Things Obama Should Have Done

The list of things that Obama should have done and didn't keeps getting longer. I'm really disappointed by this guy who ran on the slogan of "Change you can believe in". The over-promised and is busy under-delivering.

Here's a bit from a post by Geoffrey Styles on his Energy Outlook blog. He points out that the stimulus bill should have built pipeline infrastructure to move houses in the Northeast from fuel oil to natural gas. The gas cost almost half what the fuel oil does to heat the same house. This kind of infrastructure would would have created many, many jobs and resulted in savings of millions of Americans:

Consider heating oil, a close cousin of diesel fuel. Although natural gas has been eroding the market share of heating oil in residential and commercial applications for decades, US homes still burn on average around 320,000 bbl/day of heating oil, mainly in the northeast. Commercial and industrial users consume a somewhat smaller quantity. Together, this represents about 10% of total US distillate consumption of around 4 million bbl/day (at least when the economy is healthy), or around 2% of total US petroleum consumption. Every barrel of heating oil displaced by natural gas or other fuels, such as bio-heating oil, could fuel diesel cars and trucks--after being processed into ultra-low-sulfur diesel--or be exported to offset a portion of our other imports. Replacing all of the residential heating oil used in the US would free up enough fuel for around 12 million diesel cars like the Audi A3 TDI that I wrote about a couple of months ago. And with natural gas having gotten much cheaper relative to oil, thanks to the growth of unconventional gas supplies, the economic advantage of switching can be considerable, as illustrated in the graph below, comparing residential gas and heating oil prices in New York.


How practical is this substitution? Well, having lived in a part of the country in which many older homes used oil heat, the biggest obstacle for most homeowners is the cost of replacing the furnace and connecting the house to gas. And there are still regions for which the latter is either cost-prohibitive or simply out of the question, because the gas pipeline network hasn't reached every community and neighborhood. (In such cases, propane, which is increasingly sourced from natural gas, may be a good option.) In the long run, particularly with the discovery of vast natural gas reserves in the Marcellus Shale underlying much of the northeast, the gas will come, and so will the infrastructure. The question is whether that process could be speeded up with a little help, and whether it makes sense to do so.

An article I ran across recently suggested that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the stimulus) included standards and funding for converting oil heating systems to gas. When I reviewed the text, most of that support seemed to be channeled through existing state programs. Nor did I see anything promoting the expansion of the natural gas pipeline and reticulation network (i.e., "last mile"), which remains the crucial step in this process for many small towns and rural communities. A quick search of the current draft of the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill didn't reveal anything along these lines, either, despite the emissions advantage of heating with gas instead of oil. That looks like a glaring omission to me.