Here's Some New Year Economy Resolutions For Congress!

JimofPennsylvan

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Jun 6, 2007
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For individuals on New Year's Day it is a good time to do some soul searching and set some goals for the new year to improve one's life, but also, for the nation it is important to set some goals and make some commitments to insure our people maintain their quality of life and improve it! To this end people that make money off of America's energy sector are as happy as pigs in slop about Donald Trump's victory in this past November Presidential election because they believe that the current Democrat suspension on approving new Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) export terminals will be lifted and additional terminals will get government approval and these investors can make an enormous profit selling inexpensive shale gas produced in the continental United States to European and Asian LNG markets! Approving more LNG export terminals would be a disaster long-term for America because the American people and economy will need this natural gas for our needs over the decades and generations to come. Inexpensive to moderately priced natural gas is one of America's assets we should not let greed from Wall Street and the energy industry ruin this asset.

America uses natural gas as feedstock to make various plastics which are used in almost countless products the American people use, it is used as feedstock for fertilizer which is extremely important to American farmers, it is used as feedstock for hydrogen which many truckers use as the fuel for their trucks and of course many residential and commercial buildings use it to generate heat in the fall/winter season and the power industry uses it as a major source for generating electricity! Natural gas is produced in the United States largely through fracking of shale formations which essentially entails shooting sand and water at high pressure into shale formations deep underground across America. The key thing to remember about this natural gas production method is that these shale fields deplete their natural gas production at a relatively quick rate; America is in its heyday of shale production today in two or three decades it will be a completely different story, the industry will be struggle to maintain production fields that today are big producers will be low producers or shuttered and new shales fields will not be easy to bring on line as communities that sit on top of such fields don't want their water tables underground contaminated or at risk of contamination from natural gas leakage. When this golden age of shale natural gas production is over America doesn't want to be competing against desperate users in Asia and Europe for natural gas. In the past four years the American natural gas industry has built or has approval and in the process of building numerous LNG export terminals, today America is a major natural gas supplier to the world and I believe either now or when the current LNG export terminals in the process of construction are built America will be either the top or second top supplier of LNG in the world. Meaning America has no more moral or ethical reason to increase supply of natural gas to the world it has done its part!

Democrat members of Congress and Republicans in that branch of government that are not corrupted by Wall Street and/or the Energy Industry should write a letter to
The President of the United States and copy the associations of the shale industry and the petroleum industry in the United States at let it be known no more LNG export terminals or expansions of existing LNG terminal are to be approved by the Federal government and this is for an indefinite period of time and let it be known and all interested parties put on notice that Congress intends to pass legislation that permanently voids any permits and governmental approvals for new LNG export terminals or expansions of such approved after 2024 and it may take five, ten or twenty years to bring about enactment of this legislation into law but it will happen and it won't matter how many hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars are lost over these changes and it won't matter what corporations and how big of corporations are sent into bankruptcy over these changes if bankruptcies are needed to take place this wrong will be stopped. The U.S. Congress will protect the American natural gas user and consumer from high prices of natural gas because of shortage of supply of natural gas because the natural gas industry increased exports of natural gas from America after 2024 through new LNG export terminals!


The second commitment the American people need to make with the new year is to increase the use of geothermal heat pumps in residential homes across America. This writer had reason to investigate replacing a residential oil-based heat furnace this past year with a heat pump system and although I decided not to pursue the switch for a multitude of reasons boy-o-boy is there an opportunity here to improve the standard of living for the American people by lowering their utility costs. This is the crux of the problem though there is a grand canyon difference between a regular heat pump and a geothermal heat pump, a regular heat pump is a much more complex piece of equipment is located outside the building so it has to have special freon or refrigerant and so the heat transfer occurs outside of the building, the condenser is really critical and to deal with freezing winter temperatures it has to have its own heating system. The complexity of the regular heat pump system and the fact that it is located and operates outside does result in higher maintenance/service costs and the fact that the system does not last as long as a geothermal heat pump system it lasts like fifteen years as opposed to twenty years for a geothermal system. Specifically, this is the major problem for the American people as a whole from my sense of what is going on today I believe there is an organized effort and it may just be a culture problem in the extremely large heating and air conditioning service industry across America and the heat pump manufacturing industry in America where they push the regular heat pumps and they obstruct the creation of a geothermal heat pump installation system in American. This is because there is a huge amount of money on the table for the installation & repair industry and the manufacturing industry just think what is the cost to the average American consumer for a service/repair call and consider a regular heat pump will likely need two to three times more of such calls over the units life time and if a regular heat pump unit only has a service life three-quarters of the length of a geothermal unit; just think if geothermal heat pumps jumped from like ten to fifteen percent of the industry to like fifty percent of the industry the loss of revenue to these two industry's over time would be enormous!

