Goodbye Fossil Fuels?

A victory parade may be premature. Two speakers in Vail lay out the progress but also remaining challenges. But Daniel Yergin and others point out that use of fossil fuels is actually growing.

 

by Allen Best

Mike Nelson retired in early December after delivering three-minute weather reports on Denver television stations for 33 years. His voice of middle America, sturdy but friendly, fills any room, his sentences rising and momentarily pausing to emphasize key ideas with practiced precision. He was trained as a meteorologist, but working in television made him a communicator.

Long ago, Nelson also became engaged in addressing climate change. I encountered him about a decade ago at a national gathering in Denver. He spoke up, but others at the gathering, a climate-focused event, seemed to take no particular note. I did because, although I rarely watched television then, I thought his presence noteworthy. Meteorologists, whether deserved or not, had the reputation of being stand-offish to the notion of climate change. He did not.

In his spare time, Nelson —as became evident at a recent Vail Symposium event — has become a student of the energy transition. I followed the same route via journalism. How can you not take seriously climate change without very quickly trying to understand how we will slacken the emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels?

On stage with Nelson in February was Doug Arent. Arent — on the right in the above photo — had spent 20 years with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, most recently four years directing NREL’s public-private partnerships initiative.  In January, he moved to a semi-detached role as executive director of the NREL Foundation, an independent non-profit formed to support NREL research, innovation and education programs.

Together, with aid of 48 slides, they delivered a broad-based assessment of where we are in the energy transition. The presentation didn’t strictly accord with the title assigned it: “The Real Reason Solar Energy is Beating Oil & Gas!” They were optimistic and cheerful but nonetheless described a broader transition with an abundance of asterisks.

An essay in Foreign Affairs published several weeks later made the case for more subdued cheerleading. During the last 15 years, said a trio of well-regarded authors, wind and solar have gone from virtually zero to 15% of the world’s electricity generation, and solar panel prices have fallen by as much as 90%.”

Daniel Yergin and two other authors go on to note that despite this surge in renewables, 2024 was a record year for the amount of energy derived from oil and coal. More about their thesis later.

To launch the Vail Symposium presentation, Arent ran up a flag of distress that is familiar to those not otherwise preoccupied with the nation’s cultural divide. We have a climate emergency. Unlike the pages-long legalese in small print that you must consent to when you go in for a medical procedure, Arendt’s was simple:

Arent’s slide was in simple white type on black. “The Warning.: Pace and scale of climate action are insufficient to tackle climate change.” It comes from the International Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment. Arent was an official government reviewer for the report, and he had been a coordinating lead author of the fifth assessment report.

How do we decarbonize very quickly? Although climate scientists say we should peak our global emissions by 2030, Arent allowed that it’s “probably not going to happen.” In other words, we’ll continue to dig a deeper hole for at least a few years, as we continue to burn even larger volumes of carbon around the globe.

The United States continues to set records for oil and gas extraction. In March 2024, the Energy Information Administration reported that no country had ever produced as much as the United States had in the previous year, as seen in the chart below. In December, the EIA reported a new record for oil production. The United States also set a new record for extraction of natural gas.

 

Very good things have been happening, though. Since 1975, when Arent was beginning high school, the price of solar-produced electricity has dropped from around $125 per watt to 13 cents a watt.

In 2024, across the world, more than 400 gigawatts of solar generating capacity were installed. To put that into comparison, Colorado’s total generating capacity as of 2024 was not quite 20 gigawatts. On a global basis, as in Colorado, solar will continue to scale upward, achieving 1,000 gigawatts — that’s called a terawatt — annually by maybe 2030, maybe even before that.

“That’s an enormous amount of solar,” said Arent. “And the same thing is happening in batteries, although they’re earlier in their market maturity. But we’re going to see the same cost and scale phenomenon. This is exponential growth.”

In his career, Arent stopped by Regis University in Colorado to get a master’s in business administration. The numbers matter to business investors. “It’s like, ‘Can I chase returns in those markets?’”

