One of the web's most prominent climate change action activists is on the shale gas bandwagon, it looks like. Joseph Romm is urging attention to what he calls possibly "the single biggest game changer for climate action in the next two decades -- U.S. natural gas supply." Having just attended an event focused on gas supply, he advises in his Climate Progress blog:
The bottom line is staggering. As one of the presenters put it, "If the current trend continues" for production of unconventional gas, then by 2020 "natural gas could displace half of the coal burning power plants." If that is true, and the projections by the other experts were comparable, then natural gas alone could essentially meet the entire Waxman-Markey CO2 target for 2020 -- without requiring gobs of new power plants to be sited and built or thousands of miles of new transmission lines.
"There is simply no doubt," Romm says, that besides efficiency and conservation, replacing coal power with natural gas power is the lowest-cost option for getting big CO2 reductions.
The gas in shale formations is the source of the supply excitement, he notes. And he recommends that "Everyone who cares about clean energy and climate issues needs to become knowledgeable on shale gas -- both its supply potential and the environmental risks associated with extracting it."
But wait a minute, Pace Global Energy Services might say. In a MarketLink piece called "Wake Up Pickens -- Gas May Not Be the Panacea," Pace says, "Despite the apparent magnitude of domestic shale gas resources, however, recovering those resources is not as simple as Mr. Pickens would allow us to believe. The 'shale boom' of recent years had pulled every available and shale-capable horizontal drilling rig into service before prices crashed in late 2008," and still domestic production climbed only 4.3 Bcf/d from 2002 to 2008. Prices would have to rise 75% and stay there for some time to convince industry to go ahead and expand shale development, Pace says.
Duke Energy's Jim Rogers has called natural gas the crack cocaine of the power industry, clearly meaning it isn't a good thing. But as climate change mandates take effect -- assuming Obama leans hard enough on Congress to make the deals to get it through -- the debate might only get hotter.
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