“THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE DOOR” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 36

Here's a striking set of numbers. h e Department of Energy
projects that the United States will be producing nearly fourteen
trillion cubic feet of shale gas annually within twenty-i ve years. 41
Basic chemistry says that a thousand cubic feet of natural gas con-
tains almost as much energy as eight gallons of gasoline. Some quick
arithmetic tells you that within a quarter century, the United States
may be producing shale gas that contains as much energy as a hun-
dred billion gallons of gasoline annually. h at's almost as much as

Americans consume every year.
Alas, there's more to the world than chemistry. h e real question is
whether there's a way to use natural gas to power U.S. cars and trucks
that ultimately benei ts the country as a whole. If you think it's obvi-
ous that powering American vehicles with natural gas would be good
for the country, think about this: there's more than enough energy in
the U.S. food crop to power the country's cars and trucks too, but it's
clear that using it all for that purpose wouldn't be wise. Benei ts aren't
the only thing that mat ers; costs do too.
One way to use natural gas to power cars and trucks is to use the gas
to generate electricity, and then use the electricity to power electric cars.
But the big barrier to doing so isn't the price or availability of natural
gas. Before the shale gas boom, the biggest hurdle to deploying electric
vehicles was the cost of the cars themselves, not the fuel; now that shale
gas has taken of , the same barriers remain.
h ere are two other prospects that are unique to natural gas. On
a visit to California, I met Atul Kapadia, the chief executive of Envia
Systems, one of the hot est developers of bat ery technology for electric
cars in Silicon Valley. Kapadia, who still carries a light Indian accent
despite his decades in the United States, speaks calmly but with the
conviction of someone who has succeeded before. Bat ery CEOs typi-
cally brag to you about their new electric vehicles or about how they've
had their cars retroi t ed to run of electric power. Kapadia, though, had
a dif erent boast. “I drive a natural gas car,” he told me. It had taken
him all of i t een minutes to make the decision: “h ere is no compelling
reason for me right now to use my own technology. Because I get twice
the mileage [by using natural gas], and half the cost. So I'm saving four
times the money.”