WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Natural gas has been getting short shrift in the U.S. energy debate. It deserves better. Much better.

It has been battered by environmentalists who oppose exploration and the pipelines to get it to market. They are attempting to evict natural gas and force utilities into reliance on intermittent renewables.

But events in Europe may cause a rethink about natural gas, both as a transition fuel in the United States and a foreign-policy tool.

Even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, natural gas was in short supply in Europe after a summer of wind drought caused European utilities to scramble for natural gas – prices went up 400 percent. Russia added to the crisis by reducing volumes flowing through the Ukrainian system that serves much of Europe.

Fear of Russian weaponization of natural gas has been an ever-present reality. Now Europe trembles, especially Germany which has just closed its last three nuclear plants and has relied on renewables and natural gas from Russia.

In the United States, the danger is that natural gas may be pushed aside prematurely in favor of renewables, leaving the electric grid destabilized and vulnerable to severe weather. The grid is less stable today than it was 20 years ago, according to experts I speak to regularly. Environmental mandates are taking a toll, and natural gas is being pushed out before there are stable renewables and utility-scale storage.

A new assessment of natural gas is needed. Its value to the United States to counter Russia now and in the future isn’t in doubt. The United States is the world’s largest natural-gas producer, and liquefied natural gas is needed as a diplomatic tool.

Domestically, though, it needs a defined place in the electricity evolution. It is an option too valuable to be elbowed out by well-meaning but not well-informed arguments.

In electricity production, natural gas is the least polluting of the three fossil fuels. It emits half the carbon dioxide of coal and heavy oil used to make electricity. Also, it doesn’t have the other pollutants which make coal so devastating to the environment. Progress is being made countering methane leaks, a serious problem.

When burned in a combined-cycle plant, favored by utilities for more than just peaking, natural gas reaches an efficiency of around 64 percent. That is a remarkably high rate of fuel to electricity. Coal-fired plants have an efficiency of about 40 percent.

Back in the 1970s, a combination of price controls and regulation served to dry up the amount of natural gas coming to market. The newly formed Department of Energy added to the sense of an end by declaring that gas was “a depleted resource.” The conventional wisdom was that it was too precious for most uses and especially for making electricity.

In 1978, Congress passed the Power Plant and Industrial Fuel Use Act. It was a prohibiting measure and went after what Congress thought were wasteful uses of natural gas such as ornamental flames and pilot lights in gas stoves. And it prohibited the burning of natural gas to make electricity.

Known simply as the “Fuel Use Act,” it was draconian. There was even a debate about whether the Eternal Flame at Arlington National Cemetery would have to be extinguished.

In 1985, deregulation began to increase the natural gas supply and two years later, the Fuel Use Act was repealed.

But the big break, the great game-changer, was fracking -- first used in the late 1980s. It was developed by George Mitchell and his Mitchell Energy company with help from the DOE. Together with horizontal drilling, it would change everything quickly.

Natural gas became cheap and plentiful and the utilities, using turbines developed from aircraft jet engines, began to switch off coal and to question the cost of building nuclear plants. A new dawn had broken.

Now that happy day is in the past and utilities must make the case for gas turbine capacity to back up their alternative energy operations and as an efficient form of energy storage. Also, if hydrogen is to be the fuel of the future, it will need to use the natural-gas infrastructure.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is also a well-known international energy-sector expert and consultant. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island

Linda Gasparello

Co-host and Producer

"White House Chronicle" on PBS

*The Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, in Seabrook, N.H.*

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

If the Biden administration genuinely wanted to get serious about weaning the electric-power sector from fossil fuels, it would get serious about nuclear — not just patting it on the head, as it is doing with the government equivalent of “There, there, baby.”

Nuclear was an early victim of the culture wars that started in the late 1960s, and it remains so to this day.

It is incredible that a source of power, a cutting-edge technology, should have been sidelined for more than 50 years because of fear, suspicion, ignorance and politics.

In the late 1960s, nuclear power became the target of an environmental and political left lash-up. It became part of the environmentalist catechism that nuclear was an evil source of power and must be expunged from the national list of options. The political left didn’t so much as embrace environmentalism as environmentalism embraced the left.

Some environmentalists have had an epiphany, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, which was founded by Henry Kendall, an activist whom I knew well. We were friends who didn’t agree about nuclear. Now the Union of Concerned Scientists is pro-nuclear, but it was at the barricades against nuclear for decades.

It isn’t that the environmental movement doesn’t want to do the right thing. It does. But it has thought that it alone should decide what was right and good for the environment, and often it has been totally wrong.

The environmental movement turned the nation from nuclear to coal. In the 1970s and 1980s, environmental groups advocated for fluidized bed combustion coal plants. I remember them saying that coal eliminated the need for “dangerous nuclear.” I sat through innumerable meetings and had sparing friendships with such anti-nuclear activists as Ralph Nader and Amory Lovins.

All presidents have said they favor nuclear power, even Jimmy Carter, who was the most reluctant and did huge damage to the United States’ position as the world leader in nuclear energy and technology. Carter wouldn’t say he was opposed to nuclear, but he did talk about it as a last resort and stopped the plans to build a fast-breeder reactor. He also ended nuclear reprocessing, necessitating the disposal of whole nuclear cores, instead of capturing the mass of unburned fuel — thus creating a much larger waste disposal challenge, as well as the need to mine more uranium.

If you believe — and I do — what was said at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, now is the time to fix the electric-power industry. It can be fixed by building up nuclear capacity so that electricity can be the go-to, clean fuel of the future. It could replace fossil fuels in everything from cement making to steel production to heating buildings. That potential, that future, is awesome and possible.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm should ask her national laboratories to make recommendations on a nuclear-power future, not to the detriment of wind and solar power, but embracing them.

Wind power is valuable. But depending on it is a little like having a trick knee: You never know when it is going to go out on you.

Europe has just learned that lesson the hard way. It is in the grip of a major energy crisis with electricity prices quadrupling and natural gas prices headed into the stratosphere as winter approaches. One of the causes of this crisis is that wind speeds through the summer fell to their lowest recorded levels in 60 years, with a total wind drought in the normally gale-wracked North Sea.

We won’t get to a carbon-free future unless we have a robust, committed plan to deploy state-of-the-art nuclear plants across the country. We built them in the 1960s and into the 1970s – 100 of them.

Granholm needs to declare a purpose and to pick the proven winner. It is nuclear, and it has been gravely wounded in the culture wars. She needs to rescue it – with word and deed.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2