them, you have to stomp them into the ground.

Major Russian Gas Pipelines to Europe

Then there's the whole natural gas pipeline thing. Ukraine is getting roughly $3 billion in tariffs on the natural gas being piped from Russia, across Ukraine to Europe. Rumor has it that the younger Biden had something to do with that and that's why Ukraine paid him so much money. This is just nit compared to the $200 billion* that Europe pays for Russian natural gas. 

Ukraine, Chernobyl (red marker) and Volgograd (far right)
Black line shows 820 mile east-west distance across Ukraine
Click to embigenate

Russia built a new pipeline, Nord Stream 2, to supply western Europe with natural gas. The pipeline is complete but has not been 'certified', which, near as I can tell, is political doublespeak for Biden doesn't want his commissions from Ukraine impacted. Okay, the slightly better reason is that Ukraine depends on that gas tariff revenue and any reduction is going to have a negative effect on their economy which could lead to political instability. Maybe they ought to figure out how to do something useful besides sucking up Champagne, caviar and cocaine. Meanwhile winters in Europe are cold and natural gas prices are soaring, which, I dunno, might lead to political instability in western Europe. Nord Stream 2 might alleviate that, but hey, let's poke the bear with another stick. Maybe we can get him to come out of his cave and take a swipe at us. Frigging morons.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has squashed an Israeli proposal to build a natural gas pipeline across the Mediterranean Sea to supply Europe with natural gas. There is an existing natural gas pipeline from the Middle East to Europe that goes through Turkey. The proposed pipeline would probably have a negative impact on the tariffs Turkey is collecting. 

If Ukraine and Turkey could put their people to work in productive employment maybe they wouldn't be so desperate for these tariff revenues. But that's not how politicians work, especially pack animals. All they are looking for is a way to squeeze more money out of the masses. If the masses get squashed, well who cares? They were just peasants anyway.

If this goes the way it looks like it is going, Ukraine is liable to become another Syria. Won't that be just wonderful.

* that's my best guess. I did some calculations, but putting them into a coherent format would take time and I have other things I need to do. That's also why there is a shortage of links in the last half of this post.

Update January 2024 add distance caption to last map.

Natural Gas

LNG - Liquefied Natural Gas This is going to be more work than going to Mars: http://www.offshore-technology.com/projects/shtokman/ My brother reports: The Russian news station had a 10 minute piece on the [joint venture] on the "Barents sea Shtokman gas fields." Seemed to be a big deal. Can't really remember what they said about it, other than that it's like 51% Gazprom, and 25% each Total and Statoil. A complicated deal, with big engineering challenges, but everyone is optimistic that it's going to be an epoch-shattering success. Natural gas requires more infrastructure than oil. It is inherently more dangerous. Everything is done at high pressure, like 1000 psi, or at cryogenic temperatures. By lowering the temperature to -160 degrees Celsius (halfway to absolute zero), pressure can be reduced to nil. Shipping requires special cryogenic ships. Pipelines require special pipes and compressor stations. The US government was trying to get more LNG (liquefied natural gas) ports built, including one near the mouth of the Columbia. There was some fuss about it a few months ago. There was a high pressure main gas line running across our orchard (in Ohio). Dad paid to have a tap and a small residential line installed to the house. Tapping into the main line was like defusing a bomb: a tension filled endeavor. On the other hand, gas used to be really cheap. Mom always preached the virtues of cheap gas for heat. So I got gas heat here. Because of cheap hydro-electric power, a lot of people have all electric homes. And now gas has gotten a lot more expensive. I now notice the gas bills in the winter. And that business of trying to kill yourself by putting your head in the oven? Does not work so well with Natural Gas, but there used to be gas made from coal that was really deadly. Not used much anymore, though I am sure it is still used some places, probably in industrial processes.

Nord Stream Sabotage & the War in Ukraine

Nord Stream

From The Valdai Discussion Club:

‘Eurasia’s Geoeconomic Reshuffling’: The Multipolar Effect of the Nord Stream Explosion by Valdir da Silva Bezerra

Since the mid-20th century, Russia and Europe have established a complementary and mutually beneficial relationship in the energy sector. Now, very few people remember, but when Putin came to power in 2000, one of the new president’s ideas was to strengthen Europe’s political independence by combining the continent’s technological and industrial capabilities with Russia’s abundance of natural resources. For Putin, a united Europe was paramount to establishing continental peace, based on a fair relationship between the West and Russia. Nevertheless, in order to achieve this unity, both sides had to abandon the past stereotypes of the Cold War era; otherwise, there could be no ‘Greater Europe’, much less a united one. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, politicians in Washington were also aware of these talks about combining Russian energy assets with Europe’s industrial might.

That’s why, starting in the early 2000s, United States policymakers began to raise concerns about Europe’s “dependence on Russian energy” during official talks with their Atlantic partners, instilling fears that the continent was about to become hostage to Moscow’s ‘geopolitical ambitions’. Taking things a step further, after the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, Washington began threatening European companies with sanctions for their involvement in geoeconomic and geostrategic projects, such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which was slated to connect Germany and Russia via the Baltic Sea.

