The Future of Energy

The Daily Reckoning Presents

Byron King

An Interview with Byron King

Dan Rodricks, Host, Midday: I'm Dan Rodricks, and you're listening to a special edition of Midday we call Power Ahead, The Energy Future. We finish our discussion about energy with a look into the coming decades, the innovations ahead, and the power sources that are probably going to be with us for a while. Our guests include Byron King, resident energy expert with Baltimore-based Agora Financial. He's the editor of Outstanding Investments and Energy & Scarcity Investor. Byron King is a Harvard-trained geologist, a self-described old rock hound who keeps an eye on energy, mining, and precious metals for his readers. Byron King, thank you for joining us on Midday at WYPR in Baltimore.

Byron King, Agora Financial: It is a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

Rodricks: Byron King, please draw a picture of the year 2031 in terms of energy. What does the world look like? What sort of power-related technologies will be in wide use that are not in wide use now? Could you draw that picture for us?

King: Well, it's a great question because twenty years is a long time. Twenty years ago, people didn't know what cell phones were. Now they're ubiquitous around the world. Twenty years from now, it's going to look a lot the same, and there's going to be some things that are different. Much of the world is powered by coal today. Much of the world will still be powered by coal in future years. We might burn it differently or what have you, but when people build coal plants, they're built for 50 years, and the Chinese have been building hundreds of them, so they're not going to go away. Natural gas is going to take a much bigger share.

We're starting to figure out how much more natural gas there is out there than people estimated. An absolute revolution in technology in the past few years has been in this shale gas development... Nuclear has taken it on the chin in the last month or two, but nuclear isn't going anywhere.

I think the long-term view is that we've had problems with the [nuclear] technology from the '50s, '60s, and '70s. There's different technology today, and I think it's going to be around. And don't count out oil. There is a lot of oil out there. There is a lot of oil yet to be found. And there's a lot of oil that's going to stay in the system for many decades to come. And when you look at it in the year 2031, I think that you'll see perhaps up to 10% of the world running on what we consider alternative energy, alternative fuels, things like that. But I think that the main base of energy and of power to run things is going to be what we have today, natural gas, oil, and coal, with nuclear.


And lots and lots and lots of different technology in how it's produced, how it's distributed, how people use it, efficiency, conservation, things like that.

Read more...