Many climate decisions ahead for EPA
January 25th, 2012 by Armond Cohen, Executive DirectorThis posting originally appeared in the National Journal’s Energy and Environment Expert Blog.
Whatever the symbolic importance of the Keystone XL decision, it is only one of several climate-related policy decisions facing the Administration this year – and arguably one of the less significant ones. The Environmental Impact Statement on the project produced by the U.S. Department of State estimates that stopping the pipeline would avoid between 3 and 21 MMT CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions annually. While environmental commenters have suggested that this estimate may understate these benefits, they haven’t yet provided alternatives.
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Zero Emissions from Natural Gas?
January 17th, 2012 by Armond Cohen, Executive DirectorThis posting originally appeared in the National Journal’s Energy and Environment Expert Blog.
With the global explosion of unconventional gas production, reports of the death of the fossil fuel economy are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated. Gas may not stay at its current extraordinarily low price, but the market landscape seems to be altered for quite some time.
The explosion of low-cost shale gas reserves is a two-edged climate sword. Generating electricity with gas is 30 to 50 percent less carbon-intensive than coal when leaks and releases of methane, the main component of natural gas, are accounted for. (For other uses like vehicle fuel, we haven’t seen any evidence that gas is better than other fossil fuels, and if vehicles leak even a small amount, natural gas could be worse than gasoline). But even for electricity, gas is still a high-carbon fuel: replacing all coal-fired generation with gas would get us only part of the way to the 80 percent CO2 reduction needed by mid-century. Moreover, new gas plants are more likely to displace new zero-carbon generation sources than to displace existing cheap coal plants. Carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere stays there, causing warming, for many centuries. By some estimates, the amount of CO2 already emitted has committed the world to warming in excess of 2 degrees Celsius, which is well outside human experience; to hold the increase to 3-4 degrees might well require zeroing out carbon emissions by mid-century.
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Making Sense of Gas vs. Coal and Climate: A Look at the Recent Paper by Tom Wigley
September 14th, 2011 by David McCabe, Atmospheric Scientist
The last few months have seen a flurry of academic papers investigating whether using natural gas for power generation creates more global warming than using coal for power generation. A few have reached the startling conclusion that using gas for power is just as bad, or worse, than coal. The most recent of these is by Tom Wigley, a global leader in climate science, and therefore bears special examination. As we’ll argue below, natural gas is no climate panacea, especially over the time scales that Wigley examines. We need zero-carbon energy. But it is also important to consider how we get to that future, and natural gas – coupled with carbon capture and storage and tight controls on methane leaks – will likely have a big role to play there in the next few decades. It is critical that we accurately account for the climate impacts of gas, and we don’t agree with Wigley’s approach in two key areas.
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EPA’s New Rules Pave Way for Geologic Sequestration of CO2
November 22nd, 2010 by Bruce Hill, Ph.D. Senior Scientist / Geologist
It may sound like science fiction, but what if we could “scrub” all the carbon dioxide emitted from coal-fired power plants and inject it deep into the Earth, permanently locking it up in rocks? Well, this is fact, not fiction, and it’s called carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). And it turns out that the petroleum industry has already been successfully injecting carbon dioxide deep into the Earth for decades. In the sequestration part of the story, CO2 is injected into a porous rock, and locked deep in the Earth under an impermeable bedrock seal the same way fossil fuels have been for tens to hundreds of millions of years. In other words, we’re essentially putting the carbon back where it came from.
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