Finally, following the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, the world witnessed the most consequential act of infrastructure sabotage in European history, with the Nord Stream explosions of September 2022. In fact, the Nord Stream blast seemed to follow one of the most critical tenets of 20th-century British politics, formulated by the geographer Halford Mackinder, who advised against an alliance between Germany and Russia, as this would enable the Eurasian landmass to grow stronger than Great Britain’s sea power. Within that context, the cutting of Russia’s ‘umbilical cord’ to Europe represented the materialisation of Mackinder’s very advice, but at the cost of European taxpayers.

Before the blasts, Nord Stream 1 alone supplied about 55 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas per year, covering roughly 15% of all European gas consumption. The sudden loss of this infrastructure contributed to the surge in energy prices across the continent: by late 2022, wholesale natural gas prices in Europe had spiked to more than €300 per megawatt-hour—over 10 times higher than the average between 2016 and 2020. Industries dependent on cheap gas, especially in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, saw production slowdowns and temporary shutdowns, with German chemical output falling by roughly 10% in 2022. Households also faced soaring heating and electricity bills, prompting EU governments to spend over €600 billion in subsidies and emergency measures to cushion the impact. Beyond the economic shock, the explosions increased Europe’s vulnerability by forcing rapid diversification toward costlier liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports and exposing the strategic risks of critical infrastructure sabotage.

An economic reshuffling also took place in Eurasia, while the amount of Russian gas flowing to Europe dropped to a minimum. Until 2021, Russia’s share in Europe’s total imports of natural gas was 43%. In 2023, this figure was down to only 14%. In Europe, the response to the Nord Stream explosion, as mentioned earlier, was marked by a diversification of gas suppliers and a change in gas logistics. If, in 2013, 82% of European gas imports came via pipelines (234 bcm) and only 18% (51 bcm) in liquefied form (LNG), by 2023, the situation had drastically reversed. LNG now represents approximately 60% of all gas imports (169 bcm) in Europe, while pipeline imports have fallen to 40% (111 bcm). That marks a 331% increase in LNG purchases by Europe over the course of a single decade! In this new scenario, the United States emerged as the leading supplier of LNG to Europe. Now, the North Americans account for approximately 45% of Europe’s LNG imports, followed by Qatar, which contributes 12% (on the other hand, Norway established itself as the largest pipeline gas supplier, accounting for about 33% of Europe’s total imports). As a result, Europe has increased its dependence on the United States, both politically and economically.

 

CNG for Cars: Q & A

Questions from California, and my answers:

We've been seeing the promotion of compressed natural gas for cars for a while, but what REALLY made my ears perk up was the idea of filling up your CNG vehicle from a fitting on your household gas line. That would be awesome! No more gas stations!

So, what do you know about:

1. Cost of CNG engines, or converting to them ( I hear conversion costs $2K - $4K);

A: Big problem with CNG is you need a pressure tank. They are big, round, heavy and expensive. Liquid fuel tanks can be shaped to fit the available space. With CNG tanks, you need to shape the car to accommodate them. Of course you can just put them in the trunk, but it impacts your trunk space.

2. Performance of CNG vehicles vs. gasoline vehicles;

A: Performance should be comparable.

3. Can you really use household gas?

A: Problem with household gas is it would have to compressed, which consumes energy (power for the compressor), and dissipates energy (heat) from compressing the gas. Unless you can tap into the high pressure line on the other side of the pressure regulator, which is also upstream from the meter. Can be dangerous, and probably illegal, unless you get a special high pressure meter and have the gas company install it.

4. Cost of installing a refueling fitting to your household line;

A: If you are taking gas from your stove fitting and doing it yourself, then the biggest expense would be the compressor. Actually, the biggest expense would be the insurance when they found out what you were doing.

5. Running cost per mile of CNG vs. gasoline -- any cheaper?

A: Gasoline is a commodity item and the price follows the market. Natural gas is sold in larger quantities (a years supply for a city as opposed to weeks supply of gasoline for a car), but it also follows the price of oil. Many industrial processes can use either one, and they use such vast quantities that a small difference in price can cause them to change suppliers. Witness natural gas fueled gas turbines used for generating electrical power.

There is also the tax advantage. Natural gas isn't subject to highway taxes. Of course, neither is gasoline or diesel for off-highway use. Used to be highway taxes were a big deal. Something like half the price of a gallon of gasoline. But since the price of gas has shot up so much, they are not quite so significant. Highway taxes are at a fixed rate, so much money per gallon, not a percentage.

One of the big questions in my mind has always been the safety of the pressure tanks. I think this video clears up that question pretty well. As a plus, it's pretty entertaining, in a Mythbusters kind of way. Found on CNG Utah.


