What will the shale gas boom mean for the energy future of the world, and particularly

for the U.S.? Does shale gas offer a relatively clean transition to renewable energy and energy independence for the States? Recently, over at ThomasNets Industry Market Trends, I wrote a set of articles trying to address those questions. From the Green & Clean perspective, I find that shale gas is a mixed bag. No doubt about it, current trends make shale gas look very important in the future energy picture for the U.S. and around the world. According to the preliminary version of the U.S. Energy Information Administrations (EIA) 2012 Annual Energy Outlook, natural gas overall will remain at about 25 percent of U.S. primary energy consumption between now and 2035. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world picture will be similar: gas will make up about 22 or 23 percent of primary energy consumption, a figure that could climb to 25 percent under the IEAs Golden Age of Gas scenario. Shale gas is expected to increase in importance because of its abundance and low cost. As you can see from the following chart, the EIA projects that shale gas will grow from 23 percent of U.S. natural gas production to 49 percent by 2035. My What a Shale Gas Boom Means for Our Future article discusses how low-cost gas could affect various sectors of the economy. In the U.S., for example, the electrical power and industrial sectors are each projected to consume about one-third of the gas in the U.S. by 2020. Residential and commercial together consume the other third.

Credit: U.S. Energy Information Administration

Gas has a potential to exert a profound effect on the transportation sector, according to some advocates. Business-as-usual projections predict that transportation will only use .3 percent of U.S. gas in 2020. On the global scale, that figure is higher, at 3.2 percent. However, financier T. Boone Pickens believes the U.S. should use its vast shale gas resources, along with low-cost extraction technologies, to gain energy independence. He points out that off-the-shelf technologies could right now be used to convert the nations vehicle fleets over to gas fuel. The website for his Pickens Plan says: Natural gas already has a tremendous advantage, particularly when used for trucks and fleet vehicles. Most trucking today is round-trip, one-tank routes. There are approximately 1.5 million miles of gas pipe and distribution lines crisscrossing the country, making natural gas available on nearly every street and community in America today. Shale is a sedimentary rock that contains natural gas formed from organic materials. Very recently, new technologies have made it financially feasible to extract shale gas at a large scale.

One of the attractions of natural gas is that its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are only about half those of coal, making natural gas preferable as fuel for electricity generation. Other emissions are much lower, as well. However, emissions from gas are certainly not zero, so nuclear and renewable sources are less damaging generally to the environment. See my previous article The Damage Done, Part 4 Natural Gas, Green or Dirty? for more about the environmental effects of natural gas for electrical generation. (Photo: Gas power plant, New Hampshire, U.S. Credit: Jim Richmond, CC BY-SA 2.0.)

Beyond emissions from burning gas, the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) technology used for shale gas extraction has raised environmental concerns; See also Tracey Schelmetics article Whats the Big Fracking Deal? for an excellent discussion of those concerns. Overall, then, natural gas looks like a reasonable alternative to coal power in the electricity filed, and to oil in the transportation field. However, shale gas particularly comes with its environmental baggage and can be seen as a less-harmful way to transition to cleaner alternatives like nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, and geothermal.
http://news.thomasnet.com/green_clean/2012/03/05/the-shale-gas-boom/what-will-it-mean-for-the-energy-future-and-the-environment