She paints this beautiful picture of a new vibrant and friendly energy supply system. All will be well, so she makes it seem. She does admit, however, if embraced, it will slow down our inevitable move to renewables. On top of that, she brings up but quickly dismisses two flaws with her energy solution. She assumes that the cost of recovering this currently expensive gas will go down. She also hastily shoves aside the environmental issues even though the drilling does indeed have a serious potential to contaminate underground water sources.
Honestly, I think her arguments are compelling, but I'm not sure if I buy them. She seems overly biased and seemed to hide the negatives. Shale gas does have great potential to change the world but whether it happens or not is uncertain. One of the biggest flaws that I saw in her argument was that she made it seem as if we would no longer need the Middle East; natural gas is not a substitute for gasoline. And natural gas will for the most part only replace coal, which is a product that is found abundantly in the US. So with my thinking, is it worth the risk of trying to extract natural gas at a high price and with the risk of serious environmental harm only to replace coal?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303491304575187880596301668.html
After reading this article, I do not think that it is not worth trying to spend our time and money into extracting shale gas because the U.S only has 45 years worth of it. Also, the process in extracting the gas seems expensive. Energy suppliers are already looking at alternative resources and investing heavily on them so this would not really affect on whether the country starts using the alternative resources.
ReplyDeleteI would have to disagree with Mariana and Clarke on some points.
ReplyDeleteI recently read about technologies for shale-gas exploration being "off the shelf", meaning they are ready. Of course there are bound to be issues, as there were with the BP rig in the gulf, but this does seem like a viable alternative. To hear that it is half as harmful as coal and that it could last us 45 years, is great. Therefore, I believe we should at least place some investment in domestic shale gas exploration. Clarke brings up a good point: that its extraction could lead to ground water contamination. For that reason, perhaps we should wait and develop technologies to eliminate the problem of contamination. I just think it would be foolish to rule out what seems like an excellent option.