As we chugg along into whatever alternative transportation and energy future we’re creating for ourselves, it is clear that it shouldn’t involve such a singular dependence on one energy source as we’ve had. If anything, our last 100 years have taught us that relying so completely on oil can have many disastrous effects, ranging the gamut from economic to social to environmental. And, while plentiful access to oil has clearly brought about an unprecedented amount of good, at this point we know that we can build a better and more sustainable system.

So the discussions going on right now at the highest levels of government on how to structure any future energy and transportation framework highlight the pitfalls that lie ahead in weening ourselves off of our stubborn and all-encompassing addiction to oil.

Step 1: Electric Cars
If we’re smart, our future will involve multiple and flexible sources of energy that are suited to whatever region they’re being used in. The majority of personal driving on any given day can be accomplished with electrical power. The beauty of electrical power is that it is ultimately flexible: it can be made from a wide variety of “ultra local” sources ranging from wind and solar, to hydro and nuclear, to coal and natural gas. While some of those are clearly more polluting and less sustainable than others, the mix of sources adds to the ultimate stability of such a system… and as our energy mix gets cleaner over time, so do our vehicles. Which is why, smartly, our government seems to have seen the rationality in such a system. Initially, pure electric cars won’t be for everybody, which is why we’ll also have cars like the Volt that run mostly on electricity but are more expensive. But in the end, most everybody could be driving plug-ins and not even notice a difference in their daily lives.

And What to Do with Everything Else?
But what do you do with all the cars that are already on the road? What about trains, planes and freight trucks? Clearly our battery technology is not far enough along to make electric freight trucks a reality, and nobody’s yet come up with a way to make large commercial planes fly on anything but combustion. All of our diesel locomotives could be converted to run on electricity from overhead lines, but the amount of new infrastructure involved would be mind boggling. What all of this leads to is that we need to find other sources of energy to run these all-important pieces of our global supply and transportation chain. This is where biofuels and natural gas come in.

Natural Gas and the Pickens Aura
Leaving biofuels out of this particular argument we start to see an emerging theme. Last week, T. Boone Pickens, the oil billionaire who’s already invested tons of his own money into natural gas infrastructure and adopted the new mantra of being a clean energy supporter, was in Washington D.C. to continue pushing his plan to convert all the freight trucks on the road to the cleaner burning natural gas. There is a bill currently making its way through congress that would authorize tax credits for natural gas vehicles, require 50% of the federal vehicle fleet to use natural gas and would require the US Department of Energy to provide financing to light- and heavy-duty natural gas vehicle manufacturers. But there are lots of folks who say that natural gas just doesn’t make any sense.

From the oil industry you have people saying that to install all the required new natural gas refueling infrastructure and conversions would cost far too much money, and from the coal industry a lot of ruckus is being made about how a rush to natural gas electricity would irreparably harm their industry and that nobody can provide electricity as cheaply as them. They also are saying that they can implement new technologies that will make them just as clean as natural gas.

It’s a Brand New World: Fossil Fuel Industry Strife
I’ll leave it to you all to decide if any of the above makes any sense, but nonetheless it’s an interesting turn of events that the fossil fuel industries have sensed their piece of the pie is getting smaller and they will all need to share it in the near future… it’s leading to a cutthroat environment. It used to be that they all worked kind of nicely together as a group representing roughly the same thing — energy from fossil fuels — but now they’re becoming enemies as the traditional government support is starting to dry up a bit.

But Wait, Even Scientists See Natural Gas Pitfalls
As those former allies bicker it gets harder to separate the truth from the trees, with all the rhetoric and pseudofacts. But now we’re starting to hear from scientists who are also hesitant to get on the natural gas bandwagon. In particular, Robert Howarth, a geology professor from Cornell, says that by using natural gas you are actually doing more harm to the environment than using diesel in large trucks. His analysis is based on excess greenhouse gas — methane in particular — leakage during the mining and processing of natural gas. Methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so even if less of it is emitted than CO2 it can still do much more damage. Reportedly his calculations have a few holes (even he admits that), but they still clearly indicate that we haven’t done as thorough an analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of all the options as we should.

Source: GO Media - Written by Nick Chambers - Image Credit: Nestor Galina’s Flickr photostream. Used under a Creative Commons License.