This New York Times article “After the Boom in Natural Gas” puts lots of factual flesh on the natural gas boom.  Investors have lost their shirts in a classic over investment bubble that has created an excess supply and driven costs way below the cost of production for many wells.  At some not too distant point in the future, supply will naturally fall and prices will rise, re affirming the historic volatility in natural gas prices.  Opinion varies, but to break even with production costs, the price of fracked natural gas has to be $6 to $8/MMBtu, which is actually around the long term average price for natural gas.  LNG around the world is currently around $13 MMBtu.  

Its amazing how eager promoters push the possibility of cheap natural gas forever in the face of reality.  These are probably the same promoters that created the investment bubble that has fleeced natural gas drilling investors.

Unfortunately as long as there is an expectation that Natural gas will stay at $2.50/MMBtu, investments in any other energy sources are slowing  given the uncertainty of when prices will inevitably rise.
By Edmund Kelly

Though not solely focused on a technology led energy policy, a new book by Dieter Helm, a respected professor of economics at Oxford University does embrace its tenets as part of a broader energy policy.

The book is The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong--and How to Fix It.

The author is committed to the urgent need to reduce CO2 but makes a damming case against  the failure of current alternative energy technologies and the policies that promote them. 

He favors a road-map that promotes a short term emphasis on natural gas to replace the current worldwide race for coal, along with R&D to develop a wide range of potentially better technologies for the future.  He supports dropping all subsidies for energy deployment, both fossil and alternative energy and imposing a small but increasing carbon tax that includes border taxation to eliminate leakage.  The initial tax level would be sufficient to favor natural gas over coal, and as carbon free energy alternatives become economically viable, the tax could be gradually raised to promote their acceptance.

For StratoSolar, with initially cost competitive electricity, policies like this would make the price of StratoSolar electricity lower than fossil alternatives, accelerate the growth of installed GWp of capacity and further reduce costs.  Relatively small carbon taxes would raise the price of fossil fuels and accelerate the point where StratoSolar based synthetic liquid fuels could be lower price.  
By Edmund Kelly