Natural gas has garnered a lot of
attention, but the research reveals it is anything but clean. To
increase domestic energy production and reduce reliance on coal, there is a
natural gas boom in the U.S. and
elsewhere. However, reliance on natural gas is not a panacea to our
energy woes. According to a February
2012 study published in Nature, extracting and
producing natural gas releases enough methane into the atmosphere to
negate any greenhouse gas advantages that its somewhat cleaner burning
chemistry provides.
Approximately 85 percent of
natural gas is composed of methane, which is 105 times worse
than CO2 as a greenhouse gas (GHG). Based on EPA data,
methane leaks at a rate of 3.3 percent and that number more than
doubles (7.9 percent) when fracking is employed to extract natural gas.
Extrapolating from this data, gas burning for
electricity is much dirtier than coal burning in terms of GHG
emissions.
Dr. Drew Shindell and colleagues
(NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) have published a paper in
the scientific journal Science (US), in which he said:
“We found that gas-aerosol
interactions substantially alter the relative importance of the various
emissions. In particular, methane emissions have a larger impact than that used
in current carbon-trading schemes or in the Kyoto Protocol. Thus, assessments
of multigas mitigation policies, as well as any separate efforts to mitigate
warming from short-lived pollutants, should include gas-aerosol interactions.”
The
Nature News part of the prestigious scientific journal Nature (UK) has
summarized the key findings of Shindell and colleagues as follows:
“a range of computerized models to
show that methane’s global warming potential is greater when combined with
aerosols — atmospheric particles such as dust, sea salt, sulphates and black
carbon. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and treaties such as
the Kyoto Protocol assume methane to be, tonne-for-tonne, 25 times more potent
than carbon dioxide at warming the planet. But the interaction with aerosols
bumps up methane’s relative global warming potential (GWP) to about 33, though
there is a lot of uncertainty around the exact figure.”
Dr. Shindell has summarized the
findings by saying: “What happens is that as you put more methane into the
atmosphere, it competes for oxidants such as hydroxyl with sulphur dioxide.
More methane means less sulphate, which is reflective and thus has a cooling
effect. Calculations of GWP [Global Warming Potential;]
including these gas-aerosol linkages thus substantially increase the value for
methane.”
Major systemic gas leakage from
the hydraulic fracking of shale formations has led Professor Robert Howarth, Cornell University,
Ithaca, New
York, to conclude:
“The large GHG footprint of shale
gas undercuts the logic of its use as a bridging fuel over coming decades, if
the goal is to reduce global warming. We do not intend that our study be used
to justify the continued use of either oil or coal, but rather to demonstrate
that substituting shale gas for these other fossil fuels may not have the
desired effect of mitigating climate warming”.
The February
2012 study of air samples revealed high emission levels from gas
fields. The study explains that methane leaks during production may
offset any benefits of natural gas. In 2007, National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers noticed pollutants
including methane, butane and propane, in air samples from a tower north
of Denver, Colorado. They linked the
pollutants to a nearby natural-gas field. Their
investigation produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning
fossil fuel might not be better than coal when it comes to climate change.
In 2008, NOAA researchers and
the University of Colorado, Boulder,
estimated that natural-gas producers in an area known as the Denver-Julesburg Basin (where more than 20,000 oil
and gas wells have been drilled during the past four decades) are losing
about 4% of their gas to the atmosphere. Additional emissions come from
the storage tanks and pipelines.
Natural gas emits about half as
much carbon dioxide as coal per unit of energy when burned, but separate teams
at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and at the US Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) concluded that methane emissions from shale gas are much larger than
previously thought.
Robert
Howarth, a Cornell researcher whose team raised concerns about methane
emissions from shale-gas drilling in a pair of papers, said “I’m not
looking for vindication here, but [the NOAA] numbers are coming in very
close to ours, maybe a little higher.” Howarth said natural gas might
still have an advantage over coal when burned to create electricity, because
gas-fired power plants tend to be newer and far more efficient than older
facilities that provide the bulk of the country’s coal-fired generation. But
only 30% of US
gas is used to produce electricity, with much of the rest being used for
heating, for which there is no such advantage.
Natural gas is touted as a cost
effective energy, but capturing and storing gases that are vented during
the fracking process is feasible, but considered too costly to adopt. An
EPA rule that is due out as early as April would promote such changes by
regulating emissions from the gas fields.
A major 2011
study by Tom Wigley of the Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
concluded:
The most important result,
however, in accord with the above authors, is that, unless leakage rates for
new methane can be kept below 2%, substituting gas for coal is not an effective
means for reducing the magnitude of future climate change.
As explained by Gabrielle
Pétron, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA and at the University
of Colorado in Boulder, “I think we seriously need to
look at natural-gas operations on the national scale.” The findings surrounding natural
gas has far reaching consequences, not the least of which is the emerging
understanding that natural gas is not the bridge energy solution many had hoped
for.
Howarth’s online
version of his new 2012 paper concludes: We reiterate
our conclusion from our April 2011 paper that shale gas is not a suitable
bridge fuel for the 21st Century. Even without a high-leakage rate
for shale gas, we know that Natural
Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere. The International Energy Agency,
in its big June 2011 report on gas, said “Golden
Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate
Change.
These studies demonstrate the
urgency to radically reduce our fossil fuel consumption. Even with large
and early cuts in emissions, the indications are that temperatures are likely
to rise
to around 2 °C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the
century. Currently the world’s overall emissions are increasing
at a rate of 1 percent every year.
We need to shift away
from fossil fuels including natural gas. We need to rapidly
adopt renewable forms of energy energy like wind, solar,
geothermal, and tidal. We must rapidly move toward an economy
based on renewable fuels. Studies by Mark Z.
Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi and Robert Howarth indicate that the
U.S.
and the world could rely 100% on such green energy sources within 20 years.
We need to expose the
subterfuge of the fossil fuel industry, which falsely asserts
that “gas is clean energy” or that “gas is cleaner energy” than coal
burning. Natural gas does not reduce GHGs compared with coal and therefore
it will not minimize the impacts of global warming. In fact, as revealed
by a growing body of research, increased reliance on natural gas will
actually hasten catastrophic climate change.
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