Decarbonization: The Nuclear Option
February 14th, 2012 by Mike Fowler, Energy Technology Consultant, and Armond Cohen, Executive DirectorThis posting originally appeared in the National Journal’s Energy & Environment Experts blog.
Three years ago, MIT’s Richard Lester published a simple analysis of what would be required to meet President Obama’s 83%-by-2050 greenhouse gas emission reduction target. The results were stark: Even if energy efficiency were to improve at rates 50% better than historical averages, and biofuels were able to meaningfully reduce transportation emissions in the near term (a proposition with which we disagree), meeting Obama’s goal would require retrofitting every existing coal plant in the country with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), building twice again that much fossil capacity with CCS, building close to 3,000 wind farms the size of Massachusetts’ Cape Wind, and building nearly 4,000 solar farms the size of California’s Ivanpah. And, having done all that, increasing the amount of nuclear power we generate by a factor of five.
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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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Methane from Oil and Gas: Low-hanging Fruit that EPA Must Pick
December 5th, 2011 by David McCabe, Atmospheric Scientist
November 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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Ice and Oil; Oil and Ice
October 17th, 2011 by Ellen Baum, Senior ScientistThis posting originally appeared in the National Journal’s Energy and Environment Expert Blog.
Last month, U.S. scientists confirmed that the Arctic has lost the second highest annual amount of ice since monitoring began. Of the remaining ice, much more is thinner, single-year ice resulting from melting and refreezing during the year. Older, thicker multi-year ice has declined by 60% over the past 30 years.
If Arctic summer sea ice continues to melt at its current rate, we will be presented with significant opportunities to harvest more oil and gas from new sources in the Arctic. Indeed, 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil might be under Arctic ice, as might 30% of undiscovered natural gas. So, Arctic nations are lining up to get at those reserves. So the formula looks simple: less ice = more oil and more gas. And, as those resources are harvested and consumed, we expect the resulting rise in CO2, methane and other climate-forcing emissions will mean even less sea ice.
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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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Natural Gas: Palliative, Not a Cure
April 29th, 2011 by Armond Cohen, Executive DirectorPlentiful and cheap natural gas is the Prozac of American energy policy. It may take the edge off of some of our worst symptoms in the near term. But it can also dull us to solving key long term and chronic problems, especially regarding climate change. And, as with any medication, there can also be some negative side-effects – some clearly remediable (methane leaks), and some (water and air contamination impacts from fracturing – or “fracking” – of shale to yield gas) still to be managed with sufficient rigor and transparency.
On the positive side, there is little doubt that cheap natural gas can help provide some environmental relief in the short term by lowering the cost of displacing older coal-fired electric generation. Natural gas power plants emit less than half of the CO2 per kilowatt-hour as do those powered by coal; the emissions reduction gains are even greater for conventional pollutants like smog and soot and for air toxics like mercury. True, upstream leaks of methane (a far more potent global warmer than CO2) are a source of greenhouse gas pollution that cuts into the climate advantages of burning natural gas. But these leaks can be virtually eliminated, and the gas industry needs to focus a lot more on fixing them, and less on insisting that we should only consider climate impacts over a full century (which de-emphasizes the importance of the methane leaks, relative to the CO2 advantages of gas over coal, because CO2 lasts longer in the atmosphere).
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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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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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Minding Methane
September 9th, 2010 by Armond Cohen, Executive DirectorTwo major pieces of unfinished business on the global atmospheric pollution agenda could be addressed through a single strategy: cut methane emissions. In an era where so many climate initiatives face fierce opposition, methane mitigation is low-hanging fruit.
The first issue is ground-level ozone. As a 2008 report by the UK Royal Society concluded,
In large areas of the industrialised and developing world, ground level O3 is one of the most pervasive of the global air pollutants, with impacts on human health, food production and the environment even at current ambient concentrations of 35-40 parts per billion. . . . Existing emission controls are insufficient to reduce current background O3 concentrations to levels acceptable for human health and environmental protection . . . [A new framework must] reduce both background and peak O3, at global, regional and national scales.
