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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The downside is that gas fields are depleted relatively rapidly. There's less of a long tail than with oil. Oil wells tend to degenerate into "stripper wells", producing a few barrels a day. The US has about a million of those. Gas drops in pressure and goes dead. See UK North Sea gas.[1] 10 years from peak to bottom.

[1] http://www.crystolenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Norw...

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I'd like to think that's a feature not a bug. The solar electric revolution finally looks like it's right around the corner, but it's not here yet. LNG has shown up just in time to server as a bridge to solar, allowing the US to lower its carbon emissions while critical solar technologies are still being implemented. It's important though that we move past LNG as solar takes off. The depletion of wells will hopefully increase hydrocarbon costs just in time for them to be outcompeted by solar.

Does LNG have a lower carbon footprint that other fossil fuel energy sources?

Yes. About half the CO2 as well as an order of magnitude less NOx not sure on other levels. I'm pretty sure much less CO. IIRC lower levels of byproduct is because LNG is a more pure hydrocarbon than Coal.

Yes. Natural gas plants drop emissions by 50-60% compared to a comparable coal plant.

Yes. Median emissions intensity for electricity from combined-cycle natural gas plants, reported by the IPCC as of 2014, is 490 grams of CO2-equivalent per kilowatt hour. That compares with coal at 820 g/kWh and cofired coal/biomass at 740 g/kWh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...

Not as big of a downside as it might seem, what with the very rapid rise of solar/wind and storage technology of late. Simple economics are going to make those undeniable in the next 25 years, if not sooner. NG would be excellent as a transitional energy source, I think.

There was some reporting a few years ago on just how extremely the extant sites had been cherry-picked. And that overall / longer-term reserve estimates and production cost estimates might be quite off, based on false assumptions (and possibly deliberately misleading promotions) about the productivity and production costs associated with the remaining known and estimated reserves.

Haven't seen much about that, recently, in the news I've encountered.

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