Isn’t clean air enough?

It is important to distinguish between, first, those who want clean air — chock-full of carbon dioxide and nitrogen for the trees, oxygen for the tree-huggers, and water vapor for us all — and, second, the global-warming wackos, who are scared silly that we tree-huggers are producing so much carbon dioxide that we’re going to fry the planet.

Those who want clean air — and that includes Presidents Bush, father and son — advocate the use of clean-burning natural gas (methane) and methanol. During the Reagan-Bush administration, Vice President Bush even chaired a Methanol Cabinet Council Working Group to promote the use of methanol fuel, similar to the one President George W. Bush has just established, chaired by Vice President Cheney, to handle the California power-wheeling crisis.

True environmentalists also want coal and oil to be as clean burning as is practically possible. “Clean burning” means that essentially nothing is produced by the burning except energy for us, with water vapor and carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere for the trees.

For the global-warming wackos, however, even clean-burning fuels are anathema. Whenever mankind can’t wait for the wind to blow or the sun to shine, and proceeds to take matters into his own hands, the wackos reckon he is sinning. When, for the sake of our progeny, we try to make this planet a better place than we found it and, in the process, produce water vapor and carbon dioxide — both being really bad old “greenhouse” gases — the wackos reckon it is their duty to try to stop us from sinning again.

But when we produce energy by “burning” uranium in nuclear power plants or by harnessing the flow of rivers at hydroelectric plants — neither of which release any carbon dioxide or pollutants into the air — the wackos go schizoid and judge our sins against Mother Nature to be mortal (if you’ll pardon the expression).

If you really believe that mankind’s introduction of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has got to stop — or at least be severely curtailed — or the planet will cook-off, then nuclear and hydroelectricity are your only viable options. If you really believe that, then you should promote nuclear and hydropower.

However, if you merely want clean air and doubt the global-warming wackos know what they are talking about when they say we are going to fry the planet, then you are also free to burn all the clean-burning fuels — that produce only water vapor and carbon dioxide — you can get our hands on.

That brings us to the topic of this sermon. The reason it has to be a sermon is that the last “energy crisis” brought Jimmy Carter to power, and Carter had some strange ideas about the morality of burning natural gas. (He also had some strange ideas about the morality of even making plutonium.)

In particular, he preached that burning natural gas, commercially, was immoral. Carter was willing to allow Teddy Kennedy’s constituents in New England to have Southern and Southwestern natural gas (with its price held ridiculously low by the federal government) piped to them for heating their homes, but Carter got Congress to prohibit industry from using natural gas at any price for almost any commercial purpose, such as generating electricity.

Now, in an age before the global-warming wackos ascended, Carter did not think it immoral for his newly established Department of Energy to spend about a zillion dollars to build humongous plants to produce methane from coal, lignite and peat. At a time when the price “at the well-head” of natural gas was held to about 39 cents a thousand cubic feet, the methane to be produced by these Department of Energy plants was estimated to cost upwards of $10 per thousand cubic feet!

How did Carter get Congress to enact into law his schizophrenic energy policies? Well, he convinced them that the world was going to run out of natural gas before the next president could take office. Ronald Reagan would have none of it and deprived Carter of a second term with a promise to solve the supply crisis — not by hoarding the known gas reserves, but by unleashing free market forces.

(The same sort of promise was just made by then-candidate George W. Bush. It should be noted that some of the more idiotic “energy” laws of the Carter era — such as price controls on natural gas at the U.S. wellhead, but not applied any where else — were not repealed until the administration of Bush the Elder.)

Thanks to Reagan, Thatcher and various “wildcatters,” we didn’t run out of natural gas 30 years ago and, as we enter the new millennium, the known global reserves of natural gas are enough to last us at least — at least — 65 years at current rates of consumption. No one knows for sure how much natural gas there may be, because until Reagan came to town, no one ever went looking for it. And knowing that we have at least a 65-year reserve, you wouldn’t think it would make much sense to go looking for any more, right now.

But — talk about Carter’s schizophrenia — if the global warming schizoids have their way, and if the only viable alternatives to burning “polluting” coal and oil (i.e., nuclear and hydro power) are banned worldwide, then the use of natural gas, already much higher than 30 years ago, is going to skyrocket. For example, the European Union has demanded that Lithuania, as a condition of EU membership, shut down its nuclear power plants, which supply 85 percent of Lithuania’s generated electricity. Similarly, the EU has demanded that Bulgaria, as a condition of EU membership, shut down its nuclear power plants, which provide 45 percent of Bulgaria’s generated electricity.

