Doesn't former Senator Tim Wirth want to give his old colleagues a break?
If the natural gas industry takes Wirth's advice of yesterday, it will invest $2 million to $3 million for lobbyists to press the Senate to include in the climate change-energy bill provisions guaranteeing a role for gas in power generation and transportation.
Our colleague Bill Holland reports from the Colorado Oil & Gas Association meeting in Denver that Wirth, who represented Colorado in the Senate and now runs Ted Turner's UN Foundation, lambasted the gas industry for standing on the sidelines while every other energy sector wangled wins in the House bill. Since the Senate is just beginning work on its own climate package, the gas people had better get busy, Wirth admonished.
"You need eight or 10 senators to line up on your behalf," he said. In an interview he said senators from Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana are logical targets, as are the delegations from Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. Just in case the industry needs reminders about how to lobby, and where its friends are.
Plus, he said, the gas sector needs to untangle itself from crude oil and coal, and instead align with the "teddy bear" of energy policy: solar and wind. "You should be cheek by jowl" with them, he advised, In creating a market for low-carbon power that "will ask for gas on a strong basis daily."
On the gas-for-transportation front, perhaps the NatGas Act that Majority Leader Harry Reid and others were to introduce yesterday with the backing of T. Boone Pickens will play a role. That bill would make natgas-fueled vehicles a much bigger part of the mix by extending and enlarging tax incentives. On the power side of things, the gas industry showed up very late in the game, but succeeded in getting a percentage of carbon allowance allocations for gas utilities.
But the Pickens Plan envisioned (before the price of gas fell so much) shifting gas away from generation and into transportation, and making wind plants pick up the slack in power. It's not clear what specifics Wirth had in mind for the gas role in power. Perhaps something encouraging or requiring gas plants to provide backup and voltage support for wind farms? In some places, flywheel technology is trying to make headway with larger storage units, though it isn't clear yet how far that technology will go, and how quickly. Good-sized batteries are also an option for some.
Gas plants already are seen by some as the "bridge" between now and a future of non-carbon power. Maybe the industry just didn't feel it had to do much to make that happen. But Tim Wirth's admonitions may be giving it pause.
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