Fighting the Climate Crisis with Oil, Gas, and Coal Assets

One of the objections to a green energy policy are the potential jobs lost in the oil, gas, and coal industries. It doesn’t suffice to point out that there will be new jobs created installing solar roofs or building electric cars, because those tend to be different people in different geographies. One suggestion is to simply pay subsidies to affected regions. But it may be possible to do a lot better than that by thinking about creative uses of oil, gas and coal assets in fighting the climate crisis.

What are some things that could be done? Over at the USV blog we have a post up on the potential for geothermal energy. That would require a lot of drilling. While likely not in the same region and so requiring travel it would still be similar jobs for which people are already qualified. Another potential use case of existing assets and skills is the sequestration of CO2 which will become necessary if we start to capture a lot of it. That too could happen underground and require drilling and/or repurposing of existing wells (if they have run dry). I don’t have any immediate ideas for what to do with underground coal mines, but some open pit mines could be potentially be converted into solar power installations. Finally, offshore drilling rigs could be used to create artificial upwellings by pumping up deeper ocean water. This could help make the ocean more productive and sequester more carbon.

How does one get the industry to explore such options? Fundamentally there are two different tools: price changes and command & control mechanisms. Prices are impacted by policies such as clean energy subsidies and carbon taxes. There is a new set of arguments against a carbon tax essentially saying that they are not needed because we can just issue more money and avoid an unnecessary political fight, but that completely misses its crucial impact on relative prices. I also strongly believe that we shouldn’t rule out command & control mechanisms entirely. During World War II the US administration directly ordered a lot of productive capacity to make weapons instead of consumer goods. We need an activation on a similar scale and with similar speed, so should consider this route seriously.