U. S. is producing more clean energy

Published 8:36 pm Saturday, October 5, 2013

By Staff Reports

 

  1. Natural gas, wind to take place of coal

Despite what the lead stories of the day might lead you to believe, there is good news out there. The American energy industry will reach a milestone by the end of the year, becoming the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas.

But at the same time, emissions are down dramatically.

That’s good news for everyone — for the environmentalists, who worry about climate change, and for average Americans, which worry about the price of gasoline.

The boom comes as a result in the shale energy revolution. Russia hasn’t kept up, so by January, the U.S. will surpass that nation in production.

“The U.S. produced the equivalent of about 22 million barrels a day of oil, natural gas and related fuels in July, according to figures from the EIA and the International Energy Agency,” the Wall Street Journal explains. “Neither agency has data for Russia’s gas output this year, but Moscow’s forecast for 2013 oil-and-gas production works out to about 21.8 million barrels a day.”



What’s more, the shale energy revolution truly is a “green” — and clean — revolution.

“The question of whether natural gas is a ‘clean’ fuel is hotly debated amongst food columnists and the current U.S. Secretary of Energy alike,” the Energy Tribune reports. “The debate has been fueled by scientific uncertainty; measuring methane emissions has been difficult because data is hard to obtain. But a new study released last week by the University of Texas (UT) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), addresses this challenge head-on. In the most comprehensive shale gas emission study ever undertaken, the researchers found that extracting gas from shale is being done in a sustainable, environmentally friendly fashion. The study found that 99 percent of methane emissions have been captured, and emissions are a full 97 percent lower than the EPA’s initial estimates released in 2011.”

And overall, emissions are down dramatically. As the Bloomberg news service reports, “average U.S. emissions of the gases blamed for climate change from 2009 to 2011 fell to their lowest level since the mid-1990s… Emissions are down 6.8 percent compared with 2005.”

And that’s thanks to free markets, not to regulations, by the way. Because natural gas is so cheap and abundant, more and more electrical power is being generated with it.

“The cause is an unprecedented switch to natural gas, which emits 45 percent less carbon per energy unit,” Bjorn Lomborg wrote in Slate recently. “The U.S. used to generate about half its electricity from coal, and roughly 20 percent from gas. Over the past five years, those numbers have changed, first slowly and now dramatically: In April of this year, coal’s share in power generation plummeted to just 32 percent, on par with gas. America’s rapid switch to natural gas is the result of three decades of technological innovation, particularly the development of hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking,’ which has opened up large new resources of previously inaccessible shale gas.”

That’s good news. And cheap, clean energy is a far better predictor of future economic activity than watching the antics in Washington.