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By Root 989 0

not be aggressively pursuing it (and oil) between now and then. Natural gas is widely used for heating, cooking, and industrial purposes. It comprises about one-fourth of all energy consumption in the United States. It has a growing niche as a gaseous transportation fuel, and various gas-to-liquid technologies have good potential for providing liquid fuels. It is the prime feedstock for making agricultural nitrogen fertilizers. Of the big three fossil hydrocarbons, natural gas is by far the cleanest, with roughly one-tenth to one-thousandth the amount of sulfur dioxides, nitrous oxides, particulates, and mercury of coal or oil. When burned, it releases about two-thirds as much carbon dioxide as oil and half as much as coal. There is also considerable room to improve the efficiency of natural-gas-fired plants, mainly by replacing gas-fired steam cycles with more efficient combined-cycle plants.

The biggest drawback of natural gas, of course, is that it’s a gas. Unlike coal and oil, which can be simply dumped into tankers or a train car, it isn’t very portable. Getting natural gas from wells to distant markets requires either an intricate pipeline system or construction of a special refinery to chill it into liquefied natural gas (LNG). Because LNG takes up only about one six-hundredth the volume of natural gas, it can then be transported using tankers. At present, LNG comprises only a tiny fraction of world gas markets, but its use is growing fast. It is especially appealing for remote gas fields that would otherwise be uneconomic to develop. However, this does not come cheaply. A joint LNG venture begun in 2010 by Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Shell off the coast of Australia, for example, was expected to cost roughly USD $50 billion. The project will tap offshore gas fields for Asian markets and, together with other LNG projects, could make Australia the world’s second-largest LNG exporter after Qatar, with revenues in excess of USD $24 billion per year by 2018.171

A second drawback of natural gas, similar to a big drawback of oil, is that most of it is concentrated in a handful of countries. The world’s largest reserves, by far, are controlled by the Russian Federation (about 1,529 trillion cubic feet or 23.4% of world total), followed by Iran (16.0%), Qatar (13.8%), Saudi Arabia (4.1%), the United States (3.6%), United Arab Emirates (3.5%), Nigeria (2.8%), Venezuela (2.6%), Algeria (2.4%), and Iraq (1.7%).172 China and India, projected to be the first- and third-largest economies by 2050, have only 1.3% and 0.6% of world reserves of natural gas, respectively. These countries will require aggressive imports of foreign gas to meet their needs.

Like oil, gas fields are finite, so our transition to natural gas is something of a bridging solution to our long-term energy problems. But, as the cleanest-burning fossil fuel, with lowest greenhouse gas emissions and greatest room for efficiency improvements, it is by far the most environmentally appealing of the three. There are substantial world reserves remaining, a long history of exploitation, and additional markets for fertilizers and perhaps hydrogen feedstocks. In the coming decades natural gas will be an elite commodity, highly prized wherever it is found. There seems little doubt that natural gas, like oil, is a raw resource we shall pursue to the last corners of the Earth.

Coal, in contrast, is plentiful and found all over the world. Proved reserves of natural gas have R/P life-index lifetimes of only around sixty years, but for coal they are at least twice as long, often up to two hundred years.173 The largest reserves are in the United States (238.3 trillion tons, or 28.9% of world reserves), Russia (19.0%), China (13.9%), and India (7.1%), but coal is mined all over the planet. Coal fueled the Industrial Revolution and, despite popular perceptions, is the world’s single largest electricity source today. Half of all electricity in the United States comes from more than five hundred coal-fired power plants. In China it’s 80%, and the country is building about two new