Still, the pace of innovation and adoption must quicken. “If we take the same linear approach to innovation and to market development, we will go too slowly,” said Arent. “It took us 40 years to get from a solar cell — which was mostly invented back in the 1880s but first commercialized at NREL when I was a teenager in the 1970s — to 400 gigawatts,” he said.

“We don’t have 40 years. We have to implement differently. We have to innovate differently. We have to innovate at an incredible speed, and we have to do this through an engaged set of conversations and a really different way of thinking through partnerships.”

Nelson, in his turn at the microphone, demonstrated his capacity for climate change communication. If the Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history were compressed to 46 years and eight months, human beings have been here for only four hours. The Industrial Revolution with its reliance upon fossil fuels, coal in particular, began one minute ago. And in that minute, said Nelson, we have increased the atmospheric carbon dioxide from 280 parts per million to 425 parts per million.

The basic premise of global warming, one disputed by very few scientists, is that the accumulating gases are warming the global climate.

“It is, in fact, easier to predict climate than it is to predict weather,” he said. It’s basic thermodynamics. If you add heat to something, it gets warmer.”

For years, Nelson voluntarily performed for elementary school students and others – including an annual conference of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society that I attended maybe 15 years ago. He explained weather and also climate but ended his shows with a crowd-pleasing tornado dance. It invariably produced laughs along with some new knowledge.

Nelson also presented in Denver to what he called the petroleum wives club. “That was an interesting audience to talk to about climate change.”

When he said this, I had flashbacks to watching the TV series “Mad Men, which was set from 1960 to 1970, a time when the men brought home the bacon and bread and the women stayed at home. Did they even vote then? Of course. It’s a joke. But I know that at least some women into the 1980s could not take out loans for advanced schooling without the signatures of their husbands.

From what I could gather on the Internet, one of the first iterations — perhaps the first — social club for the wives of men in the oil industry was formed in 1951 in Alberta. Many more were formed around the world in the 1950s. As for the Denver organization he referred to, I could not ascertain its current iteration, although I found mention of the Ladies of the Petroleum Club forming in 1956.  I wonder whether my late aunt, who worked at Conoco in downtown Denver, was a member.

When speaking to the petroleum club, he said he acknowledged the “miracle” of fossil fuels.

“It’s true life without fossil fuels was cold, dark and short,” he told his Vail Symposium audience. “Fossil fuels were concentrated energy from the sun that were stored in the Earth like a battery,” and it’s the energy density that makes them so useful for gasoline and jet fuel and fuel for power plants.”

The solutions? There are many, not all of them easy. Nelson ran down the list at a high level but with enough detail to make it clear that he was spending his spare time studying energy long before he gave up his 10:20 p.m. slot

How about carbon sequestration? This is taking the carbon dioxide emissions from coal- or natural-gas burning plants underground. The process remains expensive and not very efficient, Nelson said. It requires a great deal of energy,in some cases, a third of the power generated at a plant .  At today’s prices, it would cost $3.65 trillion every year to sequester carbon and prevent the problem from getting worse.

“The upshot is that it’s really hard to put the genie back in the bottle.”

Although Nelson did not mention it, one of the seemingly most promising carbon sequestration sites in Colorado involves not fossil fuel combustion, but the exhaust from ethanol plants, which is nearly 100% C02.

Nelson also talked about geothermal energy, the work in Utah being done by Forge Energy and by Fervo Energy. “And by the way, Fervo is a company that energy secretary Chris Wright has invested money in,” said Nelson.

As for battery technology, he also pointed out that Wright – the former chief executive of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based energy services company, has also invested money in Natron Energy, the manufacturer of sodium-ion batteries. “They’re more stable (than lithium-ion batteries).” They are charged faster. They’re manufactured domestically in Michigan.”

