Hacker News Reader

Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine who works from home was trying to get me to switch to Griddy which offers pass-through market prices at 15 minute increments. Today his electric bill was $9 and that was after he turned off literally everything except his fridge. He even turned off his hot water heater.

We only had 3% capacity left in the system, yet out in the Permian Basin operators are flaring off excess gas because they have no access to pipelines or choose not to pay for it. *1

Until the Texas Railroad Commission stops allowing flaring permits and forces operators to connect the energy of all that gas is wasted, which is a damn shame.

We could definitely use that gas (after processing) to run peakers until better storage comes online. But how do you sell the idea of investment to flatten energy prices in an unregulated market?

(1) https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Gas-Flaring-Running-...

View on HN

You know what's worse than the gas flare offs? Nearly 100% of solar power, of which there is a tremendous amount in Texas in the summer, is going to waste. Most of the wind, of which there's a lot in the plains of west Texas and the hills of central Texas, is also wasted.

The only reason Texas isn't producing nearly 100% of its power from renewable sources today is because the oil and gas industry has been coddled and protected and catered to by the state government for decades, at the expense of everyone who isn't employed by the oil and gas industry (which, admittedly, is a lot of people in Texas).

Thats is the only reason not counting infrastructure, storage, peak-usage logistics, winter-usage logistics. Oh, and the fact that weather is temperamental, not consistent, not under our control at all, or able to change to meet our demand.

Oil and Gas already has infrastructure, and solves literally every one of those other issue due to the fact it can ramp up quickly if necessary.

If renewable advocates actually cared about something besides being anti-oil, they would see that the best renewable strategy is something to the effect of 70-80% nuclear, and 20-30% wind/solar/hydro with efficient storage options.

And finally, here is a Practical Engineering video that says the same thing but with data to prove it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY

I'm not opposed to nuclear, but that's not an option on the table, either. In Texas, fossil fuel is God, and nothing that would impede it will be tolerated, even when there are more cost effective and less environmentally destructive methods. Oil and gas holds so much sway over our politics that it's nearly impossible to make progress. Allowing the oil industry to externalize costs is so deeply ingrained in our politics it's hard to see a way out of it.

> more cost effective and less environmentally destructive methods

There are few options that are both these things. Which is not an argument to not fund R&D to reach that point, simply that as of right now, precious few things have both these properties. And once you add in the requirement to be able to sustain the power grid, I'm not sure you have any options.

That said, arguing that Big Oil has a strangle hold on politics, while not wrong, is misleading. This simple fact of the matter is that it is the least of many evils right now. Its like salt. Very useful for meat preservation, and the best they had for millennia, though not up to par with modern preservatives. Some day we will have something that is a legitimate contender, and at that point we can go after Big Oil for its influence. But until we have a legitimate contender, taking out Big Oil will only cause problems.

Your comment is misleading. Solar and wind are literally cheaper than fossil fuels today (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25032019/coal-energy-cost...). Even if we want to punt on going wholly green and keep night-time/cloudy-day coal and natural gas infrastructure running rather than deal with storage (though wind still blows at night), the times when Texas most needs power are the times when the sun is most able to provide it.

The only reason coal/natural gas aren't prohibitively expensive is that the infrastructure already exists. If the deck hadn't been stacked against solar and wind all this time, and if externalized costs started being reflected back on fossil fuel extraction decades ago instead of incentivizing more extraction, we wouldn't be in this mess. We would already have a healthy balance of solar and wind power generation, and the cost of converting some coal-fired plants to natural gas a few years ago (which was cause and effect of more fracking in west Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere) could have been redirected toward clean solutions. If our governments at all levels weren't owned by fossil fuels, we would have built our last fossil fuel power plant a decade or two ago. Germany made the decision a couple of decades ago, and they've got more Seattle weather than Texas weather...where were we? We were subsidizing cleanup for BP and Exxon spills and pretending like there were no other options.

It's a shame no one is willing to consider nuclear more. I'm convinced it was an oil-gas media campaign, lord knows they're in deep with a lot of other lobbying.

I believe this was discussed in the documentary "Pandora's Promise."

>Nearly 100% of solar power, of which there is a tremendous amount in Texas in the summer, is going to waste. Most of the wind, of which there's a lot in the plains of west Texas and the hills of central Texas, is also wasted.

It would be interesting to see a source on that, since there still seems to be investment in window and solar. But yeah we need storage to soak up that excess (whatever it is) when it exceeds use.

until better storage comes online.

We've literally had storage systems based on lakes for ages. They use them for coal plants. Find a naturally occurring underground vault of which there are many in Texas find two Chambers of differing height, pump higher when you have excess, reverse when you need more. Initial costs are high but it's cheaper than new plants.

All lakes in Texas are artificial. There just aren't many good locations to build new ones and if you did you would have to relocate probably thousands of people currently located along the river. Building underground in Texas is also problematic because of the type of soil in nearly every region. There are also no real mountain ranges that can be used for elevated storage. There is some work on using previous wells as compression storage but the efficiencies on that are poor currently and the setup is very expensive. Careless deployment of underground storage can also cause earthquakes.

Texas is one of the largest producers of renewable energy in the world thanks mostly to wind production, but it was not blessed with any great natural options for storing energy. Really though, this just means we need to keep working until we develop an artificial one!

Building things deep underground is very expensive. These would have to be enormous vaults, so you’d have to go very deep. Caverns like that are hard to find and hard to map.

So why is said oil and gas industry not investing in solar power themselves? I mean they will be left behind at some point if they don't catch up now.

