Natural gas: The engine of energy independence and a renewable future
Let's get real about foreign oil dependence and the future
Updated March 27, 2012
Just a few years ago, I wasn't much of a believer in natural gas as a significant piece of US energy policy. I largely felt that natural gas was simply a distraction, a delay tactic, a last ditch effort by the fossil fuel industry to save its business.
Batteries, I believed on the other hand, would quickly make natural gas irrelevant.
But, if natural gas seems like a distraction, how can one positively summarize the potential of the battery-powered future, something I recently covered in Plug-ins, a cord around energy independence's neck on Hybridcarblog, today?
It's not good, if we're being honest. 10 percent hybrid, plug-in hybrid and electric penetration means little, and that's the forecasts numerous analysts are providing from diverse sources.
Last year, GM and Nissan, for example, couldn't even sell 1,000 plug-in vehicles apiece per month on average. Sure, some of this was due to ramping up production on brand new vehicles built on brand new technologies on brand new production lines.
More worriesome, however, up to 60 percent of Americans can't even plug-in because they have no access to off-street parking, even if they could afford a plug-in.
While plug-ins are an important technology, even today, the limits of their potential need to be understood and accepted when planning out energy policy. And, unfortunately, plug-in potential will be very limited for at least a decade, maybe even two decades.
Hybrid cars, on the other hand, are more realistic, but even they can't top 3 percent market share, and the battery supply chains aren't even close to being able to support a serious uptick in total hybrid marketshare.
Couple those issues with the legacy effect -- the time it takes to replace the current gas-guzzling fleet -- and the numbers just don't add up. With 250 million vehicles, it takes nearly two decades to replace the current fleet with 13 - 14 million vehicle sales per year.
And with the most bullish plug-in forecasts calling for just 10 percent penetration by 2020, plug-ins just aren't enough. Not even close.
Further, more than 50 percent of Americans buy light duty trucks, and no major automaker is even yet producing a plug-in truck for this segment, and hybrid trucks have thus far failed in this segment.
Add heavy duty trucks and their enormous collective fuel consumption, and it's impossible for any objective person not to realize the need for natural gas.
So, for what are we waiting?
With at least one hundred years of natural gas, America could quickly use natural gas to offset foreign oil dependence, starting with OPEC. But just doing that wouldn't be very smart or efficient.
We can do even more, and create an even brighter future.
America, as a culture, has to begin to embrace energy efficiency as the foundation to our future. Innovations in energy efficiency will be in great demand throughout the world, evermore, as we drive into the future.
If we want to manufacture something in the US, energy efficiency should be a key focal point.
And natural gas hybrids, reducing vehicle weight, and plug-in technologies, powered by natural gas are a no-brainer start. Likewise, we should begin a program of retrofitting the largest guzzlers into natural gas vehicles.
But it's clear that focus on natural gas is the key to kickstarting the US economy.
Thanks to natural gas and the jobs it will create, our economy will again start humming, providing the ability to finance next generation renewable energy technologies -- the real key to the future.
Make no mistake. Renewable energy is the future because one day it won't just be cleaner, it will be cheaper, than fossil fuels.
In the interim, there is so much more that can be done, rather than just continuing to embrace the status quo. To play the same party lines.
It's time for the President to use natural gas and pipelines like Keystone to create a compromise between plug-in-leaning Democrats and fossil-fuel-supporting Republicans.
Since the State of the Union speech, the President has talked up a similar game. But the President talked a similar game before being elected, with little action.
Now is not the time for more talk, or for political rhetoric designed to win votes, but for real action.
With compromise, starting immediately, the President can unite the parties and develop a revolutionary unified energy policy that ends foreign oil dependence as quickly as possible, while developing the technologies that will power the future.
But its time to walk the walk, now, and that won't be easy for the President.
Many of the President's key supporters will argue against such a program, citing the great dangers shale fracking creates to fresh water supplies, for instance.
Poppycock.
While pollution issues are a legitimate concern, and must be properly regulated and monitored, they are an opportunity, not a drawback.
Certainly, clean water is becoming the new oil, but issues like fracking are producing many new water filtering technologies. For example, ORNL nanopore membrane technology, owned by the US government, could help ensure that water used in fracking could even be recycled into drinking water. Besides, even if the US put a halt to fracking, other countries, such as China, will frack and we could sell such technologies to them.
We are the world's innovators, and we can use our innovative spirit, coupled with our supplies of natural gas and oil combined with other efficiency focused technologies to achieve energy independence on the path to the kinds of innovations that will create a renewably powered future.
And it all begins with natural gas, and its role in developing a grand and unified energy policy.
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