It’s pretty depressing to learn that natural gas is actually doing more to cause climate change than burning coal.
The problem, the studies suggest, is that planet-warming methane, the chief component of natural gas, is escaping into the atmosphere in far larger quantities than previously thought, with as much as 7.9 percent of it puffing out from shale gas wells, intentionally vented or flared, or seeping from loose pipe fittings along gas distribution lines. This offsets natural gas’s most important advantage as an energy source: it burns cleaner than other fossil fuels and releases lower carbon dioxide emissions.
We can’t get a break with our energy consumption. First the spill in the Gulf, then the nuclear reactor in Japan, and now this news that methane leakage is obliterating the clean-burning advantage of natural gas. It’s not a hopeful future that I’m seeing.
I wonder what are our odds are of avoiding a chaotic (as in government breaks down), violent, high mortality future.
And the US government continues to act in the opposite direction, taking away the EPA.
I want to read the actual study itself, and see what the peer-review process says before bring down the hammer on the entire industry. The critics’ claims don’t sound far-fetched. However, what does worry me about natural gas through this method is the harm it does to the environment. That alone should make us wary.
This does suck, though. Nuclear will never get the time of day because of Japan, and there’s no other source out there (yet) to avert climate disaster.
Good thing we’ve abandoned investment in research into solar and into nuclear fusion, eh?
There is no “the solution”.
Any solution has to match the qualities of the source with the qualities required by the demand.
It’s not like you are going to shut off fossil fuels and nuclear and flip the switch on solar and wind and biomass.
T. Boone Pickens wowed folks with his energy independence plan, which depended on a resource that he owns a lot of–natural gas. (That was Enron’s core business at the beginning too.) Natural gas is an improvement over burning gasoline for large vehicles like buses. And moving folks from cars to buses can improve that.
But natural gas is being widely used to fire electric generating plants, a use that in a lot of areas can be quickly replaced with wind energy, given the permitting and financing capabilities. Kossack Jerome a Paris is the go-to guy on what’s involved in this financing. This could be being deployed much more rapidly in the US than it is–but there are a lot of Americans now who have money and lack imagination. Substantial replacement of natural gas in electric generation could offset the need for more rapid development of natural gas resources for transportation.
Nuclear is in a strange situation. The biggest thing that could improve safety in nuclear plants is to deploy the latest technology instead of keeping 40-year-old plants online forever. Nuclear is best suited to high energy requirements at single sources, such as for major high-temperature manufacturing. And in smaller plants, for high-tonnage ocean transportation. Any strategy should make it a better business decision, for example, for Duke-Progress Energy to deploy a fourth-generation reactor at its Sherron Harris plant near Raleigh, replacing and extending the capacity of the current reactor and canceling the movement of the “good” Three Mile Island reactor to North Carolina.
Coal is still used some for urban heating but mostly for firing electric generation plants. And the electric utility industry has already floated the idea of using a renewable fuel called wood waste. So which is worse burning coal or burning wood. In some areas, both come from the same mountains. And the administration seems to be looking at coal as a major US export, just as Qatar exports natural gas to the US.
The biggest issue is to stop subsidizing fossil fuels through tax credits and preferential treatment.
We have known about the need for a different energy future since Jimmy Carter was President. We even had a strategy then. Technology paid for by DOE research on a large-scale wind turbine in Boone NC (dismantled by the Reagan administration) evolved into the technology that European countries and China are selling back to us for the new wind farms that are being developed in the US.
Dealing with the energy and greenhouse gas future is not a matter of technology, it is a matter of political will. And no nation really has that political will yet, so obsessed with government finances are they. And so captured in one way or another by fossil fuels (global militaries especially).
Actually, militaries (in particular the US military) are on the forefront of alternative energy research and advocacy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/science/earth/05fossil.html
Not so much that it’s become a crash-program priority for any nation yet. The political will is not there yet, although the interest is.
Like everything these days, the science will get most certainly get swamped by the tsunami of politics and greed. It is telling that people like Mr. Tucker, who certainly wants the oil and gas industry to reap the maximum benefit of energy policy at the least cost to the producers, do not attack the merits of the study at all. He flings ad hominem shit in the general direction of the study’s author and makes the usual implication that science “has an agenda”. That is supposed to magically invalidate the preliminary findings and render any further consideration of them simply a liberal, tree-hugger circle jerk.
I have zero confidence that anyone in the political arena will go to bat for science here. We will simply dance around it, making hyperbolic assertions which have no basis in fact, and proceed down the merry path of enriching those who don’t give a rat’s ass about anything but making money. After all, what does science know? Sill things like earthquake study and weather observations and the sort are just ways for scientists to suck on the government teat and are supreme wastes of money, right?
What does it matter anyway? In the minds of a lot of righties Judgment Day is right around the corner. So who gives a shit?
Didja read Krugman today?
It’s amazing to consider that he represents the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson.
Jesus, even Bill Clinton was miles better.
Fine. I’m sitting right over the Marcellus Shale formation in NYS & I don’t care if they never drill here. As it is now, there’s zero accountability for this industry & entire populations remain at serious risk. Methane is far from the only problem.
What Wilderness said. I don’t even subscribe to the AGW song and dance routine and I will tell you flat out ‘natural’ gas – it isn’t – recovery is an idea from Hell. And I’m not even being metaphorical.
Have you watched Gasland yet ? I haven’t – and don’t need to.
opitslinkfest.blogspot.com > Topical Index > Water, Wealth & Power
Get a load especially at the one labeled “How to Destroy the Earth’s Water Supply Without Anyone Finding Out.’
Keeping tabs on an essential of life – and tool of slavers – seemed a no-brainer.
We are currently a 10 kilowatt society, meaning that on average every man woman and child uses 10 kilowatts of electrical power. We need to cut that consumption down. Many northern European nations get along with far less.
We need to recognize that no one source of energy is going to be a silver bullet. They all have problems. Wind power will never be more than a minor component in the solution. Solar plants cover a lot of ground, only work in daylight, and is still not cost effective (although prices are coming down). Nuclear energy is still the an important element in any realistic future energy scenario, even though it is also problematic in several respects.
Take a look at Doug MacKay’s book, available on line for free:
Sustainable energy without the hot air
http://www.withouthotair.com/