Earth Equity News

Traditional Energy's Modern Boom. By Joel Achenbach, WashPost, August 15, 2008. "With oil, gas and coal near record prices, there is an obvious market incentive to invest in renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power. But those same high prices have also incited fossil-fuel companies to ramp up their drilling and mining. Former vice president Al Gore has called for the United States to switch to 100 percent renewable energy for electricity generation in the next decade. But if the scene in Pennsylvania is any indication, policymakers wanting to see a greener America will have to do more than tweak the energy sector around the edges. The state of Pennsylvania is on pace to issue more than 7,000 permits for oil and gas drilling this year, more than twice as many as five years ago... [For] Pennsylvania crude oil... [where] Colonel Edwin Drake drilled the world's first commercial oil well in 1859... business is good these days... The Marcellus Shale underlies much of Pennsylvania and parts of New York, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky -- an area that already has a lot of infrastructure for distributing natural gas. Geologists say the shale might contain more than 50 trillion cubic tons of gas, about twice what the United States uses in a typical year. Rodney Waller, a senior vice president of Range Resources, said he recognizes that this is not a renewable resource: 'Every time you use it, you have to wait another billion years for something to create some methane.' Meanwhile, the coal industry, savoring the high price of its product, is opening new seams in Appalachia that would have been unprofitable in past years."