Friday, January 18, 2013

Friday Morning

The southeast digging out from snow. And quite cold in the Boston area today, but no new snow. Nice day to go bike riding: sunny, no wind, and will warm up no doubt.

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RBN Energy: I haven't read the entire post yet, but it makes me think of the story I linked yesterday.
In February 2012 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) initiated a proceeding to investigate issues related to gas/electric interdependencies. In a letter requesting comments on the coordination between the two industries FERC Commissioner Moeller stated that recent problems suggest that more resources need to be allocated to planning for the increased use of natural gas to generate electricity. The “problems” that FERC referred to occurred during a February 2011 cold weather event in the southwest. That event triggered outages, curtailments and rolling blackouts by both gas and electric utilities. An examination of the causes by federal, state and industry bodies led to the spotlight being turned on gas-electric interdependency.

The FERC request for comments also pointed to the trend of more natural gas being used in power generation. That trend accelerated during 2012 when there was a major increase in the volume of natural gas burned for power generation due to fuel switching from coal. While electric service was not threatened, the question of electric reliability was raised in the context of the adequacy of existing pipeline infrastructure and gas-electric interdependency should the trend continue. We discussed this in "Feeding the Power Burn."
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Well density from the Minot Daily News
Alison Ritter, public information officer for the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources in Bismarck, said, "Once this is all said and done, we'll only be using a little over 200 square miles of surface usage compare that to the 15,000 square miles that the Bakken mature area really is. The impact will be underneath the ground."

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NPR: turning a boom town into a "real" town -- whatever that means.

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