PITTSBURGH – A globe-hopping Texas geologist and energy expert took a data-driven dive into the concept that wiping out carbon fuels could save the world for attendees at the Shale Insight conference.
“What would help the world’s poor is energy,” he said. “It’s time to power the people.”
Scott Tinker is Texas state geologist and director of its Bureau of Economic Geology, a UT Austin professor and chairman of the nonprofit Switch Energy Alliance.
His PowerPoint tour involved all kinds of numbers, graphs and photos. Here’s a brief flyover.
A look at the concentrations of the world’s populations compared against poverty and access to energy shows how poverty and lack of access to power align. More than 2 billion live in energy poverty, he said. More than 1 billion have no electricity. And 2.6 billion have no access to clean cooking facilities; they burn fuel indoors and suffer the health consequences – with 3 million dying per year.
Energy transition is not about fuel but about improving the human condition, he said.
Thinking ending carbon emissions here can solve the problems, he said, is well intentioned but not based on data.
We outsource virtually all of our manufacturing to Asia, which relies largely on coal for power, Tinker said.
We can switch to electric cars. Coal-powered China has the most. And electric cars need batteries, whose materials come from mines. And when the trillions of batteries that would be needed to power cars around the world die, they would have to go into landfills. Windmill turbines and solar panels aren’t renewable either.
In the U.S. and around the world, keeping 85 percent of our cleanest major energy supply – natural gas – in the ground isn’t the answer. It may play well for politicians, he said, but, “It’s not going to happen. We need to think differently.”
Because of low-priced shale gas displacing coal, he said, the U.S. is already two-thirds of the way toward its Paris Accord carbon dioxide emission reduction goal.
There’s a place for all energy sources, he said: gas, coal, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro.
Sustainable transition means reducing the impacts of all forms of energy on all forms of the environment, he said. Reducing CO2 emissions will come from using natural gas with carbon capture, from developing carbon capture technology for coal as we transition away from it, form nuclear, geothermal, hydro and wind – tailored to the needs and resources of the locale.
In the U.S. he said, 60% of all oil and gas comes from shale, and 60% of all power comes from oil and gas.
Around the world, he said, making sure that all people have access to clean, sustainable power will do more to improve the world and the human condition than abruptly cutting off use of the U.S.’s major power source.
The Switch Energy Alliance summarizes it this way: “Energy fuels the engine of the modern world and has the power to bring billions more out of abject poverty. Because energy reaches into every facet of our lives, it is highly political. Biases and emotions run deep, and facts and data are often distorted, or worse.”
Tinker told the Shale Insight crowd that it’s not just about atmospheric emissions, he said. “We have to ask our politician to be more thoughtful when they speak.”
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