"Wind and natural gas are actually fairly close -- they are cost comparable in terms of how much it costs to generate one megawatt hour for wind versus one megawatt hour for natural gas. Solar is about five times higher," Larson explained.
The expansion of U.S. natural gas production could also help revitalize U.S. manufacturing, says Royal Dutch Shell's Chief Executive Officer Peter Voser.
"If you have affordable and abundantly available gas… there could be a great rebirth of manufacturing industries in the United States," noted Voser.
Transportation fuel costs might also be brought down by using natural gas, instead of corn, to produce the ethanol that is now a required additive in gasoline.
Steven Sterin is chief financial officer of the Dallas-based Celanese Corporation, which has developed a way of doing it.
"It is a thermochemical process that either uses natural gas or coal or other carbon sources, hopefully in the future, bio-sources, as those develop, to produce very large scales of very economically attractive ethanol," Sterin noted.
A change in U.S. law is needed for this to happen here, but Celanese is now working with China to produce ethanol from coal.
Petroleum will be the dominant transportation fuel for many years to come, but experts say the world's dependency on it can be greatly reduced by the development of alternative fuels.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25