We can't ignore the short-term reality while pursuing long-term social shifts. By the year 2100, our energy mix will be radically different. But getting there will require all the energy we can develop from all sources — conventional and alternative. It's not an either/or proposition — it's a matter of pulling out all the stops and using all our combined resources and ingenuity to create an energy future — for the short-, medium- and long term — we can all live with. To help get us there, Shell advocates a 12-point plan:
1. Allow more access to conventional oil and gas. The United States is the only country in the world that restricts the use of its own energy resources while transferring trillions of dollars of wealth to other countries in order to import energy. Having access now to the more than 100 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and gas in this country can play a significant role in reducing our dependence on foreign oil sources.
2. Develop domestic unconventional oil and gas resources. In the United States, a trillion barrels of oil remain trapped in shale in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. Efforts to develop this vast resource using environmentally responsible technologies are hampered by lack of a federal program that defines regulations, policies and a royalty framework.
3. Move to clean coal technology. The United States is rich in coal resources. Clean coal technology can allow us to use coal for electricity generation while managing carbon dioxide emissions, if we are willing to make the upfront capital investment.
4. Supplement our natural gas supply with imported liquefied natural gas (LNG). To meet growing demand for clean-burning natural gas, technology now allows us to store and ship the gas safely in a liquid state, but we face resistance to building terminals for receiving LNG, especially on the East and West coasts.
5. Move biofuels beyond corn. Already, the use of corn for fuel is affecting agricultural and food prices. Alternatives such as cellulosic ethanol, made from the stalks and other nonfood parts of corn and other plants, are not yet ready for large-scale use, but must be pursued aggressively.
6. Create the distribution systems to take advantage of wind energy. Wind is one of the world's cleanest energy sources. But this technology is limited by lack of transmission systems to connect remote wind farms with the electric grid. We need federal and state policies supporting new transmission systems.
7. Push solar research to make it commercially viable. Available solar panel systems are expensive and inefficient. Because the potential reward — readily available, zero-emission energy — is so high, this area deserves intensive nanotechnology research and development.
8. Develop the hydrogen fleet and fueling infrastructure. Hydrogen as an automotive fuel is real today, but in a very small way. There are still technical and policy questions to be addressed. Yet this may become the fuel of choice for our grandchildren's children.
9. Focus on energy-efficient design. Current automobile engines use only 20 percent of the energy they consume to move the car forward. The rest is wasted as heat. Over the long term, we may be able to achieve greater efficiency from a radical redesign of the power source than from shifts in fleet size and weight.
10. Develop a federal framework for measuring and controlling greenhouse gases. An effective U.S. climate change policy should include a workable cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions from stationary sources and a separate program for reducing carbon emissions in the transportation sector. The United States should encourage more renewable energies and the capture and storage of carbon dioxide emissions, and work with existing international systems to reduce greenhouse gases around the world.
11. Promote education on energy issues. We cannot make the hard choices ahead of us without a broad understanding of the basic issues of energy security. We need to promote energy education at an early age, both to shape consumer behavior and to encourage young minds to become the energy engineers of the future.
12. Keep the door open for other technology solutions. There are other viable energy alternatives, each with its own current limitations: nuclear power, geothermal energy and hydropower, for example. We need to keep pursuing these alternatives and look for other, as-yet-undiscovered solutions.
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