Safety Video CNG

Golden Rule

 

    I hope you know that the original golden rule is "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". I expect that you are also familiar with the one portrayed in the picture above (He who has the gold makes the rules). While I like the original and try to follow it (the operative word being "try"), the world in general seems to follow the second.
    I've been musing about the "crisis" in the Ukraine, and I remember hearing a while back about how people were upset because Russia was holding up supplies of Natural Gas to the Ukraine and maybe Eastern Europe. So now I'm thinking maybe I should I revise this second rule to refer to black gold instead of metallic gold.
    Western Civilization runs on oil (and natural gas and coal, all hydrocarbons that come out of the ground). so if you are in the West, golden gold will only do you any good if you can exchange it for black gold. That's why we are having so much trouble with the Mid-East. They've figured this out and are flexing their muscles to see how much power they really have.
    Now Ukraine is a big place, not as big as Russia, but bigger than any other country in Europe, so I'm wondering how come they were having this natural gas problem with Russia. Don't they have any of their own? So I go to Wikipedia and I find these somewhat confusing paragraphs:

Fuel resources

Ukraine produces and processes its own natural gas and petroleum. However, the majority of these commodities are imported (and transited), mostly from Russia. Natural gas is heavily utilised not only in energy production but also by steel and chemical industries of the country, as well as by the district heating sector. In 2012, Shell started exploration drilling for shale gas in Ukraine—a project aimed at the nation's total gas supply independence.
Ukraine has sufficient coal reserves and increases its use in electricity generation.

Power generation

Ukraine is a net energy exporting country (in 2011, 3.3% of electricity produced were exported) but also one of Europe's largest energy consumers. As of 2011, 47.6% of total electricity generation in Ukraine was coming from nuclear power, with the country receiving most of its nuclear fuel from Russia. The largest nuclear power plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, is located in Ukraine. Coal- and gas-fired thermal power station and hydroelectricity are the second and third largest kinds of power generation in the country.

    If I understand this, Ukraine has more than enough power plants, but they don't have the infrastructure in place to keep them fed with locally obtained fuel. Why don't they have the infrastructure? Maybe because they were under the Soviet's thumb for so long.
    Anyway, Russia seems to have recovered more quickly from the Soviet debacle than the Ukraine has. As long as the Ukraine is dependent on Russia for fuel, they are going to be at their mercy. About the only thing they have that they can use to beat the Russians over the head is a jet engine factory. Russia probably has one of their own somewhere, but no self-respecting super-power will want to have just one of a critical component in their military industrial complex.

Update April 2016 corrected typo.

Gas

Contrary to what hippies think (since I know what other people think, being omniscient and all), our civilization runs on petroleum, about a hundred gallons a month per person. Specifically, gasoline. Oil causes all kinds of problems, mostly because we use so much of it, there are buckets of money involved, and well, that kind of explains it, doesn't it?

On the other hand, we have a boatload of Natural Gas, sometimes it is more than we know what to do with. It is great for any energy hunger operation that isn't going anywhere. You can run a pipeline and suck up all the gas you want or need. For powering any kind of vehicle, it is a little more problematic. You need a big, high pressure tank to hold the gas. You can get such tanks, but they are expensive and they are big.

Then I got an idea. Natural gas and oil are both hydrocarbons, which means they are composed of the elements hydrogen and carbon. Natural gas is mostly methane, which has a chemical formula of CH4, which means one carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. Oil is composed of chains of carbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms. They come in a variety of lengths. Tars are very long chains, oils are composed of medium length chains, and gasoline is made of a variety of shorter chains. Methane is like a chain with a length of one.

Cracking is a process they use in the oil refineries to break long chains into shorter ones. They use it to turn things like tar, which is like the bottom of the barrel (literally and figuratively), into gasoline which is worth more. So we can break chains. Can we make chains?

What we need is a breakthrough in chemical engineering that would allow us to build up long chain hydrocarbons from short ones, like methane. We need a breakthrough because no one has figured out how to do this on an industrial scale for a low cost. If we could do this, we could be making gasoline out of natural gas, which would give us an alternative to getting oil from the Middle East, and could postpone a war with China and India over oil.

Vostochny Cosmodrome is in Business

Russia launches first rocket from new cosmodrome
euronews
The first launch happened almost a year ago. None of my news sources reported it. Of course, I've got my filters set on high to keep the crap out, but still, something like this should have got through. Shoot, I put up a post about the Vostochny Cosmodrome two years ago. You'd think someone would have told me. Useless news media.

On a related note, Russia is working on a new booster that will use methane, i.e. natural gas, as a fuel. Natural gas is not often used for vehicles of any type because of the need for a very high pressure tank, but since rockets commonly use cryogenic fluids, natural gas could make sense.

P.S. Looking for the post about using natural gas in cars, I was surprised to find that I have put up a couple of dozen posts relating to natural gas.

Update March 2023 replaced missing video. I don't know if it is an exact replacement, but the title is similar and the time frame is right.

Drifting LNG Tanker

Libya tows damaged Russian LNG tanker Arctic Metagaz to its west coast
euronews

Seems the war in Ukraine has overflowed into the Mediterranean. Kpler MarineTraffic tells us the ship was on its way from Tieshan Port in China to Port Said, Egypt via the Suez Canal. If the ship was going to Port Said, what was it doing over by Malta? Supposedly, they are building a LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) Terminal at Port Said, but I don't know that Egypt is big producer of natural gas. On the other hand, Algeria has a bunch of LNG terminals that are built to liquify natural gas for loading onto ships, and China has a bunch of regasification terminals for turning LNG back into gas and stuffing it into pipelines. So I suspect the ship was on its way to Algeria, empty, to pick up a load of gas for China.

