In a new day, the big boys take on alternative energy
By Tom Baxter
Southern Political Report
August 7, 2008 — The striking difference between the conversation which introduced the subject of alternative energy sources back in the early ‘70s and the one going on now is that the big boys have grabbed the microphone. About Boone Pickens’ plan to save the country through wind energy, you know already. He’s becoming almost as familiar as Viagra, which he shares commercial time with on the network news shows every night, promoting the “Pickens’ Plan” to wean the nation off foreign oil through the active development of the wind as a power source. There’s a back story to Pickens’ sudden interest in wind energy. It would be naive to think that when an 80-year-old billionaire oilman buys air time to pitch the wind as the solution to the country’s oil import problem, there wouldn’t be a back story. The West Texas land Pickens is developing for wind is also where he has tried and been frustrated in the attempt gain permission to pump water out of the Ogalalla Aquifer to meet the demands of growing cities in the area. No matter how prominently that goal still figures in Pickens’ plan, it’s no secret he wants government to build the transmission infrastructure that would make large-scale use of wind energy a reality, and multiply his stake. One scheming old oil man, nevertheless, is worth a thousand guys in earth shoes fiddling with the angle of their solar panels, when it comes to establishing new energy sources as an economic reality. What Pickens has become for wind, Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy Corp., is primed to be for natural gas, an old energy source with a new look. Last week McClendon told a U.S. House panel that recent shale gas discoveries make it urgent the government promote the development of natural gas as an alternative to coal-fired electrical plants and even gasoline in cars. “The size of these shale gas deposits is so enormous that they can no longer be overlooked,” McClendon told Congress. The American Clean Skies Foundation, founded and chaired by McClendon, also issued a report last week which said the nation has enough natural gas to last it 118 years at current levels. What McClendon is talking about is a story of enormous importance for the economy of the South. Starting with the drilling of the first well to tap the potential of the huge Barnett Shale in Texas in 1981, and quickening dramatically over the past couple of years with the discovery of comparable deposits in St. Clair County, Alabama, and this year in northern Louisiana and Arkansas, natural gas has in the relative wink of an eye become a vastly bigger resource than it was understood to be. So far, the impact of these discoveries has been little more than a local land rush in the affected areas and a lot of capitalization around the drilling projects. But they have the potential to transform the economies of these states. McClendon, whose company is the third-largest U.S. natural gas producer, has rubbed others in his business the wrong way by aggressively pushing for a big expansion in the use of natural gas. His enemy on the Hill is Big Coal, which wants to implement clean burning technologies as an alternative to converting power plants to natural gas. Thus, in all the big alternative energy proposals being rolled out, there are issues. But for the most part they have sailed over the heads of the presidential candidates, who have found themselves lost in the ‘70s, still arguing about offshore oil drilling. How much should the government subsidize the construction of power lines to wind farms that take the load off the nation’s carbon emissions? What’s the real potential of these natural gas discoveries, and how’s that being fed into the planning model? Those are better questions than the ones being asked in this campaign, which has been overtaken by the speed of developments in the energy sector. |
