A.) A short Q&A video with Jonathan
This year’s Sustainable Gas Research Annual Lecture was given by Professor Jonathan Stern, Natural Gas Research at Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
We caught up with Jonathan before the talk to ask him about his research work.
Here’s the short Q&A interview on YouTube.
We asked Jonathan two questions:
As an expert in the world of gas markets, what do you think the role of the gas will be in the future? Can gas help us to decarbonise?
“Gas can help us decarbonise in the future but its not really easy to generalise across a lot of different countries and regions. In some countries gas will have a big role and in other countries it will not. It depends on how far you look ahead particularly the next 10 to 20 years.”
Could you describe very briefly what you mean by the key challenges for gas (unburnable and unaffordable) that you mention in your talk?
“By unburnable, I mean the challenge of phasing out the carbon element of gas in countries where targets are very important which is European and Some US states, and also in Japan and Australia.
But in the rest of the world, the more major challenge to gas is that people will not be able to afford it. In other words, it will be too expensive in relation to either the absolute level of income or because other fuels like coal or renewables will be cheaper. This is what we see in much of the developing world.”
If you would like to download the report, please visit the OIES website.
B.) A summary blog post: “A future of gas”
Sandro Luh, a research student at the Institute, has also written a short blog post for Energy Futures Lab.
The blog post summarises Jonathan’s talk and provides some of the key take-home messages.
You can read the article on Energy Futures Lab’s blog.