Meduza reports:

Attempt to tow drifting Russian LNG tanker to Libyan port fails as vessel breaks free in rough weather April 2, 2026

An attempt to tow the drifting Russian LNG tanker Arctic Metagaz to a Libyan port has failed, Libya’s Ports and Maritime Transport Authority said on April 2.

The tanker broke free from the tugboat in rough weather. Strong winds and high waves made it impossible to reattach the tow line. The authority declared the vessel “out of control” and warned other ships to stay away from it.

• A fire broke out in early March aboard the Arctic Metagaz, a Russian-flagged tanker carrying more than 60,000 tons of liquefied natural gas, while it was in the Mediterranean Sea between Malta and Libya. The crew was evacuated, and the damaged vessel was left adrift with its cargo still on board. Russia has said the tanker was attacked by Ukrainian unmanned surface vessels.
• Winds and waves pushed the tanker toward the Libyan coast. In late March, Libya’s National Oil Corporation announced that it was forced to take emergency measures and organize a towing operation to bring the drifting tanker into a Libyan port.

Arctic Metagaz
Left to right: Arzew Algeria, Malta, Damietta & Port Said Egypt, Tienshangang China

P. S. Where did the Ukrainian attack drone come from? Magura drones, for example, have a range of 500 miles. The Ukrainian navy currently did not have any navy ships in the Mediterranean last year. Do they now? Enquiring minds want to know.

Mohammad Gunn

Peter Gunn Theme by Henry Mancini
This tune has been popping up on YouTube lately. It's kind of a cool tune and I enjoy listening to it. Then I noticed that the group of performers is the Qatar Philharmonic Brass, which struck me as a little odd, so a-Googling I go.

Sheikha Moza bint Nasser

The Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra . . . was founded in 2007 by Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, the then Emir of Qatar's consort. - Wikipedia

Sheikha got her money the old fashioned way: she married it.

[Emir of Qatar] Hamad seized power in a bloodless palace coup d'état in 1995. During his 18-year rule, Qatar's natural gas production reached 77 million tonnes, making Qatar the richest country in the world per capita with the average income in the country US$86,440 a year per person. - Wikipedia

LNG Rivers, a Liquified Natural Gas carrier

I presume the 77 million tons is an annual figure, which is a goodly quantity in anybodies book. Natural gas can be liquefied and then transported by ship, much like oil is transported in tankers. However, this an inconvenient process as the gas must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures.

Crude Oil Price since 2000

There is a process that can convert natural gas into liquid hydrocarbons. It was discovered in 1925 by some German chemists, but it also a complicated procedure that requires expensive equipment.  The run-up in the price of oil that started around 2005 convinced some people, including the Emir, that building a plant to perform this conversion was a worthwhile idea.

An aerial view of Shell's gas-to-liquid plant in Ras Laffan Industrial City, Qatar

ORYX GTL Plant. Just down the road from the Shell plant in Qatar.

It appears that two of the biggest plants built for performing this conversion are in Qatar, a small country located on a peninsula projecting from the western shore of the Persian Gulf. Billions of dollars have been sunk into these projects which makes them comparable to the big integrated circuit factories that make our computer chips.

Qatar on the Persian Gulf

Temperatures during the summer can be 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not much different than Phoenix Arizona, but the humidity is much higher as you might expect being as it is surrounded by the sea. But then I checked the weather today and it is a balmy 70 degrees. So, for six months of the year it is nice, much like many places on Earth.

Previous appearance of Peter Gunn here.

Winter is Coming

Winter is Coming

ZeroHedge has a good story about how stupid the bureaucrats in Europe are about energy supplies. This paragraph is prime:

And there you have it: after demonizing Russia for much of the past decade, with countless fake news reports out of the liberal media in the US seeking to portray Putin as the world's biggest mastermind and effectively in control of the Trump White House, while helping send western relations with Russia to fresh post-Cold War lows, the chicken are coming home to roost and they are finding the temperature to be rather frigid. 

Basically, Europe is very dependent of natural gas from Russia, but the bureaucrats have screwed things up and the price of that gas has gone through the roof. Prices might fall back a bit in a month or two, but you know politicians - never let a crisis go to waste. I'm sure they'll find some way to keep the crisis going.

This doesn't affect us too much, most natural gas is delivered by pipeline rather than ships. We don't have any trans-oceanic pipelines, but some natural gas is delivered by ships. The whole energy infrastructure is interconnected, so even if natural gas prices don't affect us directly, it's going to make everything from Europe more expensive.

Previous post on the subject.

