> "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.
