“The new estimates are much higher than the last assessment by the Geological Survey in 2002. Those estimates – which suggested the Marcellus contained only about two trillion feet of recoverable gas – were provided before new technology had drastically increased drilling for natural gas in shale formations.”

Human ingenuity has already increased the reserve by a factor of 42. We’ll see where it goes from here.

From the NYT Geologists Sharply Cut Estimate of Shale Gas

The shale formation has about 84 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas, according to the report from the United States Geological Survey. This is drastically lower than the 410 trillion cubic feet that was published earlier this year by the federal Energy Information Administration.

We’ve seen this inflation and mis-understanding of resource and reserve estimates in the past. The media likes splashy headlines of huge deposits and the public doesn’t understand the difference between an assesment, a resource, and a reserve.

Still, we have lots of Nat Gas, and that’s going to help, as long as the infrastructure can be expanded to areas that traditionally heat homes with oil. And that it maintains a price high enough to encourage development but not too high to discourage use. Our energy needs are moving to exploit the only resources now available, which are typically deep, dirty, or dangerous. Sometimes all three. And always expensive.

An excellent essay on the current status of Nat Gas can be found at the Oil Drum:Natural Gas: The Squeeze at the Bottom of the Resource Triangle

I think there is also a future in smaller, decentralized nuclear systems (I’m tracking the technology). There are also futures for solar, wind, and others. Granted, no alternative energy will fill all our needs, but a megawatt produced by a solar, tidal, geothermal, or wind plant is a megawatt we don’t have to burn hydrocarbons to get.

Natural gas may have a future, but who’s going to pay for the conversion, or the financial inefficiency of maintaining parallel delivery and marketing systems? You know all those commercials on TV are prep for the inevitable call for government subsidies to support a natural gas market. Every time the energy lobby pulls out that skinny blonde I reach for my wallet. That’s the drilling they’re really good at.

Barring some technological breakthrough (which I am convinced everyone is working feverishly for in the background, but which probably won’t come in time to help, if ever) there is only a limited handful of options we can rely on.

Conservation is the best bet, but only if enforced by law. Market enforcement will never be enough and will always come too late as long as the Saudis have any oil left to sell and don’t care what happens in the future. Nuclear, and coal, in that order our next best bet. Everything else is ideological wishful thinking, something-for-nothing wet dreams from both right and left.

We’ve known this since the 70s, but nuclear looked so good at the time we didn’t worry about it too much; we never implemented conservation because the business community wouldn’t hear it. We had an economy dependent on extravagant energy consumption, they weren’t about to mess around with that. Conservation is most effective when the need for it seems least pressing. So it never gets done in time to buy us any time or do us any good.

Nuclear didn’t pan out because the business community wasn’t willing to pay for the necessary safety infrastructure, either directly through rate hikes or indirectly through taxation, and the environmentalists refused to compromise on their exaggerated safety concerns. (Yes, TB. They were exaggerated, not non-existent.) Besides, as long as oil was cheap no one worried about tomorrow.

Coal is plentiful, although the environmental costs of mining it are probably even worse than the pollutants produced by burning it. It will probably be the way we wind up going, because its cheaper than nuclear. Lets just hope the particulates increase the albedo and helps counteract global warming.

An area of Minnesota I used to drive through as a kid to get to Grandma’s, Lake Benton and the Buffalo Ridge, is a huge windmill farm.

The larger the windmill, the more efficient it is, and as a bonus, the slower it turns and the less damage there is to birds.