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In the process of moving to renewable energy, The Netherlands has banned natural gas connections to new houses starting 1 July 2018. This is even though the cou

In the process of moving to renewable energy, The Netherlands has banned natural gas connections to new houses starting 1 July 2018. This is even though the country has one of the largest gas fields in the world [1]. Electric (induction) cooktops and district heating are very good alternatives to using gas (and safer, even though the gas infrastructure is very good). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field

VLM 8y ago
Much like the biggest farm is not necessarily the most profitable, the Netherlands government reporting office claims peak production was a decade ago, and its all downhill until the mid 2020s (lets say, five years away?) when the Netherlands switches over permanently from being a net producer of natgas to being a net importer. Kind of like how the UK peaked around the turn of the century and has been a net importer for more than a decade, but delayed by maybe 15 years. In this line of business (IT) its all about scaling. The economic models around natgas are hilarious in that nobody scales beyond one, at least in public. So every country on the planet has a natgas economic model where on a scale factor of one, the permanent transition from exporter to importer is "no biggie" because there's an infinite supply of infinite cheap commodity natgas from world trade, so we'll just have some ... permanent inflation from printing money to import all that natgas. That economic model sounds really good scaled to one country, but doesn't work well when scaled to "pretty much every country on the planet at the same time and the global cheap commodity natgas market disappears". There's probably a lot of startup opportunity in "residential natgas disappears".
nacnud 8y ago
What are we going to do with all those dormant pipes? Could some clever startup use them to route physical packets of stuff? :)
- praseodym 8y ago
  Gas pipes don’t have very large diameters. That being said, they could be used to route fibre optic cables through without digging.

VLM 8y ago

Much like the biggest farm is not necessarily the most profitable, the Netherlands government reporting office claims peak production was a decade ago, and its all downhill until the mid 2020s (lets say, five years away?) when the Netherlands switches over permanently from being a net producer of natgas to being a net importer. Kind of like how the UK peaked around the turn of the century and has been a net importer for more than a decade, but delayed by maybe 15 years. In this line of business (IT) its all about scaling. The economic models around natgas are hilarious in that nobody scales beyond one, at least in public. So every country on the planet has a natgas economic model where on a scale factor of one, the permanent transition from exporter to importer is "no biggie" because there's an infinite supply of infinite cheap commodity natgas from world trade, so we'll just have some ... permanent inflation from printing money to import all that natgas. That economic model sounds really good scaled to one country, but doesn't work well when scaled to "pretty much every country on the planet at the same time and the global cheap commodity natgas market disappears". There's probably a lot of startup opportunity in "residential natgas disappears".

nacnud 8y ago

What are we going to do with all those dormant pipes? Could some clever startup use them to route physical packets of stuff? :)

praseodym 8y ago
Gas pipes don’t have very large diameters. That being said, they could be used to route fibre optic cables through without digging.