Natural gas prices in Europe (and perhaps elsewhere)

[jonatha]

Articles in The Economist quote European natural gas prices in Euros per Megawatt Hour.

This strikes me as strange since the amount of power you get from burning gas surely depends on the efficiency of the process you use to convert it to electricity. In the US, natural gas prices are by volume (dollars per thousand or million cubic feet).

Or maybe Europe assumes some sort of ideally efficent process. (Google says one MWh is 7600 cubic feet of CH₄...)

 

[bilby]

Articles in The Economist quote European natural gas prices in Euros per Megawatt Hour.

This strikes me as strange since the amount of power you get from burning gas surely depends on the efficiency of the process you use to convert it to electricity. In the US, natural gas prices are by volume (dollars per thousand or million cubic feet).

Or maybe Europe assumes some sort of ideally efficent process. (Google says one MWh is 7600 cubic feet of CH₄...)

The energy you obtain from burning gas is constant. That makes energy or volume interconvertible and equivalent.

The amount you then waste is up to you, and what you're using the gas for.

If you're using it for heating, the efficiency is as close to 100% as makes no difference; In Europe, most gas is not used to generate electricity at all, but is directly used for heat - in industrial applications, or domestic cooking, hot water, and central heating systems.

 

[bilby]

The only "correct" way to measure the amount of natural gas (or of any chemical substance) is in Moles.

Every other option has to include some assumptions; In most real-world use cases, the assumptions are fairly obvious and fairly constant.

The energy content of natural gas is given by Einstein's most famous equation, and by that arithmetic we can see that natural gas is vastly higher in energy content than advertised. However we can assume that in real-world use, we are only interested in the chemical energy available from burning methane with oxygen. And in fact, we rarely burn methane in oxygen; We burn it in air, and assume that the non-oxygen components are irrelevant (which they mostly, but not completely, are).

Likewise, volumetric measures assume atmospheric pressure, which is rarely observed in transportation or production of gas. A cubic metre of gas requires far less than a cubic metre of storage, because we store it under pressure. But as long as we burn it at one atmosphere, it is perfectly fine to measure it in terms of volume at point of use.

The unwritten assumptions vary, but as long as they're fairly obvious, it's not particularly important.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yeah, stupid SI crap again. In America we measure natural gas usage in "groundhogs".