Natural gas as panacea: dubious path to a green future

Contrary to standard criticisms of solar and wind, providing this much energy in the future would not use up a lot of land. Based on current installations, less than 1 per cent of US land area would be required. Right now, 22 per cent of U.S. land is in agriculture, not counting grassland pasture and range used by grazing animals.

What about costs? Wind is the cheapest energy source, with installation costs as low or lower than coal’s. There’s no need to pay for fuel, and no huge costs to repair the environmental damage caused by strip-mining and underground mining, let alone costs involved to try to develop “clean-burning coal”.

This leaves two problems: that solar and wind are variable from hour to hour, and that solar is, at present, the most expensive energy source to install, costing about four times as much per unit output as wind.

There are several ways to deal with the variability in solar and wind. First of all, we will not make a sudden leap from fossil fuels to solar and wind. Instead, there will be a slow transition as production and installation of solar and wind increase. During this transition, we will want to use all our energy sources, each for its best purposes. A few years ago there was a day in Spain during which one-third of the electrical energy came from solar, and nothing untoward happened - no grid failures, no blackouts; just business as usual. Fossil fuels and nuclear power plants can compensate for a good while for variations in solar and wind output.

As for solar power, the costs of producing new cells - photovoltaic or otherwise - are moving rapidly down, and increased research and development will inevitably lead to a similar decline in installation costs.

We won’t want to get completely away from liquid fuels. Gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuel are wonderful ways to store, transport, and use energy. A gallon of gasoline contains an amazingly large amount of energy and is relatively safe and very convenient. Rather than expend our technological research and development on ways to get shale gas from deep bedrock, we could develop a kind of reverse refinery, dissociating water to hydrogen and oxygen, combining the hydrogen with carbon to give us methane (natural gas), and combining that with oxygen to give us ethanol. Developing this technology will be a major challenge, but I believe it is not beyond the creative and innovative science and engineering that has typified America.

I’m not proposing that America gets 100 per cent of its energy from solar and wind, just that we be heavily invested in these forms of energy that do not have the enormous potential environmental and economic costs of developing shale gas reserves.

Maintaining our high standard of living, our creative and innovative civilisation, will not come easily. It needs lots of energy. It’s the great challenge of the future that must be approached openly, beyond special interests and ideologies. We can do it - there is a safe, sustainable, abundant-energy future. The question is, will we do it? Do we have the political will, the funding for inventiveness, and a government sufficiently independent of special interests for this to happen?