Memo To EPA: Stay Strong On Oil and Gas Standards
April 11th, 2012 by David McCabe, Atmospheric Scientist, and Ann Weeks, Senior Counsel and Legal Director
Next week, EPA will issue final New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for conventional air emissions from the oil and natural gas industry. The standards must require the capture of hundreds of thousands of tons of smog-forming emissions emitted annually by this industry, along with millions of tons of methane.
Methane – the primary component of natural gas – is both a valuable fuel and a potent pollutant, 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change over a 100-year period. The methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas operations warm global climate as much as 16% of all the CO2 from U.S. coal-fired power plants. With a strong rule, those emissions will be cut by a quarter, so EPA clearly has an excellent opportunity to begin to address this dangerous climate pollutant.
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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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Methane from Oil and Gas: Low-hanging Fruit that EPA Must Pick
December 5th, 2011 by David McCabe, Atmospheric ScientistNovember 30th was the last day for public comments on EPA’s proposal to significantly update air emissions limits for most of the oil and natural gas industry. The proposal makes much-needed revisions to existing requirements, which in some cases are over 25 years old, and in expanding the coverage of these rules, recognizes the significant changes and expansion in the industry that has taken place since the rules were issued. The proposed rules make real progress in advancing cleanup for some of the biggest sources of pollution from the industry, but they do not go anywhere near far enough to curb the wholesale dumping of methane and other pollutants into the air.
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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 ScientistThe 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 Fiddles While Forests Burn
May 16th, 2011 by Ann Weeks, Senior Counsel and Legal DirectorEPA is fiddling while forests burn when it proposes to do nothing for the next three years to regulate “biogenic CO2” – including the CO2 emissions produced by burning forest biomass. Instead, it will convene a panel of experts to review whether or not there are carbon benefits to be gained from using wood and other biofuels for energy production. This decision is taken in response to complaints received from the National Alliance of Forest Owners (“NAFO”), and from its Senate and House champions, after intense lobbying.
NAFO claims that forest biomass is “carbon neutral:” the amount of CO2 emitted when forest biomass is burned is equal to the amount of CO2 taken up, or ‘sequestered’ by the biomass during its growth. Forest biomass sounds so harmless – humans have burned wood for centuries.
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Let’s Fix Dangerous, Climate-Warming Methane Leaks From All Fossil Fuels: Coal, Oil, and Natural Gas
April 13th, 2011 by David McCabe, Atmospheric ScientistA paper by Robert Howarth and co-workers comparing the climate impacts of natural gas to coal has made a huge splash this week, by arguing that natural gas may have a bigger climate footprint than coal for generating power—a finding that flies in the face of conventional wisdom that natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Howarth argues that it’s mainly leaks and venting of methane, the main component of natural gas, that makes gas impacts so high.
We’re very concerned about methane leaks from all fossil fuel extraction, especially natural gas. But this paper hasn’t convinced us that natural gas-fired power is worse than coal, for reasons discussed below.
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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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A Cleantech Revolution in Four Easy Steps
November 18th, 2010 by Armond Cohen, Executive DirectorA recent National Academy of Sciences report [PDF] notes that CO2 lasts thousands of years in the atmosphere, so if we really want to limit the damage from climate change, we’ll need to drop the world’s energy system to near-zero emissions by 2050. Yet the U.N.’s climate chief, Cristina Figueres, recently admitted: “I do not believe we will ever have a final agreement on climate change, certainly not in my lifetime.”
Is it time to give up? No, but a better strategy might help.
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Can we control black carbon in the Arctic by reducing agricultural fires?
November 9th, 2010 by David McCabe, Atmospheric Scientist
David McCabe
One long day down, and one to go at a global meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, where climate scientists, fire experts, farmers, regulators and NGOs have been discussing the role of springtime fires on climate change in the Arctic and what must be done to reduce the occurrence of set fires in northern latitudes. The Arctic is warming at an alarming rate, threatening not just regional ecosystems but coastal areas around the world that are vulnerable to sea level rise. Carbon dioxide is the main pollutant responsible for this warming, but recent research shows that black carbon, or soot, from incomplete combustion may also be responsible for much of the Arctic’s warming. Samples from snow indicate that most of the black carbon in Arctic snow comes from burning biomass, and much of that is from burning crops and grasslands in northern Eurasia.
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