And whatever happened to the free market? If an investor wants to plop down a solar collector farm somewhere in Texas' vast lands, what's stopping him? The government?

Ghengis Khan doesn’t look around at his pillaged kingdom and think: “i guess this is enough, maybe we should establish more competition to enhance our long-term success as a community.”

No. He keeps chewing on brisket until someone else forces the issue.

I don't believe these huge oil/gas companies are this naive. If just one makes the plunge and has success then all the others would have to follow. I don't think any of these oil companies are a Kodak.

If you mean not naive in the sense that Exxon knew of the effects of the emissions they helped create and continued with no change except for spreading disinformation: you are correct, they aren't naive.

Permitting is one thing: https://openei.org/wiki/RAPID/Solar/Texas

Access to the wholesale electricity market is another.

> why is said oil and gas industry not investing in solar power themselves?

Some are:

- https://www.chevron.com/technology/technology-ventures

- https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/new-energies/she...

Admittedly, that's not a ton. What's really stopping it is that the family offices etc. don't want to invest in any thing but oil. It's a safe bet, they know it, and tech has given it very high odds of a return compared to what it used to be.

Some investors are doing just that (all though more with wind), just not a ton. Oil prices are down quite a bit off their last high, so expect to see less of this. Every thing in this equation is relative to oil.

"And whatever happened to the free market?"

In Texas? With regard to fossil fuels? Oil owns the government in Texas, and the market is regulated to suit them.

In what way is the energy dumped or wasted? Are they downregulated by the grid operator?

It's not being collected, at all. Sun hits dirt, wind blows by. Decades of externalizing oil and gas costs have made it seem like fossil fuels are cheaper than renewables, so renewables have not been deployed widely, even in a state like Texas where conditions are ideal (a lot of sun and a lot of wind, pretty much year 'round).

Even in the case of what light does hit a solar panel, something like 80% of that power is wasted anyway, because the light in question is infrared. The bulk of the output from our Sun in the visible and near-visible range actually comes to us as heat, in the form of infrared.

Now, if there was only a way to collect much of that and turn it into usable electric power.....

And? Fossil fuel power plant efficiency is only ~30-40%, and the waste is disastrous.

Building solar power generation is now competitive or cheaper than fossil fuel even with the low efficiency of panels. So...yeah, it'd be fantastic if solar panels continue to improve over the next few decades, but we can't afford to wait for that to happen to deploy them on a wide scale. And, hell, they last 25+ years. They more than pay for themselves, even at a low efficiency.

Solar is too expensive when you consider that you can probably get Natural gas for some insanely cheap price. Just burn the natural gas to make electricity that way everyone can just run their AC without paying a fortune.

[citation needed]

Gas flaring needs to be banned or at least very heavily penalized as the #1 priority of western environmentalists everywhere. Yet everyone seems to be caring about straws. I kind of want to make a video of holding up a plastic straw next to a hundred-foot flare to ask people which is the bigger problem.

Not all of the flaring is in remote areas, either: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-4...

> Yet everyone seems to be caring about straws.

Yeah, I'm not really a believer in conspiracies, but the whole straw thing feels like a distraction campaign.

I don't think it's deliberate, but it's the kind of "distraction" that can very easily arise organically. "We must do something, this is something we can do, therefore we must do this". Straw bans are something completely trivial that can be done for the environment with almost no pushback (apart from disabled people!). People can then get back in the SUVs while feeling like they've done their Good Deed For The Environment.

I don't understand the mocking. If they would get back in the SUVs anyway, then yes, they did something. Maybe tiny, but at least a part of a wider change. For some that straw, plastic bag, and a keep cup may be the way to start thinking of something bigger. If not, they saved a straw, a bag and a plastic cup - I'm happy they did. (just acknowledge it's a tiny part and move on)

I like this way of thinking.

I started using Linux as a better and free system than win95, and only after a while thought about the bigger software freedom issues. Before linux, microsoft was just a random company for me. I am not alone in this respect. And look how far open source has come.

In the same way, straw banning can be a 'gateway drug' to environmental awareness. You've done your bit. So you acknowledged there was something to do. Then you dont want that small bit to be meaningless, so you do a tiny bit more All the while advocating to other people this is a worthy cause. Then you find how bigcorps are flagrantly violating the good cause. Of course this cant be right. And drip by drip you wear down a mountain.

>I don't understand the mocking.

Try swapping out the 'wrong' and 'good' with something else and the reasoning seems far clearer.

"Hey, I've done my two hours of volunteering at the orphanage, now let me go back to running my child sweat shop."

If you feel the scaling is unequal, change it. At any scaling I can imagine the initial reaction to someone seriously holding that view is disbelief and then mocking.

If, in an attempt to lose weight, I drink a can of diet coke instead of regular coke when I eat my daily Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese and Large Fries, some would say either I'm not really trying to lose weight, or I've grievously misunderstood the whole enterprise.

Keeping everything else the same someone who drinks a 24oz Diet Coke vs regular every day ends up ~25 lbs lighter. That’s less obvious if their baseline is 300lbs, but it’s still meaningful 8% of their body weight and a great first step.

Keeping everything else the same is hard with diets, but just cutting soda does seem to have a real impact.

Your point would work better if you said "eat healthily" rather than "lose weight". Because just dropping sugared soda from an already-unhealthy diet is a fantastic weight loss method. :D

Yep. Bad analogy.

A better analogy for the straw is skipping one fry in each meal. Technically that's an improvement, but the amount is negligible and if you act like it made a difference you're more likely to skip opportunities to actually force meaningful change.

