Arctic drilling Must Protect the Climate
April 30th, 2012 by Jonathan Banks, Senior Climate Policy Advisor, and Conrad Schneider, Advocacy DirectorThis posting originally appeared in the National Journal’s Energy and Environment Experts blog.
Two years ago the world turned its attention to the Gulf of Mexico and the tragedy that was unfolding there, with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. This disaster brought a reinvigorated focus to the safety of offshore drilling, but the term safety must now be understood to not just cover spills and leaks, but also the impacts that drilling has on the climate, especially when done in the fragile environment of the Arctic.
It is well understood that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion in our cars and power plants are responsible for the majority of earth’s global warming. Less appreciated, though, is that methane emissions account for nearly half as much of the warming we are currently experiencing as carbon dioxide. The oil and natural gas industries are the largest source of methane emissions from the US. Oil and gas extraction can also be significant sources of black carbon, another potent climate pollutant.
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New Rules for Gas: Good Policy, Delayed
April 24th, 2012 by Darin Schroeder, Legal Fellow, Ann Weeks, Senior Counsel and Legal Director, and David McCabe, Atmospheric ScientistThis posting originally appeared in the National Journal’s Energy and Environment Expert Blog.
Last week, EPA announced New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for the oil and natural gas industry. These new rules are an important and long-awaited step towards better control of the air pollution emitted by this rapidly expanding sector.
Notably, the standards include the first federal air pollution regulations for hydraulically fractured (fracked) natural gas wells. That, plus new regulation of other equipment in this industry, represents significant progress in combating air pollution, especially as forecasts project increasing reliance on natural gas for generating electricity. Without these rules, air pollution from new gas wells and equipment would continue to increase; now the industry must begin to clean up nationwide. Once the rule finally goes into full effect, VOC emissions, a precursor of ground-level smog, will be reduced by hundreds of thousands of tons per year; toxic chemicals like benzene will be reduced by 12,000 – 20,000 tons per year. And, as a co-benefit of the pollution control measures needed to achieve the new standards, emissions of methane will be reduced by 1.0 – 1.7 million tons a year. This rule therefore eventually will provide significant air quality and climate benefits.
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At Last: A First Step on GHGs
April 5th, 2012 by Ann Weeks, Senior Counsel and Legal DirectorThis posting originally appeared in the National Journal’s Energy and Environment Expert Blog.
Last week, the Administration took a bold step forward to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In a long-anticipated action, EPA proposed new source performance standards (NSPS) for fossil-fueled power plants that would limit emissions from new plants to a rate of 1,000 lbs. of CO2 per megawatt-hour, averaged annually. This level is comparable to the annual average emissions rate of the existing fleet of U.S. natural gas power plants. The rule levels the playing field between coal and gas on greenhouse gas emissions, so new coal and gas plants will compete on price. When finalized, the rule will provide a much-needed and long-overdue step on the path towards full decarbonization of all domestic coal and gas power plants.
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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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Underground Coal Gasification – Coming Soon to Wyoming?
November 2nd, 2011 by Mike Fowler, Director, Advanced Technology
After years of talk, things are starting to get real: developers are looking at pioneering underground coal gasification (“UCG”) projects in Wyoming. Some may see these projects as first steps to finally producing truly clean energy from coal, while others may perceive them as unnecessary, risky experiments. What’s the truth? Let’s explore the issues.
First, some unpleasant facts. Fossil fuel use has increased dramatically across the globe (China’s coal power plant fleet, most of it built in the last 10 years, is now more than twice the size of ours in the US) and appears likely to continue to mushroom (in South Asia alone there are 600 million people – roughly twice the population of the US – waiting for access to electricity). Even in the center of Europe, Germany, in its rush to move away from nuclear power, is considering building more coal power instead. And in the US, where coal usage has declined slightly, another plain fossil fuel – natural gas – has taken up the slack, with limited greenhouse gas advantages.
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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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