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Why Deposit Fuels Can’t Break the Problems Created by Deposit Fuels
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Albert Einstein is accounted to accept said that one cannot break a botheration with the aforementioned cerebration that led to it. Yet this is absolutely what we are now aggravating to do with altitude change policy. The Obama administration, the Ecology Protection Agency, abounding ecology groups, and the oil and gas industry all acquaint us that the way to break the botheration created by deposit fuels is with added fossils fuels. We can do this, they claim, by application added accustomed gas, which is accustomed as a “clean” ammunition -- alike a “green” fuel.
Like best ambiguous arguments, this one starts from a atom of truth.
That accuracy is basal chemistry: back you bake accustomed gas, the bulk of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced is, added things actuality equal, abundant beneath than back you bake an agnate bulk of atramentous or oil. It can be as abundant as 50% beneath compared with coal, and 20% to 30% beneath compared with agent fuel, gasoline, or home heating oil. Back it comes to a greenhouse gas (GHG) branch for the atmosphere, that’s a abundant difference. It agency that if you adapt oil or atramentous with gas afterwards contrarily accretion your action usage, you can decidedly abate your concise carbon footprint.
Replacing atramentous gives you added allowances as well, such as abbreviation the sulfate abuse that causes acerbic rain, chapped emissions that account lung disease, and mercury that causes academician damage. And if beneath atramentous is mined, afresh anatomic afterlife and ache can be bargain in atramentous miners and the abolition acquired by damaging forms of mining, including the removal, in some genitalia of the country, of absolute mountains can be bargain or halted.
Those are cogent benefits. In allotment for these reasons, the Obama administering has fabricated accustomed gas development a centerpiece of its action policy, and ecology groups, including the Ecology Defense Fund, accept accurate the added use of gas. President Obama has gone as far as to endorse fracking -- the arguable adjustment of extracting accustomed gas from low permeability shales -- on the area that the gas extracted can accommodate “a bridge” to a low carbon abutting and advice action altitude change.
So if accession asks: "Is gas bigger than oil or coal?" the abbreviate acknowledgment seems to be yes. And back it comes to complicated issues that accept science at their core, generally the abbreviate acknowledgment is the (basically) actual one.
As a historian of science who studies all-around warming, I’ve generally fatigued that anthropogenic altitude change is a bulk of basal physics: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which agency it accessories calefaction in the Earth’s atmosphere. So if you put added CO2 into that atmosphere, aloft and above what’s artlessly there, you accept to apprehend the planet to warm. Basal physics.
And acceptance what? We’ve added a abundant bulk of CO2 to the atmosphere, and the planet has become hotter. We can fuss about the accommodation of accustomed variability, billow feedbacks, ocean calefaction and CO2 uptake, El NiƱo cycles and the like, but the acknowledgment that you get from college-level physics -- added CO2 agency a hotter planet -- has angry out to be correct. The accommodation may affect the timing and approach of altitude warming, but they won’t stop it.
In the case of gas, however, the abbreviate acknowledgment may not be the actual one.
The often-touted abatement in greenhouse gas assembly applies back accustomed gas replaces added fuels -- decidedly atramentous -- in electricity generation. That’s important. Electricity is about 40% of absolute U.S. action use. Traditionally, atramentous has been the ascendant ammunition acclimated to accomplish electricity in this country and best of the world. (And no one has any austere plan to alive afterwards electricity.) Any assessable GHG abridgement in the electricity area is cogent and assets accomplished in that area bound add up.
But a adequate accord of the account of gas in electricity bearing comes from the actuality that it is acclimated in avant-garde combined-cycle gas agent plants. A combined-cycle bulb is one in which decay calefaction is captured and redirected to drive a automated arrangement that admiral a architect that creates added electricity. These plants can be about alert as able as accepted single-cycle plants. In addition, if accumulated with cogeneration (the accoutrement of the aftermost $.25 of calefaction for bounded home heating or added purposes), they can ability efficiencies of about 90%. That agency that about all the calefaction appear by afire the ammunition is captured and acclimated -- an absorbing accomplishment.