Some others would say they understand the challenge of losing weight and the diet coke habit is a great first step! Do you know what you'd like to tackle as the next one?

I lost 10lbs just switching to diet soda. It's definitely not a small change if you're drinking soda often like I was. I eventually moved off of soda entirely.

Why is the straw inherently a problem though? If properly exposed of, there's no issue with them. People who are buying expensive metal straws wouldn't just throw them out in nature anyway, so I'm not seeing how those things solve any problems. Sure, a ban, like you mentioned would keep assholes from littering, so that would help independently.

Edit: Did some googling, and this article sums up my concern nicely:

"Banning straws may confer 'moral license' – allowing companies and their customers to feel they have done their part. The crucial challenge is to ensure that these bans are just a first step."

https://earth.stanford.edu/news/do-plastic-straws-really-mak...

Any single-use non-degradable object is an issue. It's not as much about throwing individual straws out in nature, but loads of bars/restaurants/cafes, each throwing out hundreds of them a day, every day. Next, we can grab another single-use plastic thing...

Straws are also recommended by dentists, since it reduces the exposure of your front teeth to sugary drinks. For what it’s worth.

Switching to eating a cheese pizza a week in place of a meat meal would do far more for the environment overall and be almost negligible for most people yet no one really does it because it's hard to virtue signal that.

I think most people imagine straws are a trivial and completely unnecessary luxury item that everyone can give up painlessly -- aside from seriously disabled people, whose voices don't count for much to most people, in part because I think most people imagine disabled people are some trivial percentage of the population. Reality: most stats cite 15-20% of the population as disabled and one study found that if you don't use stigmatizing language -- like disabled or handicapped -- then 60% of people admit to having varying degrees of difficulties with various tasks of day-to-day life.

Comment with more details and a link to the study:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811988#19815635

Isn't take-out food and drink in general a trivial and completely unnecessary luxury item, with single-use items (including straws) being a subset of that?

I can think of populations for which it's more necessary (e.g. the homeless) but as I think you've posted about before - the solution to that is to, well, fix the root issue, no?

Maybe it's an artifact of my upbringing - I literally couldn't afford takeaway food apart from the odd cone of chips (wrapped in paper) or whatever, a McDonalds meal with a straw etc is still something I think of as being absurdly expensive (it's like an hour at minimum wage).

Even middle class families in the UK often just don't eat out like this because it's both bloody expensive and usually crap food.

It's weird to me that people treat this luxury, and of fast food at that, as something that absolutely has to be protected?

I'm guessing you aren't American. Forgive me if that's incorrect.

When I was a homemaker, workers at grocery stores where I shopped would joke about getting me to talk to their wife do I could convince her to cook as much as I did. They could tell by the frequency of my visits to the store and the contents of my cart that most of our dinners were home cooked.

A lot of modern Americans don't really know how to cook. One expression for a woman who can't cook is "Microwave queen."

I hate microwave food and seldom eat it. I think most stuff that comes out of a microwave is pretty revolting.

In recent years, it has been my observation that grocery stores are simply mobbed in the days before a big holiday when the stores expect to close and a big home cooked meal is thw norm. I also routinely see comments on the internet about how impossible it is to cook for one person or how impossible it is to stay on budget and eat healthy when you don't have time or energy for anything but takeout.

I strongly suspect a lot of Americans don't do all that much cooking. Fast food seems to be basic survival for many Americans. They don't have the money or time for fancier restaurants and they don't have the skills or time to cook from scratch.

But us not cooking is a luxury. That was his point. All of us can choose to cook. Its odd that in the usa cooking seems relegated to the rich and the poor, with much of the middle class ending up overfed and malnurshed by prepackaged food. I bet just a switch to fresh food would be more beneficial to the environ than going vegan, and much better for your health.

I'm not so sure that's true. You could say "Owning a car is a luxury" but most parts of America seem to make that a necessity and it's an awful burden for many people.

If you don't have the time or skill to cook, you will find it tough to find the time to learn to cook. A lot of Americans are very time stressed.

I don't mean to be flippant but I really think you are over-egging this 'time and skill' thing based on people that simply chose not to cook because they could.

It's not correct to look at, say, a father who can just let the woman of the house be the homemaker, or a person who just buys take out all the time, and say "they don't have the time or skill". I know people like this. The former is especially prolific - they will go ahead and pretend they can't cook, make silly unhealthy meals, because they can't be arsed and know that wifey will sort it all out.

They have what they consider to be a substitute good and so they don't need to cook. They could rapidly develop the skill if they wished to. No, they won't be some gourmet chef, but making mashed potatoes and stews and salads and stuff like that basically requires knowing that you can boil things to cook them.

You could compare it to, say, a well off parent who has no idea how to raise children because they just pay for a nanny or whatever. If you forced the issue; they lost their job, say; they would learn because the alternative wouldn't bear thinking about.

It's a hell of a lot easier to buy a hob and some pans, than it is to move home. Cars are a far more difficult issue because there are homes in locations that are simply too isolated to function properly without the mobility a car provides.

(Amusingly, I'm in temporary accommodation at the moment - it would be completely impractical to live here without a car, but also without home cooking, because the nearest fast food place is... I don't even know, probably over 50km away.)

Paying others to cook for you is and always will be a luxury.

Groceries are soooo cheap in America, take advantage of it.

Yeah, I'm not American.

I've heard something like your last paragraph there a lot.

I don't really understand cooking as something that takes a lot of skill or time. I just made a stew whilst chatting on here, it took less than 10 mins and you just throw things in a pot.

