So no way to judge if there'd be a significant impact on the price of gas from the increased demand of maxing capacity?

I'm not seeing that the US is importing or needs a bunch of LNG, one of the strange quirks of energy politics and economics.  There is a glut in domestic NG production right now and the infustry is shutting down NG production and drilling as fast as it can.  In fact, T. Boone Pickens lost billions on that gamble.  Minor point, perhaps a long-term one because the issue will come back some day.

As to "converting" a coal power generating plant to NG, I tend to have my doubts.  True, NGs is often used to start a coal fired system, and as coal is introduced into the fire-ball in the boiler, the gas is turned off.  Due to how fire-ball mechanics work, a coal fired boiler really can't sustain a base load with NG without ripping out the entire boiler and getting a new one, tens of millions of dollars per 250 MW unit.  The reason as I understand it, is that natural has leaves different patterns of cool spots that can cause a coal boiler to crack, deform, warp, or even explode (there are reasons why nitrogen and argon tanks are at coal plants, for over-fire safety).

I would be so bold as to say we should build lots of new base load NG units with high efficiency and better transmission lines, and not try to convert old units.  Of course, solar and wind power could be leveraged as well,  I would definitely reserve a few of the newer, very clean coal plants for peaking power such as if a major cold snap or heat wave impacted parts of our country.  It would be neat to see coal used only as "degree-day peaking power units" or in cases other units were down due to maintenance.  Your electricity bills would zoom up though, I'm just warning you.

Seriously, with today's integrated grid, I should be able to go to the PSE website here in Kent, WA and select whether I want to buy electricity generated by natural gas or from coal.   Even if the local power is provided by coal, I would be charged the equivalent price of what someone adding more capacity from a gas generator would be charged.

It's the same logic as carbon credits.

That way, instead of simply transferring our dependence from one CO2 emitting fossil fuel that is produced by damaging large swaths of land through strip mining and mountain top removal to another CO2 emitting fossil fuel with a demonstrated history of extreme price volatility and known environmental hazards that are increasing with increasing use of technologies like 'fracking', you eliminate CO2 from the equation with a zero emission fission reactor.

Of course, if your real motive for being an environmental activist is to promote the use of natural gas to enrich companies like ExxonMobil, Shell and Mesa Power (owned by T. Boone Pickens), you probably will not think much of my plan or the one advocated by Jim Holm at coal2nuclear.com.

Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast

Here's another idea:  If we can so easily decomission coal plants, how about a federal program to buy the dirtiest coal plants and decomission them?

http://biodiversivist.blogspot.com/2009/05/hsa-future-of-fusion-solar-power.html

I have also noticed that our garbage and recycle trucks all run on natural gas. Maybe the fuel needed to bridge between renewable and fossil fuels has been sitting right  under our noses.

I'm sure there would be an impact - but predicting energy prices (beyond the obvious: more demand = higher prices) is more art than science.  Line up all the economists who predicted gas would go to $14 in 2006 and $4 today, and I'll put a lot more faith in economic forecasting...

For what it's worth, I'm not suggesting a solution, nor implying that we convert old coal plants.  I'm simply observing that there are lots of underutilized gas assets and highly-utilized coal assets.  Shifting that utilization factor (e.g., run the gas plants harder and the coal plants less) is therefore possible.  That's not incompatible with fuel switching in specific coal plants - but it wasn't my point.

It's more efficient to convert any fuel to heat than to power - such is the nature of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.  That's not a gas-specific story, or even really a heat vs. power story.  (Try running your computer on heat!)  We need heat and we need power.  An ideal world would cogenerate them both from a single fuel source - whether nuclear, fossil, renewable or some player-to-be-named-later. 

But be careful assuming that any fuel would be "better" used for heat; it's analagous to saying that we'd be better off using our nation's beef processors only to make chuck.  Yes, you get higher efficiency, but you end up losing a lot of T-bones, filets and higher-value cuts.  Ditto with a preference for heat.  Like it or not, we need electricity - our challenge is simply to make it with as low a fossil-fuel signature as possible.

To be clear, I'd hate to call this "Casten's plan".  I'm not advocating this path - simply observing that it's possible.  Noting that we have a massive excess of gas capacity, it's worth asking the question how big that tool is.  Whether or not we choose to use that tool and what the cost is is secondary - and one that I personally feel much less qualified to opine on. 

Note though, apropos of my comment to Enviroperk, that I would not personally advocate any plan that shifts inefficient use of one fossil fuel for another.  At best, this is a bridging strategy - but it's a hell of a big bridge.

Note also that I have no disagreement with you that this would increase the price of gas (as noted by the first commenter).  The question at hand is whether - in a world that is preparing to put a price on CO2 emissions - that price increase on a $/ton of CO2 reduced basis is acceptable / on a par with $/ton costs we are prepared to pay for other strategies.  The simple math above suggests it may be, at least in small doses, for the simple reason that all the capital has already been built. 

Indeed, gas prices would have to increase massively for this to be less expensive on a $/ton basis than new-build nuke, solar PV or coal with CCS.  Without getting into a debate of the relative merits of those options, it simply suggests that this asset-switching strategy deserves equal consideration.  And indeed, would receive equal consideration in a world that priced CO2 on a technology agnostic basis and let capital flow accordingly.

