One of my clients is trying to determine which method of heating is best for a new apartment building. One approach is what we have normally done for the past 20 years. The other method is new and a little scary. It sounds good. Others have tried it and it works, but it is more complicated. The choice is between a central boiler with natural gas as a fuel or a ground source heat system using individual heat pumps for each apartment, providing both heating and cooling.
What to do? My recommendation is to very seriously explore the ground source heat pump with the supplemental heat for hall pressurization coming from a passive solar wall and domestic hot water supplemented by solar water heaters. Am I sure this is the best approach? No. But a serious exploration is in order and electricity, as a back up, seems the best option. Here is why……
Last year David Hughes, now retired from the Geological Survey of Canada, in a March, 2007 taped interview with Julian Darley of the Post Carbon Institute suggested that we are in a very serious supply problem with natural gas. The following are a summary of the main issues:
1) In the 'Lower 48' the U.S. is very likely at or near peak coal production. As with any essential resource peak production will inevitably lead to a price spike and result in a period of frenzied exploitation. And while this will create a short-term plateau or at least mitigate the rate of decline nonetheless the writing is now on the wall for U.S. coal as it is for global oil production and North American gas production.
2) Canada has peaked in terms of natural gas production. We are now drilling 4 times as many wells as we did in the 1990's but this has not increased production. It has however enabled the production decline rate to be mitigated.
3) 77% of Canada 's putative reserves have yet to be discovered. Theoretical reserves should not be treated as being in the same class as those that have felt a drill bit.
4) The average production rate decline for Canada 's really existing wells is 20%!
5) The U.S. has also peaked in terms of natural gas production and currently relies on Canada for 15% of their supplies which is 55% of our production. (3.6 Tcf to 6.5 Tcf)
Chapter 6 of NAFTA the "proportional sharing clause" states that we must continue to export even "in times of scarcity". The average decline rate for really existing U.S. gas wells is 28%.
6) North America will be facing natural gas shortfalls in the near term. (David Hughes' number is 3 years "if we are lucky".) To put not to fine a point on it we heat about 50% of our homes with natural gas and 33% with electricity which is increasingly being made by using natural gas. Yes our winters are getting warmer still......
7) As we go down the energy food chain the energy return on the energy invested also goes down. Ghawar and its like were able to return 100 units of energy for every one invested. Off shore fields like the North Sea are good for about a 17 to 1 return. The tar sands according to Mr. Hughes 2:1. (He likens the use of natural gas to create syncrude as equivalent to "Turning gold into lead.")
These facts are well known inside the energy industry. What however is not acknowledged and has so far at least been wholly under appreciated by almost everyone is the following.
8) The green house gas implications of #7 are staggeringly immense! Effectively what #7 means is that if we use all of our considerable ingenuity and the immense wealth that we have currently to keep our current energy, production and distribution systems up and running then the next decade will see our GHG's be far higher than they are today. It will also mean that after those ten years we will have far less access to the very great amount of energy that will be needed to transition our current system to a renewable energy production and distribution system. i.e. A sustainable one.
The implication is that if the wrong choice is made now, the economic ability to switch to the other energy source will be very difficult. Switching to a different source will be done in the context of a weakened economy.
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