Shipmate Stove

More adventures from Uniberp :

Browsing CLFS (craigslist for sale) Friday morning (day off from wrk) the 5th item was a Shipmate wood stove for 200. I bought it for $208. It's old but works; I fired it up the first day and burnt my fingertip All needed parts included. No stove holder or removeable grate shaker handle.
It's this model:
http://www.shipmatestove.com/Details.cfm?ProdID=32&category=6

There was a full page ad in the Sunday paper from a company that wants to set up a propane export facility at one of the Port of Portland's terminals. It was all about jobs and how clean burning propane is. No mention, naturally, of how dangerous it can be. It's not dangerous if it's handled properly, but any time you have a long term operation there are going to be times when somebody slips up. It's pretty remarkable that our industrial operations maintain such a good safety record.
     Propane is a popular fuel. We use it for barbeque grills and propane torches. When burned it is very similar to natural gas. Stored it is much different. Compressing propane with a modest amount of pressure turns it into a liquid, which is why a bottle of propane can supply you with enough fuel for a whole season of grilling. Natural gas doesn't like to be compressed. Squeezing enough into a tank to have a useful supply requires very high pressures and very strong tanks.
    Another difference between propane and natural gas is that natural gas is lighter than air so when you have a leak it drifts off into the atmosphere and is dispersed. Propane, however, is heavier than air and when you have a leak it sinks to the ground. If you are outside this usually isn't a problem, any little breeze will quickly disperse it.
   However, a propane leak in a closed space, like the hull of a boat, can cause a disaster. Because propane is cheap and compact it is often used as a fuel for stoves on boats. Because everything contained tries to escape, and people make mistakes, like forgetting to turn on the bilge blower before they light the stove, occasionally a boat blows up.
   No such problem with a Shipmate stove. I visited some folks in New Mexico 40 odd years ago who were living off the grid. They had a cast iron, wood burning cookstove. The lady of the house claimed she could boil water in ten minutes starting with a cold stove. I think that would take some practice, but people are, if anything, adaptable.

This Means War

I had a revelation this morning. I was reading a story in The New Yorker about a convention of stove makers in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Cottage Grove is just outside of Eugene. Eugene is commonly known as Berkeley North, a bastion of liberals, pinkos and the dreaded hippy (Ha ha! The dreaded hippy! Get it? Hippy with dreadlocks? I made a funny!) Seems that cooking fires might be the biggest cause of global warming, bigger than SUV's, cows, or even people breathing. That's when it struck me. It doesn't matter if pollution is causing global warming or not. The whole point is to have an issue that you can use to rally your troops, and it seems that the powers that be (on the left anyway) are making good use of this one. The right has their War On Terror, and they have made effective use of it for their side. Both issues ("Global Warming" and the "War On Terror") are sure to cause disagreements, arguments, and get people's blood up, and that's the whole point. Nobody really cares about something until someone else attacks it. There are problems in the world, and some people sincerely believe they should try and help solve them. Some of these problems are really big, and solving them is going to take a coordinated effort by a large number of people. How do you get people to commit to a cause? By getting them emotionally involved, that's how. You get their blood up, and they'll do anything for "the cause". I don't think the War On Terror or the Global Warming campaigns would be as effective if they didn't have opponents screaming their heads off about how idiotic they all are. People commit to a cause, make donations to politicians, politicians get elected and pass bills that divert funds to their constituents. Their constituents line their pockets, the opponents scream their heads off and everybody is happy. The important part is everybody has something to believe in. If one party stays in power too long, their advantages start to pile up, the little people who were supporting whatever program it was realize they are not getting any financial benefit this program, and defect to the other party. Eventually the opposition gets enough adherents, the party in power changes, and the cycle starts over. The real issue is money, and for an economy that runs on oil, that means oil or its' equivalent. The Republicans are going for the simple, straight, conservative approach: the Mid-East has the oil, we want it, let's go get it, and to hell with the rag heads. The Democrats look at the mess that is the Mid-East and say "there has got to be a better way". Maybe we can figure out some way that we don't need to get any oil from the Mid-East. When the Republicans were in power, they directed the hose of public money to their friends in the military-industrial complex. Now the Democrats are in power and they are trying to redirect some of that money to their friends in the Universities. Note that the little people never get any of this largess from either party. Any benefit they receive is just a side effect of these big power plays. It is all about getting more money and power to those who already have money and power. Meanwhile, there is a fight brewing in Oregon over Natural Gas. One outfit wants to build a terminal in Coos Bay, another wants to build one in Astoria, and a third wants to build a 700 mile pipeline from somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. I'm cool with Natural Gas. I use it to heat my house. I've thought about using it in my truck, but the tanks are a tad expensive. They are also a little scary. I suppose it's whatever you are used to. I mean if you think about it, driving around with 20 gallons of gasoline in a thin steel tank is kind of scary, but we are so used to it we all do it without even thinking about it. Propane is a little nicer is some ways. It's familiar, people use it for their RV's and barbeque grills. It doesn't take much pressure to turn it into a liquid, which means you can store more energy in a smaller space. The downside is that it is heavier than air. So if you have a leak and you have any kind of basin, it will collect there and one little spark can set it off. Of course gasoline acts kind of the same way. Natural gas, on the other hand, is lighter than air and will just blow away. So if you have a leak, you may discover you suddenly have an empty tank for no apparent reason. Natural gas has another advantage over propane and that is there is much greater supply of it. Propane is siphoned off the production of other petroleum products, so it is a limited resource. The amount available is a small fraction of other fuels.