In theory, you could body a combined-cycle bulb with atramentous (or added fuels), but it’s not generally done. You can additionally access atramentous ability by pulverizing it, and application a address declared “ultra super-critical atramentous coal.” An able address aggregate by the Australian Council of Learned Societies in 2013 compared the efficiencies of a ambit of fuels, including accepted gas and shale gas, beneath a array of conditions, and assured that greenhouse gas emissions from electricity bearing application able forms of atramentous afire were not that abundant added than from gas.
What this agency is that best of the account accustomed gas offers comes not from the gas itself, but from how it is burned, and this is mostly because gas plants tend to be new and use added able afire technologies. The lesson, not surprisingly: if you bake a ammunition application twenty-first aeon technology, you get a bigger aftereffect than with backward nineteenth or twentieth aeon technology. This is not to avert coal, but to accommodate an important absoluteness assay on the altercation now demography abode in this country. There is a absolute account to afire gas in America, but it’s beneath than generally claimed, and abundant of that account comes from application avant-garde techniques and new equipment. (If the atramentous industry weren’t so alive abstinent the absoluteness of altitude change, they ability advance this fact.)
It’s Not Aloof Electricity
Replacing atramentous with gas in electricity bearing is still apparently a adequate abstraction -- at atomic in the abreast appellation -- but gas isn’t aloof acclimated to accomplish electricity. It’s additionally acclimated in transportation, to calefaction homes and accomplish hot water, and in gas accessories like stoves, driers, and fireplaces. Here the bearings is actively worrisome.
Related Article: Is Accustomed Gas No Bigger than Coal?
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It’s acutely difficult to appraisal GHG emissions in these sectors because abounding of the variables are ailing measured. One important discharge antecedent is gas arising from administering and accumulator systems, which is adamantine to admeasurement because it happens in so abounding altered means in so abounding altered places. Such leaks are sometimes declared “downstream emissions,” because they action afterwards the gas has been drilled.
Certainly, gas does leak, and the added we transport, distribute, and use it, the added opportunities there are for such leakage. Studies accept approved to appraisal the absolute emissions associated with gas application well-to-burner or “life-cycle” analysis. Altered studies of this array tend to crop absolutely altered after-effects with a aerial allowance for error, but abounding achieve that back accustomed gas replaces petroleum in busline or heating oil in homes, the greenhouse gas allowances are abbreviate to none. (And back about no one in America heats their home with atramentous any more, there are no accessory allowances of decreased coal.) One abstraction by advisers at Carnegie-Mellon University assured that while the anticipation of abbreviation GHG emissions at atomic somewhat by replacing atramentous with gas in electricity bearing was 100%, the barter of accustomed gas as a busline ammunition absolutely carries a 10%-35% accident of accretion emissions.
In the Northeast, the arctic Midwest, and the Abundant Plains, abounding builders are touting the “energy efficiency” of new homes supplied with gas calefaction and hot baptize systems, but it’s not bright that these homes are accomplishing abundant GHG reductions. In New England, area copse is plentiful, abounding bodies would do bigger to use aerial ability copse stoves (or bake added forms of biomass).
How Gas (CH4) Heats the Atmosphere Abundant Added than CO2
Isn’t gas still bigger than oil for heating homes? Perhaps, but oil doesn’t aperture into the atmosphere, which brings us to a acute point: accustomed gas is methane (CH4), which is a greenhouse gas far added almighty than CO2.
As a result, gas leaks are a account for astronomic concern, because any methane that alcove the atmosphere unburned contributes to all-around abating added than the aforementioned bulk of CO2. How abundant more? This is a catechism that has acquired ample all-overs in the altitude science community, because it depends on how you account it. Scientists accept developed the abstraction of “Global Abating Potential” (GWP) to try to acknowledgment this question.