Hell, if I had a McDonalds or whatever _next door_ it would take me more than 10 mins to get food from there.

What it does require is some level of capital investment - you need pots and pans, a hob, a stable place to store that stuff, etc. Which is a barrier.

The whole "Americans can't cook" thing just seems like a silly joke to me though. It's not like other countries don't have that sort of person. They'd figure it out if you took away their microwave bullshit, they're not gonna starve and die.

And of course, this is all tangential to the issue of straws. There we're talking about opening a tap and putting a cup under it. Or a bottle if you have no running water.

My parents bought a house when I was three. When I was 18, my father asked me how to turn on the oven in this house we had lived in for 15 years.

My dad was very old fashioned and never learned to cook. My oldest son found cooking scarily intimidating, though he did eventually learn to cook.

My mother is German and she cooked up a storm, plus sewed and knitted and crocheted. I'm actually one of the least domestic ladies of my extended family. I don't really like cooking and I never learned to sew or crochet or knit or quilt. I feel like some terrible failure of a woman in the eyes of my relatives, but Americans often seem to think I'm some kind of domestic goddess because I stayed home with my children, I cooked dinner most nights and we didn't live in squalor.

My oldest son was saying to me just recently that he thinks something went very wrong somewhere in the world that we don't know how to teach people to cook. Maybe it's some weird American thing.

I wrote a smidgen about him learning to cook here:

https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/

I'm actually planning to start a blog about feeding yourself well because this seems like such a big issue for so many people.

Heh.

Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. I know it's a thing - I have old friends with extended families that are like this.

I'm pretty sure it is a weird American thing. It doesn't help that you guys have seemingly super cheap fast food.

One thing that might be interesting to look at is - if fast food just disappeared tomorrow - imagine every restaurant below say $15 a head just was gone overnight, microwave meals disappear, etc - would there even be enough food? Would the local supermarkets have enough or would there have to be an adjustment period?

Are you redirecting all the ingredient shipments from the restaurants and factories to the grocery stores?

If yes then the supply side of things is perfectly fine. Stores shelves might be low for a few days from the rush, but that will be over very quickly. All the interesting stuff is out of scope.

If no then I don't think the scenerio says anything useful about the places people eat. You're just deleting a chunk of the food supply, and you would cause similar problems no matter what random chunk you deleted. Even if it wasn't particularly big. So the scenario tells you nothing about whether any kinds of food are too popular. It just says that a sudden cut to the food supply is bad.

I'm more thinking about the whole thing Americans talk about with 'food deserts' - e.g. are there people surviving on fast food that are really too far away from a real grocery shop to buy supplies - you can't build shops overnight.

How many people don't have a stove i.e. they're effectively homeless if not literally on the street? Stuff like that.

I have no idea. It'd definitely be alright in the UK but the way I see Americans go on about this stuff on here makes it seem as if McDonalds is critical infra.

The US and UK have similar rates of obesity* and fast food availability, as far as I can tell.

*The US is noticeably higher overall, but there are about 13 US states including NY and California with lower averages than the UK.

Fast food restaurants per capita:

1 for 1,600 people in UK

1 for 1,700 people in US

Specifically in the context of disabled people, it may not be as easy as you claim at all. Arthritis can make the holding and cutting of things extremely difficult. If it's hard for someone to stand, it's hard for them to stand at a stove. And so on.

> There we're talking about opening a tap and putting a cup under it

Requires a minimum grip strength and coordination.

Oh, sure, of course.

It's a practice that has always baffled me. Why burn off fossil fuels for no gain at all? It's bafflingly wasteful.

Plastic waste is also an issue (not sure if straws are really the biggest issue there), but it shouldn't be hard to tackle both.

Flaring gas normalizes the pressure inside a mixed well, allowing oil to be pumped at atmospheric pressure. That's a much cheaper way of getting to the oil than any of the alternatives (which basically require working with a high pressure right at the wellhead, a very dangerous practice). As for why the companies don't just harvest the gas first then get the oil, gas is harder to transport. The places I worked with flare stacks were well off the beaten path, oil was stored in 400 barrel tanks and brought out with trucks. There's no such system for gas, hence why it's considered a nuisance by a lot of drillers.

This. Comment.

Of note: Gas requires a pipeline. Take a look at some recent well-meaning protests around pipelines; they've likely had the opposite of the desired effect.

Compromise would be way better than "my way or the highway" extremist positions.

Weren't the protests about oil pipelines mostly? We've seen those fail with bad environmental effects a few times now. Apart from stricter and enforced safety rules, I'm not sure what could lead to a compromise here?

More than that in some cases - oil pipelines through areas basically regarded as burial grounds.

"Son, this is where your ancestors were buried, but we're not quite sure what happened to their remains after the oil company scraped the top few feet of soil in the 2026 oil spill cleanup and 'remediated' with clean soil imported from somewhere else."

I wish people weren't so hung up on cemeteries. They are a waste of land and sentiment. I realise I'm in an extreme minority.

Pipelines, even with their faults, are cleaner and safer than trucking.

Modern pipelines carry a multitude of stuff, they separate it with giant blasts of compressed air.

Obviously it'd be best if we didn't use any hydrocarbons for burning, but the alternatives to pipelines in the current economy are:

* Flare the gas off, instant C02

* Train crashes

* Increase well head pressures creating an explosion hazard (and if it blows, you now have a oil well fire)

* Put it through older pipelines engineered to safety standards of the 1950s

why can't they use a fraction of the flaring gas to liquify the rest of the flaring gas? then the liquid gas can be transported just like the oil barrels to the pipeline-connected world

That would be nice but gas liquefaction units were still quite expensive and large, too much so to put one at a single well last time I checked. I haven't been in O & G in a while but I don't think it's changed based on comments elsewhere in this thread.

