Source: Emily Parkhurst, TechFlash, April 3, 2012.
Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures commented at a Pacific Science Center breakfast about hydraulic fracturing (fracking), a technique becoming commonly used to extract natural gas.
Myhrvold said the energy industry needs an innovative miracle. “In some technologies, you never really break even,” he said. “One of those is natural gas.” He called fracking an energy miracle because it drops the price of energy significantly. But, he said, it won’t pay off and will instead pull the rug out from under other options, such as solar, which are better in the long run. “The technology miracle of fracking is going to ‘frack’ up alternative energy because it’s so cheap and available,” he said.