Natural Gas Leadership Test

Natural gas is plentiful and cheap. We are now able to recover gas from areas previously unapproachable. The availability has suppressed prices and, recently, has discouraged new drilling.

This circumstance is a surprise. Four years ago the biggest find was Haynesville, Louisiana which was sizable but is now dwarfed by Marcellus, Utica and Bakkan. It is slowly replacing coal fire plants and has application to transportation, our biggest demand problem. Gas is very clean and manageable but requires some special handling. Its storage requirements makes it a better candidate for big units like trucks than smaller cars. But a build-out of service facilities is the obvious next step.
The nation's ability to retire coal fire plants economically is directly a result of the rise in the availability of gas. Not to say the looney ideologues in Washington needed natural gas; they were going to do it anyway even if "electricity prices would necessarily skyrocket." Gas accidentally came to the rescue.


A chart on pollutants:
Fossil Fuel Emission Levels- Pounds per Billion Btu of Energy Input

Pollutant: Natural Gas -- Oil -- Coal

Carbon Dioxide: 117,000 -- 164,000 -- 208,000
Carbon Monoxide: 40 -- 33 -- 208
Nitrogen Oxides: 92 -- 448 -- 457
Sulfur Dioxide: 1 -- 1,122 -- 2,591
Particulates: 7 -- 84 -- 2,744
Mercury: 0.000 -- 0.007 -- 0.016
Source: EIA - Natural Gas Issues and Trends 1998

Now the test. Substitution of this fuel would clearly be a boon to the United States. It is domestic, free of Middle East political and religious conflict, vastly cheaper, much cleaner, available for the next century at least and maybe two, and would allow a job creating boom the likes of the steel industry in the 1900's as we drilled and outfitted the country for it. More, it would take the pressure off the alternative market which is being induced into premature labor to provide a solution. In short it is economical, a great advance, a job creator and ours. OURS. So one would think it would be embraced. A national effort to exploit and use natural gas, especially in the transportation industry, would mobilize a workforce with "shovel-ready jobs" and make us energy independent at the same time--like Eisenhower's interstate road system project. So far, silence from our leaders and opinion-makers, except for an almost anti-scientific position from the NYT. Because it is a surprise, perhaps our mandarin leaders need some time to digest it.

There is , of course, another scenario. The same political purity that is willing to allow "the price of electricity..( to).. necessarily skyrocket," that would raise the taxes on capital gains even if it resulted in less taxes, that purity might see the abundance of natural gas as an impediment to their unstated aims. Then arguments against the use of natural gas will emerge. And our mandarins will have revealed themselves again.