Are the liquefaction unit's replacement-or-repair costs higher than the value of barrels of liquid gas could generate?

If not what is the timescale to pay itself back?

Would the following alternative work? :

The well delivers barrels filled with oil to the connected world, and thus needs a constant supply of empty oil barrels. Why not fill them with liquid nitrogen (generated at large "economy of scale" liquefaction units at the connected world) and use this to liquefy the gas at the remote well?

Liquification plants typically cost billions of dollars. People are working on things which look like they're more in the 10's of millions range (just eyeballing the machinery and estimating by visible mass of machinery -it's not like they have a website they sell them on), but it's not clear they're cost effective.

https://nubluenergy.com/lng-facility-implementation/

Re: your liquid nitrogen idea; "that's not how physics works." Even if you could store liquid nitrogen in oil barrels (you can't) ... how does that help you?

uhm, it helps by providing a cool heat bath to pump the gas heat into? the idea is not to store liquid nitrogen in the barrels, but merely transport them to onsite storage?

Edit: it's not surprising that LNG liquefaction plants cost on the order of say billions of dollars: by economy of scale one is driven to build extremely large plants. This does not mean smaller (but less efficient) liquefaction plants at much lower costs are impossible, but it does mean those smaller plants don't reach the same efficiency as the bigger ones... (my refrigerator is condensing and freezing water from air...)

If you pump natural gas through liquid nitrogen you get ... slightly colder natural gas. Try again. In fact, please go look at how LNG liquifaction actually works. It's not something that works on a small scale, which is why I posted you a link to the smallest scale LNG plant that actually exists in the corporeal world.

It's not like people haven't thought of these things before. Thermodynamics is well understood.

>If you pump natural gas through liquid nitrogen you get ... slightly colder natural gas.

I am not proposing to bubble raw natural gas through liquid nitrogen.

>It's not like people haven't thought of these things before. Thermodynamics is well understood.

I don't claim to be the first to come up with the idea of using liquid nitrogen to liquefy raw natural gas. I am entirely open to the idea that using liquid nitrogen to liquefy RNG is somehow uneconomical or infeasible. I was hoping to get a more constructive reply: not references of how expensive or hard a smaller scale liquefaction plant is, but rather papers detailing why specifically using a heat exchanger with liquid nitrogen is infeasible, if as you say "It's not like people haven't thought of these things before."

What is raw natural gas? Predominantly methane, and some slightly longer alkanes, with impurities (H2S, CO2, N2, He,...) see [1].

What are the atmospheric boiling points of the alkanes? see [2]:

alkane, boiling point:

methane -183 °C

ethane -183 °C

propane -190 °C

butane -138 °C

pentane -130 °C

hexane -95 °C

heptane -91 °C

octane -57 °C

nonane -51 °C

decane -30 °C

undecane -25 °C

dodecane -10 °C

eicosane 37 °C

triacontane 66 °C

Observe that the lowest boiling point of the alkanes (the fuel in natural gas) is for propane at -190 °C.

The atmospheric boiling point of liquid nitrogen is −195.795 °C [3], wich is colder than the boiling point of any alkane!

What does this mean by definition? that a balloon filled with gaseous alkanes, when submerged in a heat bath of liquid nitrogen, and left to equilibrate temperature, will fully liquefy.

>Thermodynamics is well understood.

^ indeed

(This is my first order interpretation, assuming the mixing entropy does not decrease the boiling point of a mixture of alkanes, if however this is the case, I would like to see an explicit reference to a paper describing this for alkanes.)

So essentially heat exchangers and a supply of liquid nitrogen should be able to liquefy raw natural gas.

Now what about the economics of having to generate liquid nitrogen?

Let's take a step back: domestic natural gas pipelines connected to the gas grid doesn't contain liquid but gaseous natural gas. So at some point the liquid natural gas is expanded to a gas, and this absorbs heat at a low temperature. (I don't know at what point in the distribution chain this happens, but it necessarily happens somewhere.) This is the ideal point to colocate the liquid nitrogen generation plant: use the evaporation of LNG to gaseous natural gas to help the heat pump liquefy air/nitrogen, so the energy required to liquefy nitrogen is largely recycled.

The storage of liquid nitrogen at the gas well should be an entirely solved problem: at the exact sciences campus (de Sterre) of the Ghent university, at the solid state research block, there is a large (fenced off) tank of liquid nitrogen, and once in a blue moon a tank wagon comes to refill it...

[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/fsc432/content/natural-gas-c...

[2] http://chemistry.elmhurst.edu/vchembook/501hcboilingpts.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen

There are actually liquid nitrogen services used in well servicing (I saw them but never inquired what they were for) and they were on the scale of a medium-sized service truck - so in theory, what you're proposing should be possible.

My guess is that in practice, it's not profitable given the current price of natural gas and the difficulties of keeping liquid nitrogen cold - the smaller the container, the shorter the time it can economically stay liquid. So you'd need either pretty bulky equipment that needs to be moved once the gas at a well runs out, or you'd have to spend an awful lot of the energy from the gas keeping your N2 cold during transport. Which even if it is profitable on paper, might not survive contact with the field - oil leases are not controlled environments, and Murphey's law is out in force out there in a way that can be easily underestimated.

It is a nuisance - it should be fixed by making it mandatory to harvest it.

