Wind Is the Future, but Nat Gas Is Here Now

It is natural gas, though, that is the great conundrum, the great game-changer that few politicians and most pundits just don't get at all. The critics, like this Holman Jenkins in The Wall Street Journal, simply haven't done any research. They are using data and facts from 2003 and the industry has changed, changed to the point that the information from five years ago is valueless.

This is where the Noyce analogy comes in.

Every nat gas oil engineer and exec in the world knows that we have had 100 years' worth of natural gas underground in this country domestically -- not off the coasts, but within our borders.

And it has been totally inaccessible until five years ago. That's when drillers basically invented a new way to drill that makes it easy to get this gas out. It gets easier to get at every day, which is why you keep hearing about all of these "shales" that have gigantic finds -- just go look at Devon's (DVN - commentary - Cramer's Take) numbers today if you don't believe me. Look at the drilling! Look at the drilling that Chesapeake (CHK - commentary - Cramer's Take) is doing. I believe 100 years of nat gas -- which is two-thirds cleaner than oil including on the CO2 side, which is the most toxic pollutant -- is conservative.

So when you look at this fuel, you realize it should be used instead of gasoline as soon as possible. It is abundant, cheap, there are pipelines everywhere, it doesn't need to be refined, and it burns clean. What's lacking? Filling stations and cars. But not the technology for either, just the infrastructure.

Because of its newfound abundance, nat gas would be about half of the price of gasoline, which means that the payback for these new cars is quick. The opposite of SUVs.

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