Letters

The road to clean energy

In the March/April issue (“Clean energy: Why natural gas doesn’t make the cut”), Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune tends to paint a rather gloomy portrait of the natural gas industry.

I have to disagree based on several known facts. I have worked in the natural gas industry for more than 25 years and I am proud to have served millions of customers with a clean alternative to coal and oil for the production of electricity and other energy needs.

As a long-time Sierra Club member, I agree with Michael that we need to look beyond all forms of hydrocarbon-based fuels. However these technologies aren’t necessarily “around the corner” on a full-scale basis. We need to maintain our natural gas systems to deliver a dependable source of energy that is nearly independent of oil.

In fact there is a glut of natural gas at present and there is actually less exploring and drilling being performed because there isn’t much incentive for producers. Ultimately it would be preferable to use a source of energy that is clean and reliable while the alternatives are being developed.

—Steve Anderson,
Fountain Valley

The true cost of energy?

In the seemingly forever debate on carbon what is always missing is consideration of the need to measure energy consumed in terms of energy units used to produce it. This is particularly desirable when finite sources of energy are involved.

For example, the units of energy consumed in extraction of petroleum continues to increase as the resource diminishes, i.e., the wells have to go deeper day by day.

Coal may be cheapest in that the energy consumed in recovery of a ton of coal is less than that in recovery of a proportional unit of petroleum or gas. But as Congress surmised when it decided to subsidize nuclear power, the latter may be more expensive than coal in the number of units of a finite source of energy needed to refine the uranium ore, but it is cleaner and more tractable – thus more desirable but more costly in terms of energy consumed.

We need to always measure the final product in terms of units of energy consumed to make it as well as in terms of dollars and cents.

—Harry Rockey
Laguna Woods