Actually, just leave it all in the ground.

Plastic waste is not much of an issue in the US or Europe. It's a big problem in southeast Asia where much of it is dumped in the ocean. Sticking it in the ground isn't a big deal. It's wasteful but there are far bigger problems.

It is because the gas is not worth much right now. Cheaper to burn it off. Since most of the demand is for oil and not natural gas, it makes sense right now to just burn it. If natural gas doubled or tripled in price then you would quickly see the natural gas being brought to market. Also Natural gas is heavily pipeline constrained commodity so it isn't easy to transport like oil is. No one wants a natural gas pipeline in their backyard.

The US is riddled with natural gas pipelines, most homes literally have a pipe in their backyard (or front yard) that is used for natural gas.

The US has a great deal of territory that is not in someone's half acre back yard.

Gas flaring ensures that its methane content is burned and not leaked into the atmosphere. Raw methane natural gas is 30x more potent of a greenhouse gas than the CO2 and water vapor products of its burning.

Banning gas flaring would be extremely short sighted and counter productive.

Serious environmentalists should be talking about flooding parts of the Sahara or other wild geoengineering prospects, not plastic bags at the grocery.

Serious environmentalists are talking about a lot more effective measures, although them being environmentalists (and somewhat realist) they usually shy away from pie-in-sky (desert) geoengineering projects. Examples are CO_2 trading schemes, phasing out ICEs, public transport, liveable cities, or reforestation.

Plastic straws/bags/etc are obviously small (but not necessarily negligible) efforts. They rise to prominence mostly because they are easy to mock.

I don't understand reforestation in the sense of plant X amount of trees, and feel good about yourself. Won't this happen naturally at a similar rate if you just leave it alone? I'm pretty sure my yard would be covered in different shrubs and trees within 10 years if I just stopped tending it.

Flooding the desert responsible for Atlantic hurricanes is ripe for unintended consequences. The planet is big and complicated, and everything is connected.

Deserts are also an environment, often with endangered species of their own.

Today his electric bill was $9, but has he saved money overall? It reads like you're saying you're glad you didn't sign up for the service, but you also paid a ton for power today - just amortized over the average $/kWh your power company charges you.

The difference is that you don't have the option to reduce your consumption today to save money.

If large numbers of the population were signed up to a market rate service, it would go a long way towards preventing these spikes, and will probably be necessary as we shift to a higher renewable share making the pricing far less stable.

His use case and mine are very different. For one I don't work from home, have an old home and cool it with window units. When I got home at 6 or 7 last night it was 90+ degrees in my bedroom. I'm not going to risk paying spot prices and having to wait to run my AC because it takes hours to cool down as it is. He can run his AC when it's cheap and weather a few hours of it being off if he has to.

I hear you about possibly saving money the rest of the time. It's worth considering if I can get the data. I can tell you today my use is so low in the winter I've had the power company come out and disassemble my meter because they thought it was hacked. The shoulder months around summer is when I could save the most. It's just whether that savings outpaces peak prices and frankly whether I want to take that risk since IMHO this kind of thing is only going to get worse.

Don't forget that his friend had to endure a crazy hot day without AC - and still paid much more than usual for electricity. Most people don't want to gamble on these things.

Running the AC on that day is not expensive due to financial agreements. It's intrinsically a resource intensive thing to do.

When you sign up for a fixed rate, it's baked in to the price that you will fire up your AC if you feel like it even when the grid is at capacity and power is extremely expensive.

Paying market rate doesn't mean you are blocked from firing up the AC. It might cost you $100 during a heat wave, but you've paid your power company $100 less throughout the year because you haven't been paying in instalments for your peak consumption days.

Being able to say fuck it, I'd rather be uncomfortable and save $100 is empowerment, not a burden.

In aggregate, those that make this decision would provide a lot of economic benefit. The peak is reduced and whole power plants can be decommissioned.

>Being able to say fuck it, I'd rather be uncomfortable and save $100 is empowerment, not a burden.

Also you can decide to hang out at the mall until prices go down.

Some years ago (around five?) there was a big heat wave in Shanghai, and the subway stations filled with people who didn't want to pay for their own air conditioning.

That's a good thing, it drives down peak demand and increases overall energy efficiency.

It comes at the cost of many people wasting a portion of their lifetime waiting in a subway rather than doing almost anything else that they'd probably prefer doing.

For every 60K people that spent 12 hours sheltered in the subway, 80 human-years of life was consumed.

> The difference is that you don't have the option to reduce your consumption today to save money.

are you saying that in Texas you pay a fix charge for electricity regardless of usage?

Assuming that this is not the case, it seems to me that should he/she take the same actions as said friend there would be a reduction to the bill too, just a lot less significant, due to the price being a lot less

" he turned off literally everything except his fridge. He even turned off his hot water heater."

Which is exactly what you want people to do when a resource is scarce. Price signals work.

Hopefully his next step is to consider solar water heating. It's summer in Texas FFS.

My cold water is coming out of the tap a lot warmer than usual, and that's from underground! I'm super interested in bringing back older tech to make us more sustainable and self-sufficient.

It's insane people don't have solar water heating in sunny places. Fantastic ROI. Also, simple things like deciduous trees south of your house do wonders.

$9/day after doing all that is still insane. This is not NYC or SF where that is the cost of a bagel.

Price signals may work but at the end of the day utilities need to be cheap enough that the poor can mostly use them without thinking twice. The elderly can't just turn off their A/C in high heat.

Correct.

So getting people who are able to do so to use _less_ of that scarce resource helps ensure it's available to those who need it.

