An Important Argument to Watch for DOD's Energy Future

In the energy sector, the price of a barrel of oil isn't the only thing that's highly volatile. The future is too.

Here's a LINK to a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal where energy gurus Daniel Yergin and Vinod Khosla debate how quickly cleantech will begin to substantially supplant fossil fuels in the US.

This is Yergin responding to a question about the future, starting with a look back to the very recent past:

... [T]he world was going to run out of oil. It was peak oil. And we were going to be importing so much natural gas that we would be paying $100 billion a year to import natural gas. That was five years ago. The picture changed. The picture will change in five years.

and,

[Regarding national security], we've talked a lot about natural gas today. But what is also striking is what's happening in U.S. oil, with what's called tight oil and the development of that. You look at Canadian oil sands. You look at what's happening offshore of Brazil. And you see this kind of re-balancing of world oil going on, where probably 10 years from now the Western Hemisphere will be getting a lot less oil from the Eastern Hemisphere to begin with.

In case you couldn't tell, DOD Energy Bloggers like Dan and myself have a passion for cleantech and a more sustainable energy future for the US and the US military. But more than that, we put the interests and security of the country and the armed forces well ahead of our goals for new energy sources and energy efficiency.

I think you can hear in Yergin's response a sense that the world has just shifted, and that the US has moved quickly from a net energy importer to a potential energy exporter and that this condition may hold for the near and mid-term future.

Clearly, DOD's got to keep itself fully up-to-speed on the current version of the energy future and I believe it is.  This re-balancing thing ... there's security in that. Andy Bochman