RE: Re: re 180,000 MW new capacity: Update

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Typo alert, I meant to say "So the only way power shortages can be  relieved
is by a recession, conservation, and massive NEW nuclear
power plant investment, or a mix of all 3."

My doubt about whether this can happen is because recession will so hit
deregulated markets that the needed massive investments just won't happen.
It's not just about building new combined -cycled gas-fuelled power plants,
the programme has to be much mroe massive: it's about the reconstruction of
the national grid, renewal of refineries, the tanker fleets, gigantic new
upstream investments in LNG from Saudi/Russia, or in other ways of reforming
natgas on-site, especially at stranded gas reserves: will any of this
happen? Some will, but not enough, and not in time. So the cancer of decay
that has been gnawing the edges of the world energy system will continue
eating its way inwards and load-shedding, brown-outs etc will become
familiar to people living in or near the capitalist cores, as they are now
almost everywhere else.

Thus, as I have repeatedly argued, and as the Julian Simonites on pen-l love
to ignore the problem is not the gas and oil running out: that will NEVER
happen; the problem is that it will never be fully extracted, because
capitalism's world energy-system will disintegrate first. This is happening
right now, before our eyes. It's not just a Bush/Cheney conspiracy theory.
It began to happen in 1973, and then some time was bought by
easily-accessible offshore reserves, especially but not only, Alaska, Mexico
and the North Sea. These are now in rapid depletion, and meanwhile the great
Persian Gulf reserves are also reaching their peak and beginning to decline.
At the same time, the USGS, EIA, and DoE, continue to repeat optimistic
mantras about oil and gas supply almost doubling in the next decade or so.
Who seriously believes any of this is gonna happen, apart from our resident
Simonites? It isn't.

Mark Jones


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Jones [mailto:jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 29 June 2001 10:55
> To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [PEN-L:14334] Re: re 180,000 MW new capacity: Update
>
>
> Eugene Coyle:
> >
> >
> > Thanks Mark,
> >
> >     But I'm still wondering.  Your correspondent's last paragraph is not
> > credible, just on the surface.  Hundreds of units have come on
> > line just in
> > the last fortnight?  Ridiculous.
> >
> >     Here are some numbers from US DOE's Energy Information
> > Agency.  And this
> > projection may be what Cheney relied on when he said we had to
> build a new
> > power plant a week for the next 20 years.  Even if that were to occur it
> > wouldn't be "hundreds in a fortnight."
> >
> > EIA says that we need 1,300 plants by the year 2020.  (Not, N.B.,
> > 2003.)  This
> > based on an average plant size of 300 mW.  Of that total 92%
> would be gas
> > fired.Thus in 20 years, by 2020, the EIA projects about twice what your
> > informant says will happen by June 2003.
> >
> >     Regardless of how the EIA's forecast turns out to comport with the
> > unfolded future, I think you can see from this that wherever the
> > figures you
> > are relying on come from, they don't seem plausible.
>
> I've seen that EIA quote and I also saw a comment in, I think
> either Bloomberg or the FT, to the effect that the EIA is writing
> back to the future, because the rate of actual construction far
> exceeds their own estimate. It's hard to know the truth, but
> there obviously is a lot of new construction going on right now
> and the 2-year/90,000 mW is based onj something. But even taking
> the EIA at face value, the question again becomes, where is the
> gas coming from? Something weird is happening to US ng from what
> I can see: depletion rates are becoming like the porverbial fall
> off a cliff. All this means that the frenzy of investment won't
> solve the underlying problem. So the only way sortages can be
> relieved is by a recession, conservation, and massive no nuclear
> investment, or all 3.
>
> Mark Jones