We uses prices for almost everything with a scarcity, saying "well if we price this thing correctly the poor can't afford it" is an argument for addressing income inequality, not just trying to make everything an all you can eat buffet.

> Price signals may work but at the end of the day utilities need to be cheap enough that the poor can mostly use them without thinking twice.

No, utilities need to be subsidized for the poor (perhaps through s general subsidy, or otherwise through a utility-specific one) and perhaps also those somewhat less poor with special needs so that they can use what is essential without undue hardship; the prices of utilities for the rich don't need to be low enough that the poor could pay them without thought.

I don't think utilities need to be subsidized for anyone. There's a difference between that and just giving people money. If I have $X extra a month in income, and electricity or fuel is really expensive, then I still make choices based on the relative price of those things versus other goods. But if I am given a subsidy of $X specifically for energy, then that seems like a terrible idea. Just because it's the same amount of money doesn't mean it has the same effect on my choices and the environment.

A lot of that is because most end users don’t have such granular prices. They keep their AC on because why not. When price changes are concentrated on just a few users, the swings get wild.

If we had an abundance of low environmentally impacting energy, energy would be cheap enough that the poor could use it without caring. That's not the world we live in (at least not yet).

Exactly. He can probably afford it given the otherwise low cost of living and lack of state income tax.

> We only had 3% capacity left in the system, yet out in the Permian Basin operators are flaring off excess gas.

That has nothing to do with the problem (except extremely indirectly via global warming). There isn’t a shortage of fuels — there’s a shortage of generation capacity. No amount of extra natural gas would make the slightest difference.

There isn’t a shortage of fuels — there’s a shortage of generation capacity.

Or an excess of demand, there are plenty of ways to build houses that lower the need for air conditioning.

Or retrofit existing houses with supplemental geothermal cooling.

Or add some insulation.

"except extremely indirectly"

Not really that indirectly, if there weren't scorching temperatures there wouldn't be a need for extra air con. I'm aware though we can't definitively attribute this heat wave to global warming.

More fuel would mean lower prices would mean more generators built to take advantage of that.

At the price of peak electricity on a peak day, the cost of fuel is irrelevant. That $9k/MWh peak was about $300/therm. A therm of natural gas, retail, from PG&E is less than $2.

The problem here is that the grid more or less guarantees that each customer can draw as much power as they want whenever they want, so there needs to be generation capacity to cover the maximum demand, but that means that, under normal conditions, a good fraction of the capacity is unused. A plant that only runs for a few hours a year needs to charge a lot for those few hours.

In theory, demand response can help — the grid can pay certain customers to stop using power at times. Aluminum refineries are the classic example — an aluminum refinery can, in principle, be configured to turn off on demand without much loss other than the production at that time period. So an aluminum refinery that shuts off for eight hours a year generates nearly as much revenue as a refinery that operates continuously, but those eight hours can help the grid during peak load. Actually making this work requires some fancy communication with the grid operator, and this is rather new.

Thanks for providing concrete numbers! Looks like the effect would be too small to notice even if gas were free.

For what its worth, the rolling blackouts in California resulted in the state permitting a bunch of new plants fairly quickly. With luck that will happen in Texas.

For what its worth, Kenny Boy and Skilling and Fastow had a lot to do with those blackouts.

Wikipedia claims:

These blackouts occurred as a result of a poorly designed market system that was manipulated by traders and marketers, as well as from poor state management and regulatory oversight. Subsequently, Enron traders were revealed as intentionally encouraging the removal of power from the market during California's energy crisis by encouraging suppliers to shut down plants to perform unnecessary maintenance

Sadly, Kenny never did any time and Skilling and Fastow are both now out of jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#California's_deregulatio...

Late to the thread, but I'm also a Griddy customer in Houston and wanted to put an asterisk on this.

I'm not sure how your friend knows his rate yet. The Griddy interface takes 24-48 hours to update/integrate the smart meter data for a day.

It's possible your friend's data integrates faster than hours, but we still see no summary for Tuesday usage. That said, the charged rate did max out (I think this is a regulatory cap) at around $8.99/kwh for a little over an hour yesterday (and was over $2/kwh for a few hours). I suspect there's been a miscommunication here?

For additional context, Griddy rates update every 5 minutes and just include the base power component (delivery/tax/etc. are roughly fixed per kwh).

The linked article was for Monday, as was my friend's power bill. So you're right - I was off by a day when I posted on Tuesday "Today his power bill was $9." He was actually complaining to me about the day prior, Monday August 12th. In the interest of full disclosure when he texted me he said "$9 power bill" but his screen cap from Griddy which he sent later was only $8.07. I think he was a little cranky when he sent the first text. I can upload the screen cap if you want to see it?

Edit: BTW he just texted me: Tuesday's power bill was $14.65.

No worries. Just seemed like a disjunct somewhere and wanted to make sure to clarify how this model works since very few people have direct experience.

He's probably even crankier today :)

For additional context for others, our energy cost (not including other costs) for Monday were $1.24 for 14.4 kWh (88c for .3 kWh during the spike between 1pm and 4pm).

It looks like our Tuesday records showed up between my original post and now. We paid $3.18 for 15 kWh ($2.83 of that between 1-6pm).

See my edit above. Tuesday's power bill was $14.65 and of that $10 was during a three hour period where usage was less than 1 kwh per hour.

Forcing Permian Basin operators to "save" the natural gas currently being flared would probably increase the price of electricity in Texas because someone has to pay for the pipelines.

If it would decrease the price, then operators could have and would have already increased their profits by building the pipelines to deliver the gas to generating plants.

