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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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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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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