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Although I burn several cords of wood every winter, it's still a blessing to have a thermostat that controls a natural-gas furnace. Natural gas also powers the household water heater and our kitchen stove. So I'd be a hypocrite if I opposed all natural-gas drilling and development.
Even so, I was disappointed when the federal Bureau of Land Management rejected Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter's proposal to minimize the effects of natural-gas development on the Roan Plateau, a relatively untouched landscape of about 125,000 acres north of Interstate 70 between Rifle and Parachute.
Among other things, Ritter wanted 36,000 acres set aside as sensitive wildlife areas. The BLM says only 21,000 acres. Ritter proposed phased leasing; the BLM wants to lease it all at once. The City of Rifle officially opposed any drilling on the top of the plateau.
Going into more detail would be tedious here, but it is
interesting to note that the Republican platform of 2000,
the one that the current administration campaigned on, said
that Our overall philosophy is to trust state and local
government to know what best suits the needs of their
people,
and that We will change the operating
culture of the federal agencies that manage public lands,
giving a greater role to states and to their political
subdivisions in order to foster a creative partnership with
the American people.
Except when those state and local governments interfere with the demands of the energy industry, of course. The GOP apparently figured that was so obvious that there was no need to put it in the platform.
Is there any way we might burn natural gas in good conscience when this kind of development is going on? Natural gas, after all, is the cleanest fossil fuel, and until we're all in solar houses, we'll need it.
Perhaps there is, if we put the market to work. Look at electricity. A few years ago, some customers said they were willing to pay more for wind-generated power, as they preferred it to coal-fired power. That gave an incentive to electric utilities to invest in wind power, since they knew they could recover any additional costs through the higher rates. And now there are wind farms sprouting all over America, including the West.
Natural gas is basically methane, a gas that is also
produced by the decomposition of organic matter, except
then it's called biogas
or biomethane.
While it may just waft away from cattle feedlots, biomethane can be captured and put to use. For years, the Brooklyn Union Gas Co. in New York City has been tapping an old landfill and sending the biogas down its pipelines for heating and cooking. Some sewage treatment plants power themselves with recovered biomethane, as do some dairy farms.
In other words, biomethane is a technology that works now, although generally it costs more than natural gas, and the technology could certainly be improved. But if customers were willing to make up that difference, the natural-gas utilities might well be willing to invest in renewable biogas rather than non-renewable natural gas. And with investment, the technology would improve.
If these monopolies refused to respond to this pressure, the pressure could come from state utility commissions or citizen initiatives on state ballots, although that really shouldn't be necessary. After all, this is theoretically a market economy, and if we're willing to pay for biomethane from the local sewage treatment plant or landfill, rather than natural gas from the Roan Plateau, then we ought to be able to buy it.
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