"building": building collectively and with the help of the financial industry.

You seem to believe that the oil industry consists of vicious subhumans or something that need to be forced to do the right thing even when the right thing co-incides with their economic self-interest.

Problem is pipelines are a regulatory nightmare to build, even in texas. It is getting even harder to build because so much pressure has been focused towards renewables. The northeast has the same issue. Opposition to natural gas pipelines means gas shortage in winter months. They retired their coal plants and now use diesel generators for peak load.

Building out pipelines usually involves eminent domain issues.

It is a tough sell to have one’s property confiscated by the government on behalf of a for-profit entity, especially if lacking funds for legal counsel.

They take land to sell to developers to build strip malls, luxury condos or mixed use buildings (whichever happens to be politically fashionable that minute) often enough that taking it for an actual utility should be no issue.

The problem is that you have a bunch of people who are militantly against anything fossil fuel because it's part of their political identity who get their politicians to block any fossil fuel utility project.

Sure, fossil fuels aren't good in the long term but only an idiot would deny that having more natgas available cheaply resulting in less power being generated by and fewer people heating their house with oil is a significant improvement over the status quo.

I have a brother going through this right now. They want to build pipeline on his property.

He can't really say no because of eminent domain, but he has a lawyer and is fighting for a fair contract (pay for everything they break/destroy etc when building it). Most people are SOL.

The land isn't confiscated. The owner still owns the land and gets a royalty for the pipeline being there.

That is depressing.

Not sure if you're responding to me or someone else but I did work at an Enron pipeline subsidiary back in the day and heard all the stories of slapped together wellhead gas collection that was literally plumbed with household-grade PVC pipe. It really came up in the context of operators looking to break out of those contracts because at the time gas was getting expensive enough they wanted to sell direct rather than through the aggregator who had plumbed up all the wellheads and locked them in to some low-paying contracts.

And as I mentioned in the linked article now folks are flaring because it's cheaper than connection even if there's one available. From their perspective breaking contacts back then and flaring off now are just good business, so yes I 100% believe they'll do what's in their own economic self-interest.

If you happen to believe in global warming, then whether flaring that gas is in their own long term self interest is a separate conversation.

> You seem to believe that the oil industry consists of vicious subhumans or something that need to be forced to do the right thing even when the right thing co-incides with their economic self-interest.

Their economic short term interest, yes. Gas burned off wastefully is not available in the future and we have this small global warming problem.

The right thing (not flaring the gas) doesn't coincide with their economic self-interest, that's why they're doing it in the first place!

private companies pay for the pipelines.

Another annoying thing is that flaring pollutes more than running a peaker. Literally win/win.

I was one of the first Griddy engineers (though I’m no longer there). We would have people call & complain when the cost for a day was much less & they had AC blasting. I wonder how the customer support reps are dealing with all of this.

Can't answer the small question, but they did send out an email that they're going to tighten their marketing budget for a bit and comp/refund everyone's $9.99 membership fee for the month.

Griddy's communication efforts have generally grown increasingly proactive since we joined in June 2017, and they have been very proactive over the past ~10 days. They sent informational emails on the 6th, 9th, 12th, 13th, and 14th notifying us about upcoming high-price/demand periods, what hours things are expected to spike, and providing suggestions for avoiding/mitigating energy use.

And another a few minutes ago for the 15th :)

I just keep switching companies for the lowest, fixed-rate, new customer plans.

It's faster to do that than to go on the phone and complain or ask for a "discount" (where you would still be paying more).

(I don't know about other states, but this is extremely easy to do in Texas.)

> But how do you sell the idea of investment to flatten energy prices in an unregulated market?

It seems you sell it as the article is saying: at peak times you'll be selling it at $9 (ok maybe less) but that might be enough to justify the investment.

Indeed. This is why Dinorwig (the Welsh power station) is profitable. When electricity is cheap they buy it, and put electricity in and it pumps water up to an artificial lake, when prices rise they stop, and when the price rises still further that's their cue to drop water from the lake back through the system to make electricity for sale.

You can do the maths "Hmm, we need to make £2 per MWh of electricity at least once per day for this business to make sense" and look at price charts and say "Yup, that's feasible, today we will buy any time it's below £30 until we're full and we'll sell any time it's above £35 until we're empty" and make plenty of money. If only conveniently located mountain lakes were more common we'd probably have these everywhere.

The price decisions are tricky though, imagine you decide you should sell for £40 today, and then the wind just doesn't stop blowing at sea and offshore wind turbines (which will sell for any price at any time since their power is basically free) keep the price below £38 all day. You end the day with zero income. Not a game for people with limited capital reserves. Or you decide to buy once it falls below £40 on another day, but then every AC unit in the country is running non-stop and the cloud sit, unmoving but blocking the sun, prices sit above £50 all day. Again no income.

It wasn't built to make a profit, the government built it because it's a Black Start facility, ie it's one way to "boot up" the electricity grid if it fails and you need to start over from no electricity. But now it's privately owned by a French corporation and increasing use of renewables means more minute-by-minute price fluctuations to profit from.

I am confused, are some consumers actually paying $90.00 per kw/h?

That would be $9.00 per kWh, not "$90.00 per kw/h" which is both the wrong amount and the wrong way to write the unit.

And yes, some cosumers may have chosen to be billed at spot prices like this, though probably not very many, and of course since it's spot pricing they were charged it back then, not now when you're writing this and the wholesale price is more normal.

The Griddy rate was pegged at $8.99/kwh for about an hour and 15 minutes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com