Coal today accounts for half of US energy production. However, the NERC 2011 Long-Term Reliability Assessment, released in November, identified numerous threats to the reliability of the US electric system: resource adequacy/reserve margins, environmental regulations, gas-electric interdependency, variable generation, demand-side management and transmission. Potential regulations have not yet been finalized and will be released this month, so uncertainty surrounds the actual impact these may have on the energy future. As a result, the capacity and cost of energy sources will change in the coming decades. IEA predicts that carbon capture and sequestration will begin to play a stronger role in the energy mix, particularly enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which pumps CO2 into oil fields to push out harder to reach oil.

[sc name=”Standard” ]