Quote Originally Posted by Firn View Post
Ulenspiegel, I don't know on which guesstimates the business plan of many of those companies was founded and investement was comitted but I would be surprised to see the current prices of natural gas among the vast majority. A boom contains of course always the danger of overinvestment and the misallocation of capital. This might be half-bad if there is a good deal of sensible infrastructure as after the Railway Mania in the UK but it does not look as pretty for the current one...

It will be highly interesting to watch how the story goes on. In the meantime investments in other areas seem to be more promising in the long term.

I recently watched NASA | Regenerative Fuel Cells, Energy Storage Systems for Space Applications [HD] .

Great stuff, of course mostly about the things it says in the title.
The business plan of most companies was very likely quite solid on paper, however, reality sucks. :-)

Pure shale gas companies need 4-6 USD/mcf to be profitable, the lack of infrastructure prevented and still prevents the selling of shale gas on the global market: the price dropped to 2 USD, now we are at 3-4 USD again, a price at which BTW utilities in the USA switch back to hard coal again.

As a typical shale gas well depletes very fast - usually in less than 7 years- it is very unlikely that pure shale gas companies made money with the production of methane in the USA. The whole affair is not sustainable in the current state and, therefore, a bad reference.

I do not dispute that in Europe the NG prices are (much) higher and shale companies may make profit under US conditions. However, with different ownership/production rights, less sophisticated technology, much smaller reserves and a much higher population density the overall picture is not clear and it does not help the proponents of shale gas to refer to the non sustainable US situation.

I support evaluation of shale gas production, but do not seee any need to support it in large scale. It is not a game changer, not in the USA, even less in Europe.