Russian Yamal-LNG project on the Arctic Ocean

This Cost $27 Billion Dollars to Build

I am really enjoying hearing how the US wants to employ economic sanctions against Russia, and how we are pressuring Germany to not certify the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, all supposedly to protect Ukraine, a probable hub of corruption and villainy. Or maybe we're just doing that to keep the zillion dollar commissions flowing into the Biden's pockets. Whatever. Europe gets 40% of their energy from natural gas from Russia. What do you think will happen to natural gas prices if Russia starts feeling squeezed? You will notice that Total, the French oil company, is a big investor in this project.

Qatar has a big LNG facility. It's quite a bit warmer there, so it is not as efficient at liquifying the gas as the Russian plant, but they don't have to contend with ice and transport would be shorter, so it might be a wash as to which plant is more efficient.

Aker Arctic, the company that designed the ice-breaking LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) carriers, has appeared here before. Note that while the Finnish company designed these ships, they are being built in China.

LNG carrier cargo tank cross section

The membrane in 'membrane tanks' is a thin sheet of fancy steel. One mm (millimeter) thick steel is pretty stout stuff for any everyday kind of application. The steel used to make automobile bodies is only 0.7 mm (1/32 of an inch). Ship's hulls are more like 3/4 of an inch (19 mm), so I can see how shipbuilders would consider something only 1 mm thick as a 'membrane'.

I guess the part that really bugs me about this project is that is makes us, the US, look like a bunch of gibbering fools in comparison. Putin might be a murderous thug, but I suspect he is not worse than any other powerful man and might be quite a bit better. Or maybe his PR (Public Relations) office just does a better job. I look at the crap our government continues to pull on a daily basis and I'm not sure we have any room to talk. All of which reminds me of this scene from The Godfather:

The Godfather (6/9) Movie CLIP - Working for My Father (1972) HD

Everyone in a position of power is a murderous thug. The only difference is whether they are murdering your friends or your enemies.

Mont Belvieu, Texas

Mont Belvieu, Texas is a tiny little town in Southeast Texas about 25 miles East of Houston. I don't know if anybody actually lives there anymore. There was an explosion back in 1985 and some folks got relocated two miles down the road. It doesn't look like anyone lives there:


View Larger Map

Why do we care about Mont Belvieu, Texas, anyway? I mean, I lived in Houston for a couple of years and I never heard of it. Why are we talking about it now?

Propane, that's why. I am convinced that all the money we send to Saudi Arabia in exchange for oil is at the root of many of the world's problems. I've got a pickup truck with a honking big V-8 engine that sucks gas like a pig (if pigs sucked gas). So I got to thinking the other day that I could convert it to use natural gas, cut my fuel bill and boycott Saudi Arabia all in one fell swoop.

Well, you can convert a gasoline automobile to use Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), but it's a tad expensive. Thousands of dollars. You might be able to get away with $2,000 if you do the work yourself, but it will cost considerable more to have it done. The tank is one obstacle. One price I saw was $1,000 for the tank alone. Then you need a compressor to pump the gas into the tank ... it gets complicated.

So I'm talking to Jack and it comes out that while propane is also a good fuel and a gas, it can be compressed to a liquid, and liquids are just naturally more compact than a gas, no matter how high the pressure. So propane might be a better fuel.

So now I'm looking up propane and there is all this talk about it and how it's used and what it's like, but nowhere am I seeing how much is actually produced and/or consumed in the US, or anywhere for that matter.

But while I am looking around for this info, Mont Belvieu, Texas pops up at the head of the list of items Google found. What has Mont Belvieu got to do with price of beans in Brazil, or in this case, the price of propane? Turns out quite a bit. A mile underground they have the largest propane storage tank in North America: 43 million barrels. It's a salt cavern where oil was discovered way back in 1930. After they pumped all the oil out, it became a perfect place to store propane, and that's what they have been using it for, at least since 1955.

How much is 43 million barrels? Enough to fill five buildings the size of the Sears, er, Willis Tower.

So if you are dealing in propane, the spot price of propane in Mont Belvieu, Texas, is one of those bits of information you would keep track of.

Update November 2016 replaced dead government link.

Qatar, Qatar, Qatar

The World Cup (soccer) was held in Qatar this year.  Argentina won. Cool,  I guess.

My nephew Nick has returned from a two month sojourn in India. He visited Delhi and points north up to the Himalayas. I imagine he had some good times, but his trip to the mountains was an adventure, as in an ordeal. Anyway, his flight from Seattle took him over the North Pole and Russia to Doha, Qatar. That struck me as a little weird, I mean Qatar seems to be a bit out of the way. And they flew over Russia. I guess that's okay since we aren't technically at war with Russia, are we? Whatever, let's try and plot that flight.

Google Maps makes a hash of it
That is not a polar route

Google Earth gets it right,
but at the expense of detail.
It was also a pain in the neck to use.

Well, that sucks. Surely someone out there can do this.

