Houston of the future: It’s here, andit’s taking off
When we next host the Super Bowl, a different kind of ‘energy’ will drive us
IF you last came to Houston for the 2004 Super Bowl, you’ve probably noticed big changes in our city. Back then, we were still recovering from the implosion of our biggest employer, Enron, and we were still beholden to fluctuations in oil prices. Wewere counting the days until we would run out of natural gas and begin importing it like oil.
Today, oil prices are half of what they were two years ago, and while some of our biggest oil companies have cut thousands of workers, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in October the Houston area added more than 13,000 jobs compared with a year earlier. The biggest gains were in health care and education.
Sure, job growth remains far short of where it was in 2014, when oil prices were $100 a barrel, but there’s something different about this bust: This time, we did it to ourselves. The plunge in oil and gas prices wasn’t brought on by the Saudis or the Russians, or by a recession or sudden slackening of global demand. Thanks to a local oilman named George Mitchell, Houston companies led the charge in tapping billions of barrels in reserves trapped in shale formations — something that previously wasn’t feasible. Suddenly, we had a 100-year supply of natural gas and so much oil that we began exporting it for the first time in four decades.
So what will we do for an encore?
Well, the next time you’re here for the Big Game, you’re likely to see even bigger changes. Houston will still be the world’s energy capital, but what we think of as “energy” could be much different. The world will use fewer fossil fuels. Our electricity will be generated almost entirely by natural gas, wind and solar. Nuclear power will make a resurgence, but the reactors will be smaller, and perhaps even mobile. Coal largely will have gone the way of steam engines and whale oil.
Crude oil, while still in use, will be in much less demand. Already, we see the seeds of this transition as automakers like General Motors invest in ride-sharing companies like Lyft. Once we get comfortable with ordering cars on demand, fewer people will own vehicles themselves. After all, who wants to buy a depreciating asset when you can use someone else’s?
These vehicles will have fewer human drivers. Rather than hiring legions of people with their own cars, ride-
sharing companies will own or lease fleets of vehicles themselves. Because they will have large numbers of cars making short trips and returning to the same point when not in use, these fleet operators will convert to electric vehicles, which will be cheaper to operate and require less maintenance.
The most innovative of today’s car dealers will catch this wave and become localized car leasers and ride-sharing dispatchers.
Houston probably won’t be making electric cars, but it will pay an important role in this transition. Just like New York thinks about new ways for selling money, and San Francisco thinks about new ways to get puppy videos on your cell phone, Houston thinks about the stuff that makes things go. Even now, our startups are working on new ideas for energy development and some of our largest oil companies are also investing in technology such as wind, solar power and liquefied natural gas.
Wehave a long history of this sort of innovation and reinvention. Bob McNair, the owner of our NFL franchise, the Texans, made his money in cogeneration, becoming one of the largest companies building and operating on-site power plants for factories and other businesses. McNair built his business from the ashes of failure, and that spirit of reinvention will continue to define Houston in the future. Engineers laid off from oil companies, as they have before, will strike out on their own and contribute to the collective brain trust, keeping Houston on the cutting edge of innovation.
After years of hand-writing over the Astrodome — now defined, believe it or not, as an “antiquity” — the city will turn the Eighth Wonder of the World into a giant energy coop, offering shared space to startups designing and testing an array of new energy and environmental projects from ion drives to large-scale battery storage. Currently, county officials want to make the Dome a glorified parking garage, but I’m hoping they’ll like this idea of mine better and run with it. By the time you come back, the Dome, which symbolized the futur- istic notions of Space City five decades ago, could be a testbed for the revolutionary energy technologies of tomorrow.
But the Houston you return to won’t be just about energy. Medical advances made here will be exported to the rest of the country and the world. Cancer treatments now in clinical trials will extend the lives of millions of people, and perhaps even offer the chance for a cure.
With the federal government still struggling under the massive deficits left by the Trump administration, NASA’s budget will dwindle. But the expertise that flows out of its ranks will fuel a new wave of private space exploration. Regular orbital flights may be taking off from Brownsville, but Houston will remain Mission Control. Space City will live on, albeit with an increasingly entrepreneurial bent.
Of course, some things won’t change. Our summers will still be steaming blankets of oppressive humidity with mosquitoes the size of military drones, but that won’t matter to you football fans who come here in the winter. The Houston you’ll see in the future will be different, but it will be driven by the same sense of reinvention and innovation that drives us today.