Forget oil, shale gas, tar sands and gas hydrates.

The future will always be clean, renewable technology.  There is no way around it, because all fossil fuels are handicapped by air, soil and water pollution...and the ever-escalating cost to extract it.  The faster you deplete the easily-accessible commodities, the more you need to invest into finding and extracting the less-accessible stuff, and so on.  It's a vicious cycle.

But, the future might not include clean, renewable technologies such as hydroelectric, nuclear fission (traditional nuclear power plants that generate steam), solar, wave generation, or wind.  Instead, it just might be more exotic renewable technologies such as...

Nuclear Fusion.

You know, the stuff that the Sun is made up of.

In fact, an internationally-backed test fusion reactor is currently under construction in France: ITER.  And oh by the way, Lockheed Martin is aiming for a prototype fusion reactor by 2017.

Why fusion?  Well, aside from it being clean, it's not reliant on the fickleness of Mother Nature, and it'll set the world on an incredible electric technology race, enabling future colonies to establish themselves on other planets and moons by powering the engines that take them there, and by powering the colonies.

The American Security Project even has a white paper for a 10-year plan towards energy security via nuclear fusion reactors.  Former Republican governor and EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman is on their board, by the way, so this isn't some political issue...unless you make it political.

By the time gas hydrates are commercially viable, fusion may be on its heels.