Mitt Romney’s energy plan is a curious document. It is not actually an energy plan, but rather, a bet on a high-carbon job boom. If President Obama promised a boom in clean “green jobs” from solar energy, energy efficiency, and high-tech alternatives to fossil fuels, Romney's answer is the opposite: You might call them “black jobs”—a return to fossil fuel-intensive industries like petrochemicals and steel manufacturing, which contribute both pollution and carbon to the air. Romney’s “white paper” is a haphazard 21-page collage consisting of 75 percent clippings from ... Read More
Plentiful Natural Gas, Get It While It’s Cold
September 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Back in May Bruce Dorminey outlined the potential benefits of tapping methane hydrates—a “frozen combo of methane gas and water”—as a major, and frack-free, source of natural gas that could provide beaucoup energy without as much of the climate-changing collateral emissions of oil and coal. The hydrates are usually found in deep, cold water or in permafrost, the challenges of working there being a key reason hydrates have been a pretty much untapped bonanza. Untapped, but not unknown. In 1982 the United States launched a program to study hydrates; a 1995 survey estimated the ... Read More
Fracking Away the Wildlife
August 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The population of Wamsutter, Wyoming may have grown four times over in the last three years, but the town on the southeastern edges of some of the largest natural gas fields on the continent is still a dusty pit stop off Interstate 80. The augmented volume of trucks flowing through this isolated interchange only affirms the energy boom of the Intermountain West—and the fracturing of the habitat of the American pronghorn. Once ubiquitous on the Great Plains and high deserts of the American West, these antelope rely on thousands of miles of unspoiled ranges to avoid their predators, and to ... Read More
Frac-o-nomics: More Gas Won’t Guarantee Lower Prices
June 4, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
A rush in fracking natural gas in the American West has led to Indian guar gum prices flapping upwards like those famous Beijing butterflies of chaos theory. Every American gas well that’s fracked requires about nine metric tons of guar gum, a viscous gel made from the guar bean. Guar gum—also used in ice cream and other foods—makes the “proppants” that are jammed into fractures in shale rocks more viscous and more slippery, which helps free more of the natural gas trapped in the rocks. As an excellent Reuters article explains, runaway demand for guar beans has ... Read More
Is Natural Gas Just as Polluting as Coal?
May 7, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The recent boom in U.S. natural gas production has been hailed as the cure to all America’s ills. Gas, its boosters say, can reduce household heating expenses, enhance energy security, create jobs, and lower greenhouse gas emissions. That last part is crucial to winning over environmentalists. “Over its full cycle of production, distribution, and use, natural gas emits just over half as many greenhouse gas emissions as coal for equivalent energy output,” the green group Worldwatch Institute reported last August. But all of that may amount to a lot of hot air if researchers from ... Read More
Burning Ice: The Next Energy Boom?
March 19, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Set a lighter to an icy block of methane hydrate, a naturally frozen combo of methane gas and water, and flames spew forth at random. However unlikely this fluke of nature may appear — burning ice — it could hold the keys to a vast wealth of untapped, clean-burning methane gas thought to exist deep beneath the outer margins of most continental shelves. Its contribution may be peripheral to the immediate needs of Western Europe and North America, currently drowning in cheap natural gas, but it present a potential lifeline to resource-poor nations like Japan, which already imports more ... Read More
Oklahoma Earthquakes and the Wages of Fracking
November 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
When towns to the east of Oklahoma City jiggled over the weekend with two of the state’s strongest-ever earthquakes, some people asked an obvious question: Does the recent expansion of “fracking” for natural gas in Oklahoma — shooting water and chemicals and sand into shale deposits to free trapped methane — account for the trembling ground? Maybe. Oil and gas exploration has caused minor earthquakes in the U.S. since the ’30s, and a new report from Britain suggests that fracking itself can cause small quakes. It was “highly probable,” according to the report, that a ... Read More
Russian Gas and the Cost of Germany’s Energy Revolution
September 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last week, in front of a crowd of journalists in Vyborg, Russia, Vladimir Putin sat at a desk and inaugurated a major new gas pipeline to Germany with a banal, 21st-century gesture: He clicked something on a computer screen. The Nord Stream pipeline is Russia's first direct gas link to Europe, and, by next year, it should bring enough gas to the EU to generate the energy "of 11 nuclear power plants," Putin boasted. It was a reference to German energy policy, but Angela Merkel wouldn't have smiled. When the Fukushima disaster pushed her to make the quick decision this summer to shutter ... Read More
Think Biomass, Not Natural Gas
February 17, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The framework of energy supply and use by any country is confoundingly complex. Now try to speculate what it might be 40 years from now, assuming a drastic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Not so easy, eh? But there are people doing it: going to work each day, considering myriad energy sources, conjuring up possible configurations for the future. It’s an undertaking many might find intriguing, but … understanding all the technologies, constantly crunching the numbers, seeing a big picture that is as complex and immutable as a monotone jigsaw puzzle, butting up against obstacles ... Read More
Natural Gas a Player in Alternative Landscape
January 20, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
Last summer's spike in gasoline prices set the stage for an interesting debate. Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens emerged as a spokesman for the renewable power of wind and set forth a rather revolutionary plan to produce 20 percent of the nation's electrical demand with wind power, moving natural gas from its traditional role as an electrical generator to use as a vehicle fuel. The nation's largest natural gas provider, Chesapeake Energy, jumped on the bandwagon with its own plan to mobilize citizens to call for vehicles powered by compressed natural gas. Although many supporters of renewable ... Read More
