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Unfortunately, the leaking and/or burning facilities are creating years worth of pollution in a fraction of the time.
It will probably get replaced by coal meanwhile.
Coal power drops in China and India for first time in 52 years after clean-energy records
Coal is too expensive and inefficient. Solar/Wind with battery backup is becoming the new hotness, as rechargeable lithium and sodium battery prices/kwh plunge below coal mining costs.
A big appeal of natural gas was its dirt cheap extraction and transportation cost. You pressurize a well and it pumps itself. Gas is lightweight and easy to pump along pipes, so transportation is low-cost and very easy. And the machinery to convert the gas into electricity is cheap and prolific.
Coal doesn’t work that way. Huge manual labor for extraction and transport. And using coal to generate electricity requires enormous capital investment that is heavily centralized. If you don’t already have a coal plant, you’re unlikely to build any new ones. Even in the US, a country flush with coal, the federal government is needing to force plants to stay open and operating at a loss in order to keep demand up.
Most of that isn’t too important. The real failure you neglected to mention is the loss of the negative reinforcement that comes with coal based energy generation. If we keep burning the stuff, the big man can’t give out as many lumps to the bad children, and so they grow up to be criminals running big companies.
You can’t just scale it that quickly. Some of it will be replaced by coal, not all.
This graph of LNG infrastructure in the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas” current, planned, and proposed is sad to look at.
I’ve seen much the same in the US. Work for a pipeline company and the demand for LNGs is basically maxed out.
That said, a lot of this is coming from retirement of coal plants and other less efficient means of energy generation.
Also, at least wrt Saudi Arabia, they’re having very similar problems to Qatar. And don’t forget that this was kicked off by Israeli strikes on Iranian production. The whole region is getting rattled.
Oh I agree, the ‘Saudi Arabia of natural gas’ I was referring to is the United States.
