Depletion of Nova Scotia gas

Neighborhood future?



This story from The Oil Drum is very interesting to me because natural gas from the Sable Island fields flows through a pipeline less than one mile from our home. It's used at a pretty new power plant just down the road from here.

Measures presently being taken to keep up the flow of gas will only speed the rate of depletion, as the piece explains.

The curious thing about this diagram is the use of a new colour to show the effect of compression. No new field is involved, so all that compression should do is increase deliverablity, at the expense of more rapid depletion of the reservoirs. It cannot delay output decline indefinitely, and the diagram shows beginnings of decline in late 2008. One would expect that the total output (over all time) would scarcely be affected by compression, so a very rapid decline would be expected after 2008. It is difficult to see how a decline of the output to a very low level can be avoided by the end of the decade or shortly after.

Will there be enough LNG injected in this system by ten years from now to make up the losses from depletion?