To discuss the relevance of heat pumps it is important to understand the science behind heat pumps, heat pumps are essentially a heat transfer system as a heater they transfer heat from the outside to the inside through manipulation of a refrigerant by the use of pressure and when acting as an air conditioner vice versa. When a refrigerant is at low pressure it is a cold liquid and when it is run through evaporator coils the cool refrigerant liquid interreacts with the air and absorbs heat from the air and as it does so it turns into a gas and it continues through the cycle it runs into a compressor which subject the gas to high pressure and turns it into a liquid at a high temperature which is run through condenser coils and as air passes over the condenser coils the hot refrigerant heats the air and becomes a cooler liquid and then it cycles to the expansion valve which lowers the pressure and turns the refrigerant into a cool liquid and then it goes back into the expansion valve and starts the whole process over again. Heat pumps stop working efficiently when the outside temperature falls in the range of between 25 degrees(F) to 40 degrees(F) however the latest heat pumps with a special compressor and refrigerants that inefficiency temperature range gets lower but again these heat pumps become more complex. However if you go below the frost line and that depth across most of America is between three to five feet the temperature is at a continuous 45 to 50 degrees. The geothermal system referenced here is a horizontal geothermal system as opposed to a vertical geothermal system which is much easier to construct because a vertical system needs a drilling rig to construct a piping system much deeper into the ground. In essence the process difference behind a geothermal heat pump unit and a regular heat pump unit is that the evaporation coil in a regular heat pump unit where the refrigerant turns into a gas through absorbing heat that heat exchange system takes place not in a small snaked evaporation coil but in a long 240 foot pipe loop below the frost line in the ground. In a geothermal heat pump unit the heat pump isn't outside the building just the piping system most geothermal heat pump systems have three, four or five of these 240 foot loops that run into a building where a simple manifold combines the multiple pipes into one which goes to the compressor part of the system and so forth and so on; each pipe loop is equal to one ton of a heat system and so if you have a four ton system you would need four loops.

The problem for the American consumer is if you need to or are exploring replacing your heating furnace and you talk to these HVAC companies they steer you to the regular heat pumps. In my experience if you raise the topic of a geothermal heat pump system they start talking about vertical heat pump systems and quote you price tags of like fifty to seventy five thousand dollars just for the piping system. This is the situation across America state level representatives and members of Congress need to get on the job, they need to have websites for the contractors that build the horizontal geothermal systems, they need to offer low interest loans and other seed monies to help create the businesses in this industry, they need to get after the heat pump manufacturers in the United States to make it easy for the consumers to understand these products and the contractors to install geothermal heat pumps. Elected representative need to get these manufacturers to settle on the type of pipe that goes into the ground on these systems and the length of pipes in these loops is the minimum of 240 feet in a loop needed and the manufacturers need to publish this so the American consumer when they hire the contractor to install the piping system they can specify the type of pipe to be used and the length of pipe needed; they need to take the needless mystery out of these systems for the American consumer. These systems are not that complex to build, three workman over four days should be able to build the system maybe even in three days if crew is good. It would take two days to dig the trench for the pipe; you have one guy on the back hoe digging the trench and one guy on a small loader moving the dirt from where the back hoe drops it to an organize pile and the third guy can be with a shovel trying to organize the piles of dirt from where the back hoe guy drops it so the loader guy finds it easy to load the dirt in his bucket. One day to lay the plastic pipe and heat connect the joints and pressure test it and lay three inches of sand over the top of the pipes so when the trench is refilled any rocks in the dirt won't crack the pipes. The fourth day would be for filling in the trench. The American should see these piping systems installed for around fifteen to twenty thousand dollars. For most residential properties that have 20 ft by 120 feet of land on their property where a trench five to nine feet trench can be dug is all that is needed. If one looks on the internet one can see a lot of these systems built in the United Kingdom does the self interestedness of the HVAC service and installation industry as well as HVAC manufacturing industry have something to do why Americans don't avail themselves of these system in greater numbers. America's elected officials are really failing the American people in not utilizing their power to see the utilization of these systems significantly increased in America; the American consumer could save an enormous amount of money in lower heating and air conditioning costs over time if they achieved this result!
 
Approving more LNG export terminals would be a disaster long-term for America because the American people and economy will need this natural gas for our needs over the decades and generations to come. Inexpensive to moderately priced natural gas is one of America's assets we should not let greed from Wall Street and the energy industry ruin this asset.

Export more LNG, build more domestic nuclear power.
 
America uses natural gas as feedstock to make various plastics which are used in almost countless products the American people use, it is used as feedstock for fertilizer which is extremely important to American farmers, it is used as feedstock for hydrogen which many truckers use as the fuel for their trucks

How many truckers use hydrogen for their trucks?
 

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