Forbes: Nobel Physicist: Society Should Convert To Natural Gas
Nobel prize winning physicist Carlo Rubbia predicts "a methane society."
Of all the energy sources in play, natural gas offers the most immediate promise as a clean, abundant fuel that can meet society’s needs, including the need to mitigate global warming, Nobel prize winning physicist Carlo Rubbia said in Chicago Friday.
Society should pursue two goals, now within reach, to fulfill the promise of natural gas, Rubbia told about 250 people at Northwestern University:
- a technology to burn natural gas without CO2 emissions, and
- a conversion of the transportation sector from gasoline to methanol.
“It seems to me that if you can have natural gas with no CO2 emissions there’s no reason not to use it,” said Rubbia, the director of scientific studies at the Institute for Sustainability Studies in Pottsdam, Germany. “It seems to me that a methane-based society is the best choice you have in the present time.”
Asked about pollution from the hydraulic fracturing of shale, Rubbia said: ”This is a separate problem which of course must be resolved in some way.”
Rubbia named shale gas and methane hydrate—natural gas frozen on the sea floor and elsewhere—as abundant sources of energy that can meet society’s needs soon enough to respond to anthropogenic climate change. MORE