Great Circle Map might be technically accurate,
but the drawing is horribly distorted

GC Map did it better,
but it was awkward to use and not much detail

I swear last year plotting these kind of routes was much easier.

LNG Tanker Loading in Qatar

In other news, Europe is trying to replace the natural gas they were getting from Russia with Liquefied Natural Gas from Qatar. Someone recently tried to build a natural gas pipeline across the Mediterranean from the middle east to Europe, but Uncle Joe squashed it. Biden must hate Europe as much as he hates Russia.

The Gas Line

I'm working on the gas fireplace in the basement under the watchful eye of my daughter this evening. I reach for the BIG RED HANDLE to turn on the gas and suddenly she wants to know what I am doing. Huh.

When we were in San Francisco a few months ago there was a big, huge, ginormous gas explosion about ten miles from where we were staying. Took out several houses, killed a couple of people. It was big enough to warrant the Governor's attention, or maybe the Lieutenant Governor, I've forgotten. I guess it made an impression on her.

Well, this triggered a dump from the memory banks.

Forty-five years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school, my Dad threw in the towel on his engineering career and bought a farm 40 miles NE of Columbus, Ohio. The farmhouse had an old coal burning furnace. My mom, the sophisticated urban woman that she was, wasn't having any of it. As there was a high pressure gas line running across our property, why can't we just tap into that and get gas heat? So we did.

A trench was dug the 200 yards from the house to the pipeline, then the gas company sent out a couple of guys in a truck to make the connection. I got to watch. They dug down to the pipe, it wasn't very far, which was kind of weird, because they were on a slight rise just to the side of the road. The pipeline route was perpendicular to the road, maybe there was a special go-under-the-road kink in the line there, I don't know.

Anyway, they uncover the big pipe, clean the surface down to bare metal and weld a short stub of pipe onto the main line. Hooked up a pressure gauge, pressurized the stub and checked for leaks. Screw a valve onto the stub. Screw a hand operated drill into the valve. Turn the handle on the drill, drill through the wall of the big pipe. The drill had no gears, just four spoke handles. The bit looked an ordinary quarter inch drill bit. I imagine the wall of that pipe had to be half an inch thick. It took a while.

Now it gets interesting. The way it was supposed to work is you retract the drill and then you close the valve. Something went wrong and the valve wouldn't close, so when they pulled the drill off we got a jet stream of high pressure Natural Gas going 20 feet into the air. This caused everyone to step back, but it didn't catch fire, so after a bit one of the guys returned to the scene and closed the valve. Whew.

After that it was just hook up the pressure regulator, the gas meter and the normal shut off valve. Pretty cool, all in all. Especially since we didn't all die.

Djibouti Notes

Djibouti

I finally finished reading Djibouti by Elmore Leonard and now I'm finishing up my notes. 

The story is about Dara, a middle aged woman, who is in Djibouti with her assistant Xavier to film a documentary about the pirates operating out of Somalia. They meet Idris, a pirate leader, Billy, an American zillionaire, and his girlfriend Helen. Billy has a big sailboat that he sails himself. There is also Harry who is some kind of loose cannon with connections to the CIA or the military, it's never really clear. Jama is a full-blooded American terrorist. He got locked up in prison in the USA and converted to Islam and kept going.

The first 2/3 of the book are a bit of a slog. Eventually it occurred to me that Elmore may have been writing the way people talk which doesn't always translate into smooth reading. Also, in many of the scenes we have Xavier and Dara reviewing the films they have recorded that day and talking about whether what they have is good enough to be in their film.

Around about the 2/3's of the way though the book, things get lively, or rather deadly, with bodies falling left right and center. It's kind of a shock because up till then it's all cocktails, dancing and bravado.

Billy has 600 nitro express rifle. He loves to talk about it and mentions it every chance he gets. He also loves to show it off.

Cameron Mitchell shooting the .600 Nitro Express
Cam's Wild Life

LNG Tanker

While this story is meandering along, there is also a very ominous ship lurking in the background. It's a LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) tanker. Some Al-Qaeda thugs have managed to get on board and place some explosive charges that can be detonated with a call from a cell phone, all you need is the number. (And the ship has to be in range of a cell phone tower, along with a subscription that allows it to receive calls in that region of the world. Never mind this, the story never gets that far, I'm just picking nits.)

Jama has the number and is trying to decide on the best time to blow it up. His Al-Qaeda bosses have canceled this operation. This might have something to do with the gas coming from Qatar and the elite Qatarians support for terrorists. You know, if Al-Qaeda bites the hand that feeds them, they might not be getting any more doggy treats. None of that is in the story, it's just seems obvious to me. But Jama doesn't care. He likes being a terrorist and killing people.

The best place to blow up the tanker would be at an east coast port in the USA, if the gas gets delivered there. Everyone is aware of the situation, but the terrorists are no longer on the ship and no explosives have been found, so maybe there's nothing to worry about. But not finding any explosives does not mean there aren't any there, so maybe we should be worried. Billy's solution is to shoot it with his Nitro Express rifle and blow it up where it is, in the middle of the Red Sea. Multi-million dollar loss for the gas company, but not a disaster for people living around the delivery port.

