Gas: Clean Fuel? Or the Next Coal?

Global power generation is in turmoil, with every piece of the complex system seemingly in flux. A massive transition is underway, but to what, nobody knows. So forecasts both for the sector itself and for the fuels that it uses are all over the place. Since the petroleum industry is increasingly betting its future on natural gas — a fact recently confirmed by Shell's pricey bid for BG and underscored by numerous senior executives at the recent IHS CeraWeek energy conference — this uncertainty is worrisome, if not downright scary. A few things stick out clearly through the fog, though: Right or wrong, the investment community likes renewables and especially solar. It does not like coal, one bit. And it is skeptical but still undecided about natural gas. The critical corollary is that publicly traded petroleum companies looking to gas for growth desperately need to get gas positioned on the clean-fuel bandwagon alongside renewables and to avoid association with coal firms under the "fossil fuel" label.