Everything You've Heard About Fossil Fuels May Be Wrong

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/05/31/linbd_fossil_fuels/index.html


Tuesday, May 31, 2011 07:01 ET  
Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong
The future of energy is not what you think it is 
By Michael Lind 


Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its  final 
decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians  and the 
educated public have been taught to believe in the past  generation. According 
to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other  industrial nations must 
undertake a rapid and expensive transition from  fossil fuels to renewable 
energy for three reasons: The imminent  depletion of fossil fuels, national 
security and the danger of global  warming.
What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the world 
has been completely wrong?
As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last  decade the 
technique of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," long used  in the oil industry, 
has evolved to permit energy companies to access  reserves of 
previously-unrecoverable “shale gas” or unconventional  natural gas. According 
to the U.S. Energy Information Administration,  these advances mean there is at 
least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.
Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used  in both 
electricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles.
The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may  be only the 
beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of  previously-unrecoverable 
“tight oil,” thereby postponing the day when  the world runs out of petroleum. 
There is enough coal to produce energy  for centuries. And governments, 
universities and corporations in the  U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries 
are studying ways to obtain  energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with 
ice in high-density  formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas 
hydrates may  equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural 
gas,  combined.
If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and  other 
unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the  global energy 
picture looks radically different than it did only a few  years ago. Suddenly it 
appears that there may be enough accessible  hydrocarbons to power industrial 
civilization for centuries, if not  millennia, to come.
So much for the specter of depletion, as a reason to adopt  renewable energy 
technologies like solar power and wind power. Whatever  may be the case with 
Peak Oil in particular, the date of Peak Fossil  Fuels has been pushed 
indefinitely into the future. What about national  security as a reason to 
switch to renewable energy?
The U.S., Canada and Mexico, it turns out, are sitting on oceans of  recoverable 
natural gas. Shale gas is combined with recoverable oil in  the Bakken "play" 
along the U.S.-Canadian border and the Eagle Ford play  in Texas. The shale gas 
reserves of China turn out to be enormous, too.  Other countries with 
now-accessible natural gas reserves, according to  the U.S. government, include 
Australia, South Africa, Argentina, Chile,  France, Poland and India.
Because shale gas reserves are so widespread, the potential for  blackmail by 
Middle Eastern producers and Russia will diminish over  time. Unless opponents 
of fracking shut down gas production in Europe, a  European Union with its own 
natural gas reserves will be far less  subject to blackmail by Russia (whose 
state monopoly Gazprom has opportunistically echoed western Greens in warning of 
the dangers of fracking).
The U.S. may become a major exporter of natural gas to China -- at  least until 
China borrows the technology to extract its own vast gas  reserves.
Two arguments for switching to renewable energy -- the depletion of  fossil 
fuels and national security -- are no longer plausible. What  about the claim 
that a rapid transition to wind and solar energy is  necessary, to avert 
catastrophic global warming?
The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming  are low 
probability outcomes -- a fact that explains why the world’s  governments in 
practice treat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority,  despite paying lip 
service to it. But even if the worst outcomes were  likely, the rational 
response would not be a conversion to wind and  solar power but a massive 
build-out of nuclear power. Nuclear energy  already provides around 13-14 
percent of the world’s electricity and  nearly 3 percent of global final energy 
consumption, while wind, solar  and geothermal power combined account for less 
than one percent of global final energy consumption.
(The majority of renewable energy consists of CO2-emitting biomass  -- wood and 
dung used for fires by the world’s poor, plus crops used to  make fuel; most of 
the remainder comes from hydropower dams denounced by  Greens.)
The disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima have dramatized the real  but limited 
and localized dangers of nuclear energy. While their initial  costs are high, 
nuclear power plants generate vast amounts of cheap  electricity -- and no 
greenhouse gases. If runaway global warming were a  clear and present danger 
rather than a low probability, then the  problems of nuclear waste disposal and 
occasional local disasters would  be minor compared to the benefits to the 
climate of switching from coal  to nuclear power.
The arguments for converting the U.S. economy to wind, solar and  biomass energy 
have collapsed. The date of depletion of fossil fuels has  been pushed back into 
the future by centuries -- or millennia. The  abundance and geographic diversity 