Also on Nelson’s list: the work of Terra-Gen, a company in California working on renewable energy production in a private-public partnership with the Department of Defense. Still another company secured a $1.75 billion loan guarantee to build an enhanced compressed air storage facility, also near Edwards Air Force Base in California. They will put the compressed air into the ground in a cavern and then release it to generate power as needed, hours or days later.

Form Energy has a pilot project in a partnership with Xcel Energy at Pueblo. Its battery uses rust from iron to create electricity. The battery is then recharged by removing the oxidation. It can store energy from hours to days – and neither air nor iron are rare.

“There are lots of technologies for storage,” said Arent. “It’s not all about batteries, but batteries I’ll call the poster child these days, because of cost reductions and availability.”

Both Nelson and Arent spoke favorably about nuclear power. Renewables combined with nuclear power is “where we’re going to have to go,” said Nelson. “The nuclear landscape is also in transition,” said Arent.

Arent described a dozen or more new companies and some larger companies that have been putting forward designs for small modular reactors. “These reactors are effectively the civilian equivalent to the nuclear reactor on a submarine or an aircraft carrier, but they are very differently designed.”

The first one is expected to be built for regulatory evaluation at the Idaho National Lab in 2034. In Canada, the first has been projected for a 2030 completion.

Fusion nuclear energy? Tens of startups have been created to work on how to draw power of the stars. And they have garnered many tens of billions of dollars of venture capital money. Can this technology be proven commercially successful? “That’s TBD,” said Arent. Don’t expect a break-through soon, he advised, not even a pilot reactor until 2035 and a more mature technology  atmid-century.

Nuclear energy has a role in places that don’t have the renewable resources that the United States has. “It won’t be everywhere, but it may be in certain places around the world. ”Traditional  nuclear power plants continue to be built in South Korea, Russia and China, with 50 to 60 expected to come on line in the next 10 to 15 years.

Looking ahead to the next decade, Arent described a major body of work in what he called integrated systems.

“It’s not singular technologies,” he explained. “It’s going to be solar plus batteries. It’s going to be solar and batteries and maybe a wind turbine over here. Or it’s going to be solar, batteries and a diesel system itself, carbon capture and sequestration that’s actually integrated with oil and gas production facilities, a coal plant or a petroleum refinery. Or they may pull off CO2 and create carbon fiber from it and then use the oxygen to do something else. Or they might use it for enhanced oil recovery,” he said.

“So it’s really about more integrated systems, thinking about how do we take all these different pieces and extract the most value from them while also providing secure, reliable, resilient energy, not just power, but energy that’s really affordable.”

The actions of President Donald Trump and his administration were only mentioned once or twice, and then in questions from the audience. “What are three to five things we should be doing at the local or state level in the next few years?” asked one person.

Nelson urged reaching out to lawmakers to restore the ability to add new wind turbines to harvest electricity from off-shore wind.

Arent pointed out that most electric utilities are governed by state and local regulators.

“So I think engaging with state and local policy makers and your utilities to express interest in expanding your clean energy portfolio, whether or not that’s at your house or in community solar or with integrated systems like agrivoltaics, if you want to keep farming and things like that, is a really important element,” he said.

A few other odds and ends from their hour-plus session:

 

Recycling solar panels

Arent said a global effort has already begun to recycle photovoltaic panels. He suggested that solar panels today will be fully recycled, and that while panels today commonly last for 25 years, within the next five years panels will be produced that can be good for 50 years of use.

 

Harvesting star power?

What about harvesting solar energy from outer space? Very doable, said Arent, who shared that he wrote a paper in 1976, when he was still in high school, in which he mentioned this idea. “This is the idea of putting massive farms of solar panels in space, where it’s cold, where they’re actually more efficient, and then beaming that power down to earth, and then basically reconverting it into a macro, super grid, or multiple different macro grids.”

“It’s doable – although, of course, you really wouldn’t want to get fried by a solar beam. It’s technically doable. But a very expensive option relative to what we now know can be done on a terrestrial landscape.”