The solar v. gas comparison doesn't wash.  Would need to see the data, but it looks very much like an apples:oranges comparison to me.  First, as noted, our gas fleet is overbuilt, so the cost of a bringing on a new natural gas peaker (in much of the country) is simply the cost of running the gas, while the solar plant requies new capital construction.  Second, solar is heavily subsidized while gas is not (at least not directly).  As such, when the economic match from an owners perspective, it means only that we've shifted costs elsewhere in society.  That's not to suggest that we shouldn't encourage solar - just that if we don't look at full social costs of any option, we're misleading ourselves.  (And yes, we should be doing that for gas as well!)  Finally, a MW of solar isn't = a MW of gas peaking, because of renewable intermittency issues.  A colleague of mine who used to work in a wind-intensive utility tells me that for wind, they assumed that they could rely on less than 20% of the total wind capacity to be there from a capacity planning perspective (e.g., if they knew their peak load was 20,000 MW and they had 5,000 MW of wind installed on their system, reliability considerations drove them to find 20,000 - 5,000 x .2 = 19,000 MW of other generation to serve load).  Solar suffers from similar problems - although I don't know what the precise factor would be.  As such, using solar to serve peak loads either requires an overbuild of solar or - more likely - an additional purchase of conventional peakers to "top up" peak demands.

Bottom line in all cases is that I don't see any societal logic yet for solar being cheaper than peaking gas. 

Re: garbage trucks - now you're sounding like T Boone! 

The only comment I'd add to that is an observation from my (way back when) days as a consultant.  We did some work for the European natural gas vehicle ass'n and came to the conclusion that if you believed that we could shift society to one that depended on hydrogen as a transportation fuel, we ought to be able to get to compressed natural gas more quickly, which retained many of the benefits but with less cost and risk.  However, that's sort of like saying that if you can plan for a manned mission to Mars, it's comparatively easy to plan for a manned mission to the moon...

Natural gas - like hydrogen - is amenable to fleet-scale roll outs, where you need build only one fueling station / infrastructure and can standardize much of your system.  But it's a huge leap from there to a national transportation fuel.

My point is:

Since we already have a very good natural gas distribution system for business and many residences in place, it would be beneficial ( on the order of 1/4 less co2 per btu/hr! ) to encourage the use of on premises natural gas for heating purposes. I believe the combination of space heating, water heating and clothes drying ( with out considering cooking) is a major part of residential and a significant part of commercial energy use. For these applications, a 70% + reduction in co2, is is significant reduction at NO additional cost!.

Currently, my electric utility gives a discount on all of my electricty use if I have an all-electric home, while they merrily pass on the fuel cost adjustments and sell me natural gas produced peak power at 4 times the CO2 per Btu/hr!

Ah... the all-electric tariff.  Cute things those, eh?  Shortly after college, I rented a condo for the season with a bunch of friends in VT so that we could have a place to get together and ski on weekends.  The condo was built in the 80s, just as VT Yankee was coming on line and with the promise of power that would be "too cheap to meter" and utility breaks for all-electric service, they put in electric heaters.  Needless to say, the future didn't quite play out as predicted... Short version of the story is that we paid more for 3 months worth of heat that winter than paid for rent.  (I still can't figure out why the utility thought it was worth their $ to send us electric bills!)

Without question, we are vastly better using ANYTHING than electric power to make heat.  For the same reason that it's a bad idea to use filet mignons to make chuck.  But for what it's worth, the trend line is already pretty robustly away from electric heating, for obvious economic reasons.  What made sense in the 70s and 80s when we were blessed with ample hydro, low marginal cost coal and the promise of cheap nuclear is fully inverted today.  A cause for some optimism that in the long term economic logic prevails.  And as Keynes said, in the long term, we're all dead...

We are going to be paying a lot more for power anyway, and this just makes sense.

One thing we don't hear enough about is to simply use less; the immediate impact can be tremendous, but we are just too spoiled.  Austin currently has a controversy raging, bordering on scandalous, in that the city claims it can longer fund the Trail of Lights at Christmas time.  This is an abomination that needs to go anyway.  People are looking at alternative funding, perhaps private, perhaps corporate, and for what??  A many-days-long celebration of electric light bulbs all burning at once, with long lines of idling cars waiting for their turn to drive thru the trail of lights.  This means closing city streets, paying over-time for the extra police, traffic barricades, all that, plus effectively closing the park at Auditorium Shores for all other uses.  And how does this relate to Christmas?  Oh, yeah, spend/waste/consume.  And I am not against Christmas, we all love the baby Jesus.

There is another tradition, a private trail of lights on 37th street that predates the official, city-run trail.  Same story, long lines of cars idling for their chance to drive through a 2 1/2 block long residential corridor (where the residents are pressured into joining in) in which the idea is to out-do each other with outrageous electric Christmas displays.  The power company brings in extra transformers for that month.  There is one house whose claim to fame is the meter itself which is extravagantly festooned and one can walk up to this "altar" and watch the meter wheel whiz round and round.

Ridiculous to think we can afford this, much less want to do it.  And I forget the mix, but Texas juice is mostly coal.

For years, natural gas in America was flared as a waste product of oil production, perhaps still in some areas.  This is still being done in much of the developing world, by the oil giants.  Read up on the Shell-in-court story.  The gas flares in Central Russia can be seen from space in the the National Geographic's "the Earth at Night" map.  The first time I saw it, I got a distinct impression that for most Americans it would serve as a source of pride:  look at how bright our lights are, not even Europe (just as saturated, but kinda yellowish) can compare. 

I, too, would like to see some figures on LNG costs and dangers.  I think we should capture it all and use it in greater proportion while we work on getting off of fossil fuels entirely.  Beginning by phasing out the dirtiest, and NOT developing oil shale and tar sands.

Oh, yeah, no nukes. . .