By Seth Masia
SOLAR TODAY deputy editor
Last Friday, MIT released a report advocating natural gas as a "bridge" fuel to displace both coal and petroleum motor fuel while more sustainable energy sources come on line. Notable by its absence from the report was any summary of the water- and air-quality issues created by natural gas drilling. Because the report comes in the wake of the network debut of the award-winning documentary Gasland, the omission seemed startling.
Frank Clemente of Penn State, usually an apologist for coal and oil, has a nice summary of the MIT-gas-drilling situation at Energy-Facts.org.
Here in Colorado, natural gas producers have been fracking new wells on the West Slope for a decade. The result has been serious contamination of the groundwater in a region that has precious little water to begin with. We're also worried about heavy-metal poisoning of streams from uranium mining, which is set for another boom.
It's a little-known fact that Colorado decommissioned its only nuclear power reactor some 18 years ago, replacing it with a gas turbine. We'd love to see gas turbines displace our remaining coal plants, but hope that as each conversion is done the steam circuit also include a trough field for concentrating solar, and a geothermal well. We have plenty of coal and gas and uranium here. We also have plenty of sun, wind and hot rock. What we don't have is fresh water.
Comments (1)
Yes, gas has plenty of downsides
--Christof Demont-Heinrich
Editor & Founder, SolarChargedDriving.Com
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Seth Masia
Liz Merry
