Citizen Power

The billionaire Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens likes to claim that his natural gas scheme will get us off our dependency on “foreign” oil and make us safer.  He’s wrong about a lot of things, but he’s especially wrong about natural gas. He’s usually talking about liquified natural gas to run big semi-trucks when he discusses natural gas.  Liquified natural gas, or LNG, is natural gas that has been cooled down to minus 260 degrees F, which condenses it into liquid, and then it can be shipped and stored in refrigerated tanks.  It takes a lot of energy to convert LNG to it’s liquid form and then more energy to transport it in a cooled state so that it stays liquid, and in its liquid form it’s basically nearly entirely methane.  And despite the insinuations of Pickens, no natural gas is a renewable, and it’s also not an alternative fuel in the usually understood sense.  It’s a polluting fossil fuel that will run out someday, but for now, there is a huge boom in natural gas as more and more people use it for heating their homes.  Expanding the use of it to burn in big trucks is an especially bad idea.

Besides the fossil fuel part of natural gas, we have to consider whether or not it’s safe, and this takes us back to the foreign oil and terrorism connection.  Many countries that allow us to buy their oil and gas are currently not countries that the US has made a point of becoming equal partners or friends with.  The US has, in its recent history, even started wars for fake reasons, for the purpose of taking whatever fossil fuel resources a country has,  or for controlling its pipeline accesses, etc.   Obviously, starting wars does not make friends, and it has definitely decreased our “safety” where these countries are concerned.

Now it’s being pointed out that the natural gas is also a potential safety concern. LNG is usually safe to transport, and stable, but since it’s 90% methane, it’s highly combustible, which is another way of saying “explosive”.  There have been explosions involving LNG; though so far, not very many.

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