The stated rationale for forcing the shut-down of nuclear power plants is that Soviet designed reactors “aren’t safe.” However, that rationale is called into question when the G7 group of industrialized countries has refused to fund even safety improvements to any Soviet-designed reactor, in Central and Eastern Europe — including Ukraine and Russia — that could extend the useful life of nuclear power plants. They’re not really concerned about safety — they just want them shut down.

How do they propose to replace the electricity now generated by the nuclear plants? You guessed it: By burning natural gas.

Most natural gas reservoirs have been found as a byproduct of oil exploration. World reserves of natural gas are estimated at 5,000 trillion cubic feet with some 3,000 trillion cubic feet categorized as being “remote” — much of it in the Arctic. That is, most reservoirs of natural gas are very far removed from where the natural gas is actually needed.

There are three principal ways to transport the gas from the remote reservoirs to the end user, 1) by gas pipeline, 2) as liquefied — at the reservoir — natural gas (LNG) and 3) as methanol — produced at the reservoir.

Purists might argue that methanol is no longer natural gas, and that if it is included here, then burning natural gas at the reservoir to generate electricity which can then be — and sometimes is — transported to the end-user by high-voltage transmission lines should be included, also. As a matter of fact, some of the electricity being generated in the Pacific Northwest and “wheeled” down to Southern California, is generated by burning natural gas. But that is one of the reasons the wheeled electricity now costs everyone in the West — not just Californians — so much. Jimmy Carter was right about that: Burning natural gas in the Pacific Northwest to generate electricity, especially for wheeling, is not its best use.

Most remote natural gas is transported to the principal users (for example, the U.S. and European Union) by pipeline and then distributed to consumers by pipelines. Most other remote gas is transported by ship as LNG and then re-gasified and introduced into the same distribution pipeline networks. It is almost unbelievable, but the EU gets about a quarter of its natural gas — at competitive prices — by pipeline from Siberia, almost halfway around the world and, at present rates of production, Russia’s known reserves will last at least a century.

Enter once again the global-warming schizoids. In addition to the EU efforts to shut down all nuclear power plants in Europe (including Russia), the global-warming schizoids want to short-sheet the totally serious plans of the Peoples Republic of China, the Koreas and Japan to “go nuclear.” The schizoids — supported by many true environmentalists — propose building an incredible network of pipelines to transport remote natural gas to virtually every corner of the civilized world.

However, it doesn’t do much good to transport, by pipeline or by ship, all that natural gas to a country, like China for example, until there is an existing distribution pipeline system for it within the country itself. Only Japan, at present, has such a system.

(In a future column we will examine the third option for marketing remote natural gas — namely, converting it at the source into methanol. There already exists a worldwide distribution system for methanol — in this country we call them “filling stations.” There are already fleets of vehicles in California, converted from running on gasoline to methanol and, in about a year, there will be many more fleets of “fuel-cell” powered vehicles, also running on methanol.)

But, there is an electricity distribution system in place in China, the Koreas, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia, etc. So, for now, the global-warming schizoids promote the shut-down of all nuclear, coal and oil-fired generating plants, to be replaced by natural gas-fired electricity generating plants.

That’s OK with the true environmentalists, who just want clean unpolluted air for the trees and tree-huggers to breathe. Whereas coal and oil-fired plants produce pollutants, natural gas is clean burning. And if there’s nothing to this man-caused global-warming scare, why take the risk of a nearby nuclear power plant, even if it is clean burning?

Well, there are a couple of reasons why true environmentalists shouldn’t blindly pile aboard the schizoid’s bandwagon. The first is that generating electricity is not usually the best end-use for natural gas. The second is that the global-warming nuts could — barely conceivably — be right, and that by shutting down nuclear and hydropower, thereby producing much more “greenhouse gas,” the planet will go to hell in a wheelbarrow a whole lot faster.

But the main reason is that, once the schizoids have got us all in that wheelbarrow — hooked on natural gas — what will the schizoids do next? Hard to say. Rumor has it schizophrenics are really weird.