Fossil fuels unlikely to lose starring role

Fossil fuels unlikely to lose starring role

Apr 24 - Houston Chronicle

Solar and wind energy may get the buzz, but traditional energy -- oil, natural gas and even coal -- will be relied upon for decades, speakers at a daylong conference on the future of energy said Friday.

"It's not the Al Gore view," said H. David Ramm, a founding partner at Houston-based DKRW Energy. "There is not a 10-year plan to replace everything with renewables. That's not practical."

Ramm and other speakers, a mix of university researchers and energy industry executives, said during the conference at the University of Houston that global demand is growing so quickly that the world will continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels, even as researchers work to make alternative fuels more cost-effective.

"We're going to need every bit of energy we can find," said David Roberts Jr., executive vice president of worldwide upstream operations for Marathon Oil Corp.

That could be good news for Houston, giving the city's energy companies more time to diversify. In the meantime, demand for petroleum engineers, geophysicists, chemists and other traditional energy workers continues to grow.

"The good times are back" in hiring, said UH geologist Janok Bhattacharya, who added that the number of graduate students in geosciences at UH has doubled over the past few years.

He predicted that the United States will be able to provide only about half of the 30,000 geoscientists it will need in coming years.

Still, no one discounted the coming importance of renewable energy, especially solar and wind.

That's a growing area of research at UH and elsewhere.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst called for even more emphasis on alternative fuels when he addressed conference- goers, especially in the area of storage and affordability.

"We've got to figure out a way to get costs down," he said. "Work on storage. Make some investments."

For now, alternative fuels remain too expensive to be widely used. Ramm estimated that it costs about 6 cents per kilowatt to produce electricity with coal, compared to 32 cents per kilowatt for solar power.

There are also problems with transportation -- wind energy, for example, is generally produced far from the cities where it would be needed, and much of it is lost on conventional transmission lines.

Venkat Selvamanickam, hired last fall as director of the Applied Research Hub, a collaboration between the Texas Center for Superconductivity and the UH College of Engineering, described his work with high-temperature superconducting wire, which could eliminate energy loss.

The campus itself came in for a little attention, too: It was named this week by the Princeton Review as one of the nation's most environmentally responsible colleges, chosen for its commitment to recycling and other green measures. The only other Texas schools on the list are Texas A&M and Texas Christian University.

Natural gas drew praise as everyone's new favorite fossil fuel. It produces only about half the carbon emissions of coal and is widely available in the U.S. since extraction from natural gas shales became feasible. Ramm said current supplies would last about 100 years at current demand levels.

Several people proposed converting more of the nation's vehicle fleet to run on natural gas.

Britt Dearman, manager of special projects for Apache Corp., said converting just 25 percent of U.S. vehicles to run on natural gas could cut oil imports by 40 percent and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 8 percent.

But no one suggested that growing supplies of natural gas will lessen demand for oil.

In fact, horizontal drilling techniques and other technologies will keep older oil fields active, allowing companies to extract more oil than in the past, Bhattacharya said.

And Ramm said that even this week's collapse of the Deepwater Horizon, a semisubmersible rig in the Gulf of Mexico, was unlikely to cause more than "a momentary pause" in offshore drilling.

"There's a lot of oil out there," he said. "I think we'll keep on drilling, and I think we probably should."

jeannie.kever@chron.com

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