Scott Tinker
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Scott Tinker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And if you're gonna get out the SOX and the NOX and the particulates and the mercury and the CO2, each one of those things is a bolt-on system that runs on more energy. So you're lowering your EROI the more you clean up that coal. And it's still useful. It still has a decent return even after all that, but it's expensive because every one of those things isn't just energy, it's money.
So now I've taken coal from affordable and reliable to kind of expensive, more expensive and reliable. China doesn't do all those things. Sometimes their scrubbers are on, sometimes they're off. Depends on what their economy is needing and the cost of electricity. We don't do that here. You turn off those here in regulated societies, you get massive fines or go to prison as you should.
So that's the nice part about density again, oil a little bit less of those scrubbers, natural gas, you don't need any of that. You don't need CO2 if you wanna remove it, but there's a little bit of particulate in natural gas, not much, not much mercury, a little sulfur. Sometimes there's sulfur gases scrubbed out, but a lot less work needs to be done to make natural gas clean.
And we clean it up in our, and we cook with it in our homes. You know, it's not, I don't worry about that. There's some studies that say you should, I'm not. So that's the beauty of energy density.
Depends on what you have to worry about.
Looking pretty good.
Looking pretty good if you're cooking with wood. LPG is saving so many lives in this world, replacing wood and charcoal and huts and homes. And I'm not talking a few lives. There are 3 billion people and 2.8 billion people in the world today that cook indoors with solid biomass. And 3 million of them die every year still, Jordan. 3 million people from breathing indoor smoke, particulates.
The major pollution problem. That's it. In cities outdoor, this is just indoor. There's another two, at least that many outdoors breathing indoor particulate pollution, real pollution. So you replace that with an LPG tank, liquid propane, you save lives, instantly save lives, or an induction cooktop, something that doesn't have that happening.
It's an incredible life-saving technology, if you will. So on the abundance thing, back to that, here we are, there's a lot of natural gas in the world, okay, a lot.
Correct.
No, we're not out of energy options, we're out of ideas sometimes.
So in 08, Mr. Obama brought me up to ask me to be Assistant Secretary of Energy under Stephen Chu. 08, first term, first month Obama, and I visited and we talked and they were looking at me doing fossil energy, coal, oil, gas, strategic petroleum reserve and other things.
And I spoke with the secretary and this was right as that fracking revolution, evolution really, because I know that it's kind of an evolution of technologies, came together. The Barnett shale really kicked it off in 2001 and two with George Mitchell. But by 08... We saw the Barnett, the Fayetteville had gotten started, the Haynesville was coming, the Marcellus is just getting started.
These are big shale gas basins in the country. And you mean big. Big. They're huge. They're big. Right. And oil followed, more technology. Natural gas is a little molecule. I think you'll be interested in this. Why do you have to frack? Why do you have to crack rock? Okay, and here's why.
And when you're cracking rock, what you're doing is putting water, which is not very compressible, under a lot of pressure, and then putting it into the ground under pressure and releasing that pressure. And that pressure release cracks rock down there a couple, five, six, 10,000 feet. Cracks the rock, makes these little teeny cracks. Why?
Well, because the holes where the natural gas is, are, the molecules are, are about, they're so small, they're in the nanometer scale. I could fit about a hundred of those little holes across the width of one human hair.
Yeah, there are a hundred of those little teeny pools across one human hair. And so the molecules, it's not easy to get them out of there. Now, so you gotta crack that rock. You're creating, you got little teeny rooms and you're creating little pathways, doorways and hallways for them to flow toward a lower pressure area.
And that wellbore, when it comes down and goes down and cracks rock, and then you open it up, you've created a low pressure pipe and everything wants to go towards low pressure, like humans. Hey, less pressure, give me less pressure, I'm good. I don't like the high pressure. In they go, and they start to flow up. So that's why fracking, hydraulic fracturing, came about.
It had been happening again for five decades.
Cracking vertical. And then the horizontal wells, they came together. So that changed things here. Our natural gas production in 2007-8 from shale, that's the name of these rocks, was about 4% of our natural gas came from shale in 08. Today, 70%. Wow.
Showing 101–120 of 207 · page 6 of 11
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