 

Tariffs and solar production

Arent said tariffs on imported photovoltaic panels would impact the commercial variability of both residential and utility-scale solar projects. However, the solar panel is a relatively small part of the overall project costs. “Solar panels are at 13 cents a watt, if they go up to 15 cents a watt, that’s probably manageable. But we would have to see on that front.”

 

Killing birds?

Don’t wind turbines kill birds? Nelson deflected the question. “The biggest mortality of birds is by house cats by an order of magnitude over what wind turbines do now. Those generally are smaller birds, not the big raptors. A lot of things were learned when they put in some of the early wind turbines at Altamont Pass in California. They just kind of threw them up in the ’70s and ‘80s and didn’t take into account migration patterns and the speed of the blades and the density of the blades and the turbines. We’ve gotten much better at identifying migration routes.”

The super grid

Nelson laid out a vison for what he called the Super Grid, installation of high-voltage power lines knitting the United States together somewhat similar to the way we are knitted together by our interstate and other U.S. highways. “These electrical lines would be underground, along highway and railroad rights of way. “We’re good at drilling things, so I think some of the techniques that we use for tunneling, for hydraulic fracturing, and horizontal drilling could be useful in putting the underground system in,” he said.

A shielded, underground grid would reduce wildfire risk and also be a national security advantage. But the political science of achieving this massive undertaking, equal to or greater than the U.S. space program, would be far more challenging than figuring out the physical science of global warming.

What can I do?

What can an individual do? “You can contribute by owning and engaging as a smart consumer,” said Arent. He described the automated home management that allows EVs to be charged when there’s excess power available. “There are things that you can do with thousands of customers together to create thousands of megawatts of capability that help the system be reliable and successful.”

 

Subsidies?

The history of energy subsidies goes back all the way to the1880s. Since then, almost all of the exploration and production for oil and gas wells is actually written off as tax credits because it’s done for research of production, said Arent.

Today, in addition to fossil fuels, hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies get dispersed to solar and wind, electric vehicles and batteries, carbon capture and storage, and hydrogen production, he said. “It’s a very complicated landscape.”

 

Concluding thoughts

Listening to experts, as opposed to advocates, you hear a somewhat nuanced view of the energy transition that Colorado is trying to engineer. We have had great success, yes, and in a relatively short time. But we still fall short – and all along we knew that it would get more difficult. And that’s just Colorado.

As for the global energy transition, that’s a much more difficult problem. In a lengthy essay in the March/April 2025 issue of Foreign Affairs called “The Troubled Energy Transition,” Daniel Yergin, Peter Orzag and Atul Arya lay out the case for rethinking how this energy transition will occur.

The authors of the 5,100-word essay have credentials. Yergin, an economic historian, wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Prize: The Quest for Oil, Money and Power” as well as “The Quest” and other books. Orzag was director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration and is now CEO of Lazard, the financial advisory firm. Arya is chief energy strategist at S&P Global.

The writers insist this energy transition will not be a simple matter of replacing coal plants with wind turbine and solar panels. It’s more complex. They cite past transitions to make their case.

We think of the use of coal being synonymous with the arrival of the industrial revolution, and in certain sectors it was. But coal did not overtake traditional biomass energy sources until the beginning of the 20^th century. As for oil, which was discovered in Western Pennsylvania in 1859, it did not become the world’s top energy source until the 1960s. Even so, the amount of coal continued to grow – and in 2024 it was three times what it had been in the 1960s.

They also point out that 80% of the world’s population lies in the developing world. And almost half of the population of the developing world – three billion people – annually uses less electrical per capita than the average American refrigerator.

As energy use grows, “carbonizing” will precede “decarbonizing,” they say. You can see the 5,100-word essay here if you have a Foreign Affairs subscription. You can access the essay through libraries, I presume. Or write me, and I will send you a PDF.

As for the Vail Symposium, you can watch it here.