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by photochemsyn 620 days ago
IPCC originally, filtered through ChatGPT-4o. The ChatGPT-o1 model is getting pretty good, I gave it this prompt and I didn't see any glaring errors in the output:

> "We want to calculate the total amount of energy required to extract 90,000 tons of natural gas from a gas field in North Dakota, move that gas by pipeline to a port on the Southeastern United States, liquify that natural gas to the LNG state, then ship that LNG by tanker ship with 90,000 ton capacity to its destination in a Polish port in Europe, then re-gasify that product so its end users can consume it. There are thus five stages in this process."

The estimate is that shipping & processing costs are about 17% of the total energy transported, which still gives LNG quite an advantage over coal in terms of CO2 emitted per kilowatt-hout generated, although wind/solar/storage is obviously much better on that metric, and LNG's upfront infrastructure costs are quite high.

1 comments

Could you ask it to add latest estimate for leaks in methane infrastructure used along the way?

IIRC these estimates were low in IPCC reports vs where they are now.