Essay: Natural Gas or Electric Vehicles -- Rigzone

Link here to Rigzone.com.

CNG:

Drawbacks to CNG vehicles include the availability of fueling stations. The natural gas filling stations that are available in the U.S. tend to be concentrated in areas where commercial fleets of CNG vehicles exist; buses and trucks are the biggest market for CNG today.

Additionally, CNG cars also have less power than gasoline-fueled cars, said Rinek, who road tested a 2012 Honda Civic CNG vehicle earlier this year and was underwhelmed by its performance. After-market enhancements to boost power on CNG cars are costly, and a fact with which most drivers will have to learn to live.

Electric:

However, the limited driving range of electric powered cars – with drivers lucky to get 100 miles between stops at charging stations -- has been a deterrent to their widespread adoption in the U.S. market. As a result, EVs ended up being relegated to a second or third urban vehicle used for short trips, Rinek commented.

The limited range of electric vehicles and the lengthy time required to recharge an electric car's batteries are two big Achilles heels for EV vehicles, said Michael Gorton, an engineer, physicist, lawyer and power systems engineer who writes and speaks on topics related to energy, alternative vehicles and solar power finance.

My hunch, in the United States in  2030: we will see three markets. The vast majority of miles driven in the US will be on CNG. Commercial trucking will make up the bulk of CNG miles driven cross country along CNG corridors. Yuppies, millennials, and post-millennials packing the urban centers will routinely drive CNG mid-size and compacts, with rare special trips (vacations?) in conventional or hybrids. This doesn't mean the vast majority of private automobiles will be CNG, but 75% of miles logged in this country will be on CNG.

Electric vehicles, hybrids, and conventional (gasoline/diesel) will share the rest of the market space, perhaps 30 percent. The conventional will predominate in fly-over country, whereas EVs and hybrids will outpace the conventional on the east and west coasts.

Rambling -- A Note For the Granddaughters -- Nothing About the Bakken

Some days ago I posted the following to add a bit of color to a note regarding oil activity in eastern Montana:

Makoshika State Park, Glendive, Montana

I was intrigued by the beautiful music, and subsequently found this:


The Shores of Avalon, The Seekers ...and of course that led me to hours of searching, listening, and enjoying The Seekers once again. I've placed a few of their videos throughout the blog.

I never read the King Arthur legends when most others first read the stories (middle school, high school) and by college it was "too late."

Some weeks ago, on a whim, I picked up a 1975 hardcover with torn jacket, The Celts by Gerhard Herm, and was more than pleasantly surprised. I suppose if I could take only two books of this genre to a desert island, it would be The Celts and How The Scots Invented the Modern World.

Chapter 16 of The Celts is devoted to King Arthur and the knights of the round table. 

The Celts, who entered the European landscape as head-hunters, now leave it as Christian knights, though without -- as the legend of Arthur shows -- ever being untrue to themselves. At its centre is a classical Celtic couple, the lord of a retinue and his Druid, stylized into a magician. Merlin lived in the forest like the priests of Gaul or Irish hermits; he had brought up his prince, advised and tutored him ....

Earlier in the chapter:

... he withdrew the sword effortlessly and thus succeeded the now dead Uther. At the same time he also had the weapon destined for him, Excalibur.

The island now enters on a great chivalric epoch. Arthur selects Camelot -- a place no one has identified -- as his residence and marries Guinerva (in Cymric, Guanhumara, or 'the White One'), daughter of the dwarf-king Leodegrance. The king takes one hundred and fifty knights to follow him because he receives, as part of her dowry, a huge round table that can accommodate that number of guests (it must have been at least forty metres in diameter). 

And, so Arianna and Olivia, just one more reason why I love to blog. Who would have guessed? From the Bakken to Makoshika State Park, Glendive, Montana, to the Seekers, and to Avalon and King Arthur.

Makoshika is a variant spelling of a Lakota phrase meaning "bad land" or "bad spirits."

Finally: A Pipeline For The Rest of Us! -- Not About The Bakken

Finally, someone is taking my advice and metaphorically rotating TransCanada's XL 1.0/2.0 ninety degrees, proposing to take Canadian heavy oil to Asia via the west coast.

The story is in the Wall Street Journal, this date (print media; no link).

Data points:

• Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP
• $5 billion expansion of its TransMountain pipeline
• to be completed in 2017
• will nearly triple the capacity of the crude oil it can ship to Canada's west coast
• currently, almost ALL Canadian oil crude exports are to the US -- "almost all"
• currently the pipeline ships a small amount (from Alberta to Vancouver)
• the "small amount" currently: 300,000 bopd
• expansion: up to 850,000 bopd
• will compete with Enbridge's proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline from Albert to a small, northern port in British Columbia; $5.5 billion; also to be completed in 2017; faces strong resistance from Native Americans
• Kinder Morgan proposed expansion may have an easier time; the current pipeline has been there for 60 years

Wow: "small amount" is defined as 300,000 bopd. The Alaskan pipeline is flirting with 600,000 bopd; the current total North Dakota production is about 550,000 bopd.

*****************

Several people in the past have written to tell me that I am wrong to say that the president killed the Keystone XL 1.0. From the article:

That effort [to add more capacity going west to Asia] accelerated after the White House earlier this year rejected a big pipeline-expansion project, TransCanada Corp.s' Keystone XL, which would have sent more Alberta crude south of the border.

Following the Clinton presidency I have learned to parse statements well. The sentence says the "White House" not the President, so it's possible someone else in the White House (one wife, two daughters, staff) killed the project.

TransCanada has not yet submitted a new application for the "White House" to review.

For Investors Only: EPD Increases Distribution -- Not In The Bakken

Yahoo!InPlay:

8:04AM Enterprise Products declared increase in quarterly cash distribution rate paid to partners to $0.6275 per common unit, prior $0.5975 per unit.

Takeaway Capacity in the Bakken: An Update and Overview

Link here to RBN Energy  (registration may be required).