It is fashionable among some energy and environmental groups to declare that natural gas is the bridge to a solar and wind energy future. Clean-burning natural gas has become the fuel of choice for generating electricity in the United States, and now fuels a quarter of new electrical plants across the nation. But demand for this premium fossil fuel is rising so rapidly that we risk exhausting our available supply.
Fifteen percent of the nation's electricity is produced at gas-fired power plants, up from less than 10 percent just a few years ago. Until recently, there was little concern about the cost and availability of natural gas. But demand for gas is outrunning supplies, and there is no surplus capacity in North America. Already 16 percent of U.S. natural gas supply comes from Canada and Mexico.
The problem originated with a collapse of oil and gas prices two years ago that discouraged drilling. The supply cutback, aggravated by a shortage of pipeline capacity, is largely responsible for the price spiral. Last year, overall consumption of natural gas in businesses, industries and households rose 4 percent over the previous year, but domestic gas production increased only 0.2 percent. Only now do gas companies have the financial backing they need to expand production. But even with accelerated drilling, it will be many years before new gas reaches the market.
Another factor is that most U.S. natural gas fields are mature, shrinking production areas. All major fields in the nation are already online, and much of what remains is off-limits for environmental reasons. This means more gas must be imported, if it is available. Thus the country will become more dependent upon foreign suppliers for natural gas as we are now for oil.
That leaves coal and nuclear power, the sources for over 3/4 of the nation's electricity. But we haven't built a "base-load" coal or nuclear power plant in the past decade. The last large coal plant went into service in the early 1990s. The last order for a nuclear plant was in 1978.
In the aftermath of the 1970s energy crisis, we developed a number of different energy options — oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear power, hydroelectric power and renewables. New emphasis was also placed on conservation and improvements in energy efficiency. The need for more electricity capacity must not destroy this mix and place too much reliance on natural gas. Every option has imperfections, but we must have fuel options to control prices and avoid excessive dependence on foreign suppliers.
The basic attractions of coal, the nation's No. 1 power-plant fuel, are abundance and low cost. The United States possesses more than 240 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves, or about 1/4 of the world's total. We have a greater share of the world's coal than Saudi Arabia does of the world's oil. No longer the dirty fuel of the past, coal is being burned much more cleanly, due in part to improved pollution-control technologies. The Environmental Protection Agency says that coal-fired plants are 33 percent less polluting than in 1970, even as coal-based electricity has nearly tripled.
In the most dramatic development to date in clean-coal technology, Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a technique to gasify coal into hydrogen for use in fuel cells that generate electricity without any emissions. Carbon dioxide is captured and solidified into an inert mineral for disposal underground. The Zero Emission Coal Alliance, a coalition of U.S. and Canadian coal companies and utilities, says this gasification process would cost about a cent more per kilowatt hour than power produced by conventional coal-fired plants. The alliance plans to build a pilot plant to demonstrate the process within five years.
Those who dismiss nuclear power, now safe and reliable, fail to recognize that, for the first time in more than a decade, production costs at U.S. nuclear plants are lower than production costs at coal plants. According to McGraw-Hill's Utility Data institute, the average production cost in 1999 at nuclear plants was 1.83 cents per kilowatt hour, lower than coal at 2.07 cents, and far lower than oil-fired plants at 3.18 cents and natural gas plants at 3.52 cents. Rising oil and gas prices during the past year have greatly increased nuclear power's economic advantage.
Significantly, the lowest-cost nuclear plants that provide electricity for as little as 1 cent per kilowatt hour generally boast the highest levels of safety, performance and reliability. Also, nuclear power produces electricity without any air pollution or greenhouse-gas emissions. Even knowledgeable critics of nuclear power realize that new and advanced nuclear plants using standardized designs should be part of the answer to the nation's energy needs. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already certified three such designs for these advanced nuclear plants.
Electricity consumption is increasing almost 3 percent a year, spurred by the growing use of computers, telecommunications and other high-tech tools. It's estimated that the power used by microprocessors and integrated circuits housed in the millions of systems and settings that constitute the information age's tools now amounts to nearly 13 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption today, more than the steel, pulp and paper, and chemical industries combined.
Today there are about 600,000 megawatts of electricity produced in the United States. At 3 percent annual growth, almost 500,000 megawatts, or five hundred 1 GW power plants, will need to be added by 2020. This requires the construction of a 1 GW plant every two weeks for the next two decades. California has not built a single GW plant in several decades.
It may be necessary to use natural gas to meet peak demands for power, but we must remove obstacles to the further use of coal and nuclear power if we are to have reliable and affordable electricity in the years ahead. The time to begin planning and construction of both coal and nuclear power plants is now. Combined with improvements in energy efficiency and renewables, they must be part of the answer to the need for a balanced and sustainable mix of electrical energy sources.
Gary M. Sandquist is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah.