[Bring_Back_Shantz]

Originally Posted by TheGrimm

I am all for the move to NGV's in Alberta. People get all caught up in the fact that Alberta is a big oil producer, but Natural Gas is huge and abundant here as well. The issue with prices and abundance that we see today is attributed mainly to the recent ability to "Frack" for natural gas. This has simply made it rediculously easy to access natural gas and over the past several years every company is guilty of using the new "fracking" techniques to gain easy supply. Now we are at a point where we have more gas than ever before and no one to sell it to, prices have dropped and being a "gas" it's very difficult to transport overseas to China and other countries where the prices remain strong.

There are ways to transport it which are all up-and-coming including liquifying it at very cold temps (-162 celsius). It actually becomes a fairly efficient fuel by volume when liquified however there are some caveats as you can well imagine.

There is also another method which I am not too familiar of where you can turn it to a liquid at normal temperatures however I believe this is a fairly costly process, and thus not widely used.

The Kitimat pipeline will be used to move gas to the coast where it will be transported as LNG to Asia, but this won't be happening for another several years (I think 2015 at the earliest).

The other somewhat interesting fact about natural gas (methane) is that it's actually a fairly renewable resource that happens as a byproduct of decomposing organic material. It is something that we can easily find ways of replacing and when compared to "fossil" fuels it seems like a great way to transition from our dependency.

Stop spelling it with a "k" and stop putting it in quotation marks.