power plants

Keeping up with all the natural-gas-related infrastructure under development along the Gulf Coast is a full-time job. New gas pipelines out of the Permian and the Haynesville. New LNG export terminals from Brownsville, TX, to Plaquemines Parish, LA. And don’t forget new gas storage capacity — that slice of the midstream sector is in the midst of its biggest boom in decades. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll finish our review of the latest round of Gulf Coast storage projects.

A tsunami of natural gas storage projects has been building along the Gulf Coast, most of them aimed at meeting the growing demand for flexible, responsive storage capacity near new LNG export terminals and gas-fired power plants. And the magnitude of that wave keeps growing. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll begin a new mini-series in which we update the storage projects we discussed in a number of posts last year and describe the additional projects that have come to light since then.

For many, coal has become a hydrocarbon non grata in recent years, mostly due to the considerable amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) generated when it is burned to produce electric power or heat. But what if, instead of combusting coal on its own, coal plants were co-fired by a combination of environmentally friendly versions of ammonia and the volumes of CO2 generated were way less? And what if, through the 2030s and ’40s, the ratio of fuels used in these coal-and-ammonia-fired power plants shifted away from coal and toward ammonia, and by mid-century the plants were fueled only by “green” or “blue” ammonia, which generates little or no CO2? It may sound too good to be true — heck, it may well turn out to be! But there is a lot of interest in the idea, especially in Japan, where coal still retains a big share of the power generation mix. In today’s RBN blog, we continue to look at the prospects for environmentally friendly hydrogen (H2) — and ammonia, an H2 carrier — in the power generation sector.

It’s true. A lot of folks harbor serious doubts about whether “green,” “blue,” or “pink” hydrogen (H2) can ever be produced efficiently and cheaply enough — and in sufficient volumes — to justify blending hydrogen with natural gas, let alone using H2 as an outright replacement for gas. At the same time, though, a growing number of electric utilities and independent power producers — generally cautious groups — are planning new, large-scale power plants that will be capable of hydrogen/natgas co-firing from the get-go, and can be converted with relative ease to 100% H2 later on. Can hydrogen really make sense as a generation fuel? In today’s RBN blog, we begin a series on the prospects for environmentally friendly hydrogen — and ammonia, an H2 carrier — in the power generation sector.

As nobody in Texas will soon forget, in February of this year freezing temperatures across the southern U.S. hammered energy markets and resulted in widespread and long-lasting blackouts across the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) power region. Life for many Texans came to a standstill for a week until power could be restored. The resulting economic damages have been estimated in the billions. Many people, rightfully, questioned how an energy-rich state like Texas could have been so affected. And then the blame-game started. Lacking a forum of qualified experts, productive discussions took a back seat to self-serving rhetoric, special-interest advocacy, and political posturing. But if real solutions were going to be found, it would take more than finger-pointing. It would take a meeting of experts whose primary focus was a resolution, rather than a constituency. Fortunately for Texans, that’s what they got two weeks ago. In today’s blog, we take you through the symposium and its outcome, particularly regarding the role of natural gas.  

The U.S. power sector’s shift to natural gas over the past few years has been a boon to gas producers across the Lower 48, especially in the Northeast. Scores of new gas-fired power plants have been built there during the Shale Era, and a number of coal-fired, oil-fired, and nuclear plants have been taken offline. New England is a case in point; gas-fired power now accounts for about half of the installed generating capacity in the six-state region (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) — three times what it was 20 years ago. But New Englanders have a love-hate relationship with natural gas, and with renewables and energy storage on the rise, gas’s role in the land of the Red Sox, hard-to-understand accents, and lobsta’ rolls may well have peaked. Today, we discuss recent developments on the natural gas and power generation fronts in the northeastern corner of the U.S.