Opinion: No avoiding fossil fuels' continued use

Set aside the rhetoric on global warming, we are going to have to open the throttle on oil, natural gas and coal production to power our economic recovery. Together they account for 80% of America’s energy supplies.

To get our economy back on track, the overriding national interest lies in maintaining full production of fossil fuels. As a major energy producer, New Mexico is better positioned than most states to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 crisis and the most catastrophic economic collapse since the Great Depression.

Will energy demand return to pre-pandemic levels? No one knows. In the years ahead, this will pay rich dividends in jobs creation and revenue for state and local governments.

And it couldn’t come at a more opportune time, given the need to return to economic normalcy.

Oil and gas are our energy mainstays. Even coal — which has declined from 54% of the nation’s electricity-generating capacity at its peak in 2005 to 20% today and is expected to bottom out at 11% within a few years — will be needed as a source of baseload electricity, along with nuclear power.

Those who regard coal as a relic of the past and assume that renewables have overtaken coal are wrong. All renewables combined account for 20% of the energy mix, but most of that (40%) is in the form of hydroelectric power.

Solar and wind power combined supply around 10% of the nation’s electricity, less than half as much as coal, and are intermittent, making them unreliable on days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

We have vast quantities of coal in this country. This gives us energy security and substantial revenue from coal exports. Though exports dropped 20% from 2018, the United States sold 93 million metric tons of coal last year to foreign countries, led by India, Germany and Japan. Asia accounts for more than two-thirds of the world’s coal consumption. Altogether, there are more than 2,000 coal plants either being built, planned or proposed worldwide — and a large share are in Asia.

A case in point is Japan, which began building more coal plants following the loss of nuclear power due to the Fukushima accident. U.S. energy exports have been an astronomical success. Last year they rose to a record high of 23.6 quadrillion Btus, and for the first time in nearly 70 years, energy exports exceeded energy imports. The reason: a decrease in net imports of crude oil.

Also, thanks to the shale revolution, there’s been a dramatic rise in the export of natural gas, both by pipeline to Mexico and in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to buyers worldwide. Last year natural gas exports rose 29% compared to 2018, to a record 4.7 quads, or nearly 12.8 billion cubic feet per day.

Currently, we’re seeing delays in the construction of new LNG terminals on the Gulf Coast due to the economic paralysis. But foreign demand for U.S. supplies of LNG is expected to bounce back in time and grow for decades to come. In fact, the U.S. is expected to become the world’s leading exporter of natural gas within a few years, eclipsing Australia and Qatar.

But the inconvenient truth is that the top buyer of U.S. natural gas is China. And while I don’t particularly like sending a lot of LNG to a country with a deplorable record on everything from human rights to intellectual theft, trade matters. Both countries benefit from it.

China is using the natural gas for electricity production as a way to reduce air pollution in its cities and mitigate carbon emissions.

There is no avoiding the fact that fossil fuels will continue to be used worldwide. Renewables alone won’t meet energy requirements.

Barring an unexpected long-term economic decline, it’s all but certain that world demand for fossil fuels will remain strong and profitable, and that’s especially good news for the United States, since it will provide a huge market for exports well into the future.

Jim Constantopoulos is a geology professor at Eastern New Mexico University. Contact him at:

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