The Future of Energy
Dan Rodricks, Host, Midday: I’m Dan Rodricks, and you’re listening to a special edition of Midday we call Power Ahead, The Energy Future. We finish our discussion about energy with a look into the coming decades, the innovations ahead, and the power sources that are probably going to be with us for a while. Our guests include Byron King, resident energy expert with Baltimore-based Agora Financial. He’s the editor of Outstanding Investments and Energy & Scarcity Investor. Byron King is a Harvard-trained geologist, a self-described old rock hound who keeps an eye on energy, mining, and precious metals for his readers. Byron King, thank you for joining us on Midday at WYPR in Baltimore.
We’re starting to figure out how much more natural gas there is out there than people estimated. An absolute revolution in technology in the past few years has been in this shale gas development… Nuclear has taken it on the chin in the last month or two, but nuclear isn’t going anywhere.
I think the long-term view is that we’ve had problems with the [nuclear] technology from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. There’s different technology today, and I think it’s going to be around. And don’t count out oil. There is a lot of oil out there. There is a lot of oil yet to be found. And there’s a lot of oil that’s going to stay in the system for many decades to come. And when you look at it in the year 2031, I think that you’ll see perhaps up to 10% of the world running on what we consider alternative energy, alternative fuels, things like that. But I think that the main base of energy and of power to run things is going to be what we have today, natural gas, oil, and coal, with nuclear.
And lots and lots and lots of different technology in how it’s produced, how it’s distributed, how people use it, efficiency, conservation, things like that.
I mean, I don’t think people understood the seismic hazards in the ’60s the way they do now. If it’s ’60s technology in terms of nuclear, what the nuclear guys are telling me is that today, with passive nuclear systems, you wouldn’t have that issue of the meltdown in Fukushima. And really, it was the failure of 1960s era diesel generators to cool the reactor that brought the resulting meltdown. So there’s a lot of thinking that goes into this, a lot of systems thinking that goes into this. I don’t think people are giving up on nuclear, certainly not globally. Here in the US, we have to fight about everything, so the jury is still out on that one…
One of the things that you have to keep in mind as well, is understanding the concept of the grid. And it’s transmission wires, it’s pipelines, it’s everything because it’s one thing to create electricity or create a thermodynamics, but it’s another thing to get it to where you need it.
You’ve got your production, but…you need transmission, and transmission is your market enabler. And that is another of the great bugaboos. It’s a huge technological challenge… Power distribution, power transmission is a massive problem in this country, especially rebuilding the old grid that we have. Rebuilding it with new, modern stuff. When you see just the kinds of cabling and wiring that it requires, these are not your father’s or your grandfather’s little copper wires with some plastic wrapping or something.
These new cables that bring the power in from offshore or that take the power out to an offshore platform or that bring the power from the windmill farm up in the mountains down to the city, these are incredibly technologically complex wires. These are works of art. They are engineering marvels just the wiring alone.
Similar Posts:
- Budget 2012 – 5 Green markers
- Meltdown: The Fukushima Catastrophe by The Numbers
- Three Mile Island for US Oil
- British Gas and Ovo axe cheap energy deals
- Hidden energy price hikes to be outlawed