of fossil fuels made possible by  technology in time will reduce the dependence 
of the U.S. on particular  foreign energy exporters, eliminating the national 
security argument for  renewable energy. And if the worst-case scenarios for 
climate change  were plausible, then the most effective way to avert 
catastrophic global  warming would be the rapid expansion of nuclear power, not  
over-complicated schemes worthy of Rube Goldberg or Wile E. Coyote to  carpet 
the world’s deserts and prairies with solar panels and wind farms  that would 
provide only intermittent energy from weak and diffuse  sources.
The mainstream environmental lobby has yet to acknowledge the  challenge that 
the new energy realities pose to their assumptions about  the future. Some 
environmentalists have welcomed natural gas because it  is cleaner than coal and 
can supplement intermittent solar power and  wind power, at times when the sun 
isn’t shining or the wind isn’t  blowing. But if natural gas is permanently 
cheaper than solar and wind,  then there is no reason, other than ideology, to 
combine it with  renewables, instead of simply using natural gas to replace coal 
in  electricity generation.
Without massive, permanent government subsidies or equally massive  penalty 
taxes imposed on inexpensive fossil fuels like shale gas, wind  power and solar 
power may never be able to compete. For that reason,  some Greens hope to shut 
down shale gas and gas hydrate production in  advance. In their haste, however, 
many Greens have hyped studies that  turned out to be erroneous.
In 2010 a Cornell University ecology professor and anti-fracking  activist named 
Robert Howarth published a paper making the sensational  claim that natural gas 
is a greater threat to the climate than coal.  Howarth admitted, "A lot of the 
data we use are really low quality..."
Howarth’s error-ridden study was debunked by Michael Levi of the Council on 
Foreign Relations and criticized even by the Worldwatch Institute, a leading 
environmentalist  organization, which wrote: "While we share Dr. Howarth’s 
urgency about  the need to transition to a renewable-based economy, we believe 
based on  our research that natural gas, not coal, affords the cleanest pathway  
to such a future."
A few years ago, many Green alarmists seized upon a theory that an  ice age 600 
million years ago came to an abrupt end because of massive  global warming 
caused by methane bubbling up from the ocean floor. They  warned that the 
melting of the ice caps or drilling for methane hydrates  might suddenly release 
enough methane to cook the earth. But before it  could be turned into a 
Hollywood blockbuster, the methane apocalypse  theory was debunked recently by a 
team of Caltech scientists in a report for the science journal Nature.
All energy sources have potentially harmful side effects. The  genuine problems 
caused by fracking and possible large-scale future  drilling of methane hydrates 
should be carefully monitored and dealt  with by government regulation. But the 
Green lobby’s alarm about the  environmental side-effects of energy sources is 
highly selective. The  environmental movement since the 1970s has been fixated 
religiously on a  few "soft energy" panaceas -- wind, solar, and biofuels -- and 
can be  counted on to exaggerate or invent problems caused by alternatives. Many  
of the same Greens who oppose fracking because it might contaminate  some 
underground aquifers favor wind turbines and high-voltage power  lines that 
slaughter eagles and other birds and support blanketing huge  desert areas with 
solar panels, at the cost of exterminating much of the  local wildlife and 
vegetation. Wilderness preservation, the original  goal of environmentalism, has 
been sacrificed to the giant metallic  idols of the sun and the wind.
The renewable energy movement is not the only campaign that will be  
marginalized in the future by the global abundance of fossil fuels  produced by 
advancing technology. Champions of small-scale organic  farming can no longer 
claim that shortages of fossil fuel feedstocks  will force a return to 
pre-industrial agriculture.
Another casualty of energy abundance is the new urbanism. Because  cars and 
trucks and buses can run on natural gas as well as gasoline and  diesel fuel, 
the proposition that peak oil will soon force people  around the world to 
abandon automobile-centered suburbs and office parks  for dense downtowns 
connected by light rail and inter-city trains can  no longer be taken seriously. 
Deprived of the arguments from depletion,  national security and global warming, 
the campaign to increase urban  density and mass transit rests on nothing but a 
personal taste for  expensive downtown living, a taste which the suburban 
working-class  majorities in most developed nations manifestly do not share.
Eventually civilization may well run out of natural gas and other  fossil fuels 
that are recoverable at a reasonable cost, and may be  forced to switch 
permanently to other sources of energy. These are more  likely to be nuclear 
fission or nuclear fusion than solar or wind power,  which will be as weak, 
diffuse and intermittent a thousand years from  now as they are today. But that 
is a problem for the inhabitants of the  world of 2500 or 3000 A.D.
In the meantime, it appears that the prophets of an age of  renewable energy 
following Peak Oil got things backwards. We may be  living in the era of Peak 
Renewables, which will be followed by a very  long Age of Fossil Fuels that has 
only just begun.
	* Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New 
America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New 
Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution." More: Michael Lind
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