While this topic is under discussion Xavier mentions the 1937 gas explosion disaster at the New London School in east Texas:

The New London School Explosion | A Short Documentary | Fascinating Horror
Fascinating Horror

While I was reading I took sporadic notes. Here are some things that get mentioned:

Page 45

USS Vella Gulf

Page 77

USS Bainbridge

Maersk Alabama Hijacking

Page 80 Aphrodite thousand foot long LNG tanker owned by bin Laden

Page 110 Remember we're talking about a federal system of people with semi-one track minds. You make a mistake you spend the rest of your career in a third world country so they sit on this till the twins go away.

Page 199 'the Song telling us "The sweet things in life to you were just loaned. So how can you lose what you never owned?"' - Rudy Vallee

Statue de Foch
Place du Trocadero, 75016 Paris France

Page 202 We have this passage:

Cars came around to take different streets off the Place Verdun, circling past the statue of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, 1851-1929, on a pedestal in the center of the plaza, the single word J'Attaque below his name.

Xavier said, "Ferdinand was asked what he'd do if surrounded by Germans and he said he'd attack. I believe it was at Verdun he lost somethin like eighty thousand men j'attackin." He said, "There's your man there."

So I go looking for Place Verdun and a statue of Marshal Foch in Djibouti but all I find it this poster:

Commandant Marchand - Across Africa Book Cover

Musee de L'Armee Invalides Page 34 

"In 1896, Captain Marchand was appointed to lead the Congo-Nile mission to the White Nile River, with the aim of establishing a French protectorate in southern Egypt. Marchand led a team of eight French officers and 150 Senegalese skirmishers up the Congo, Ubangi and Bahr el-Ghazal rivers, arriving in Fashoda on 10 July 1898. They built a fort and raised the French tricolour flag. In September, the Anglo-Egyptian army under General Kitchener arrived at Fashoda. French and British colonialist ambitions came face to face at Fashoda, a standoff that ended in December 1898 when the French government ordered its troops to retreat to Djibouti."

Eventually I realized Xavier was just giving an example of a particularly bull-headed soldier to describe Buck, the soldier they were meeting. Although the French were in Africa, Marshal Foch was not.

Page 203 plant Epimedium otherwise known as horny goat weed

Page 215 Billy is talking about Medal-of-Honor winners:

• Joe Foss shot down 26 Zeke's over the Solomons in his Grumman Wildcat and later became governor of South Dakota.
• Major Bing Bang Bong flying a P-38 shot down 40 doing it during his tour and gave his life testing a jet. 
• Another Ace, Pappy Boyington, a Sioux Indian, shot down his 26th over Rabul. Later that same day some nip sent Pappy down in flames. 
• I forgot the name of the Navy pilot in a Dauntless crashing into a cruiser after he'd been hit. Another hero giving his life for his country, all Medal of Honor winners. He's probably referring to Colin Kelly who was flying a Vindicator, which is very similar to the Dauntless.

Page 216 Sterling Hayden doing Jack D Ripper in the movie Dr. Strangelove

Page 217 1 cubic foot of liquefied natural gas will make 12,400 cubic feet of flammable gas air mix

Chapter 31 

Page 230 Golfo de Tadjoura
Page 243 Big Mucha Island

Previous posts: 

• Djibouti
• Chartres House

How many power plants do we need?

China

One one hand there seems to be an endless demand for power. On the other hand we have this project to supply China with an infinite supply of fluorescent bulbs, which is going to cut their demand for power enough that they will be able to get by with fewer power plants. I remember seeing something similar on "Connections", a series of shows on PBS, where they claimed that if India would replace their inefficient refrigerators with new, more efficient ones, they would not have to undertake this enormous new power plant project. Replacing the refrigerators would cost a bundle, but not near as much as a new power plant. Not too long ago I was reading about the economic feasibility of generating your own electric power using your own genset running on natural gas. It would free you from dependence of the electric company and cost less to boot. Of course you would have to put up with the noise of a generator, but I think they quieted them down some. With the recent boost in the price of natural gas, I do not know if it still makes economic sense, but then energy prices are going up everywhere, and if you are in a rural area without power, it probably makes a lot more sense than stringing power lines on power poles. If you have a farm with animals, a methane generator could provide you with all the gas you need and you could be completely off the grid.

India

LED lights are coming. The white ones are still too expensive to make them worthwhile for residential use, but for places that do not already have power, they are definitely worthwhile. A small solar panel and a car battery could illuminate an entire house using these highly efficient solid state devices. Air conditioning, microwaves, refrigerators and any kind of electric heat (including ovens and ranges) are another matter. They all require substantial power.

However, building big power plants has another impetus besides providing power for a zillion new homes, and that is a demonstration of commitment to supply industry with all the electric power they need. People who are planning large industrial developments want as firm a foundation as they can get. If there is a reliable source for electric power, then that is something they do not have to worry about. If there is no power, they will have to build their own power plant, and that may be one more straw on the load they have to carry, and that may just be too much. If they can just buy the power, it just makes things that much easier for them.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.