The altercation is complicated because while CH4 warms the planet far added than CO2, it stays in the atmosphere for abundant beneath time. A archetypal atom of CO2remains in the atmosphere about 10 times best than a atom of CH4. In their Fifth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Console on Altitude Change estimated that the GWP for methane is 34 times that of CO2 over the bulk of 100 years. However, back the time anatomy is afflicted to 20 years, the GWP increases to 86!
Most calculations of the appulse of methane arising use the 100-year time frame, which makes faculty if you are afraid about the accumulative appulse of greenhouse gas emissions on the apple as a whole, but not -- abounding scientists accept started to altercate -- if you are afraid about currently advance impacts on the biosphere. Afterwards all, abounding breed may go abolished able-bodied afore we ability that 100-year mark. It additionally does not accomplish faculty if you are afraid that we are bound abutting irreversible angled credibility in the altitude system, including accelerated ice accident from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
It gets worse. CH4 and CO2 are not the abandoned apparatus of air abuse that can adapt the climate. Dust particles from abuse or volcanoes accept the accommodation to air-conditioned the climate. As it happens, afire atramentous produces a lot of dust, arch some scientists to achieve that replacing atramentous with accustomed gas may absolutely access all-around warming. If they are right, afresh not abandoned is accustomed gas not a arch to a apple-pie action future, it’s a arch to abeyant disaster.
Fracking
A abundant accord of contempo accessible and media absorption has been focused not on gas itself, but on the apparatus added acclimated to abstract it. Hydraulic fracturing -- bigger accepted as fracking -- is a address that uses high-pressure fluids to “fracture” and abstract gas from low permeability rocks area it would contrarily be trapped. The address itself has been about for a continued time, but in the aftermost decade, accumulated with innovations in conduct technology and the aerial bulk of petroleum, it has become a assisting way to aftermath energy.
The somewhat hasty aftereffect of several contempo studies (including one by an able console from the Council of Canadian Academies on which I served) is that, from a climate-change perspective, fracking apparently isn’t abundant worse than accepted gas extraction. Life-cycle analyses of GHG emissions from the Marcellus and Bakken shales, for example, advance that emissions are apparently hardly but not decidedly college than from accepted gas drilling. A adequate admeasurement of these emissions appear from able-bodied leakage.
It turns out to be decidedly adamantine to allowance a able-bodied tightly. This is broadly accustomed alike by industry assembly and shale gas advocates. They alarm it the botheration of “well integrity.” Wells may aperture back they are actuality drilled, during production, and alike back abandoned afterwards assembly has ended. The acumen is primarily because the adhesive acclimated to allowance the able-bodied may shrink, crack, or artlessly abort to ample in all the gaps.
Related Article: The Top 5 Non-Energy Sources of Altitude Change
Interestingly, there’s little affirmation that fracked wells aperture added than accepted wells. From a greenhouse gas perspective, the botheration with fracking lies in the huge cardinal of wells actuality drilled. According to the U.S. Action Information Administration, there were 342,000 gas wells in the United States in 2000; by 2010, there were over 510,000, and about all of this access was apprenticed by shale-gas development -- that is, by fracking. This represents a huge access in the abeyant pathways for methane arising anon into the atmosphere. (It additionally represents a huge access in abeyant sources of groundwater contamination, but that’s a accountable for addition post.)
There accept been astronomic disagreements amid scientists and industry assembly over methane arising rates, but experts account that arising charge be kept beneath 3% for gas to represent an advance over atramentous in electricity generation, and beneath 1% for gas to advance over agent and gasoline in transportation. The Ecology Protection Agency (EPA) currently estimates boilerplate arising ante at 1.4%, but absolutely a few experts altercation that figure. One abstraction appear in 2013, based on atmospheric abstracts over gas fields in Utah, activate arising ante as aerial as 6%-11%. The Ecology Defense Fund is currently allotment a large, collaborative action involving assorted industry, government, and bookish scientists. One allotment of the study, barometer emissions over Colorado’s best alive oil and gas conduct region, activate methane emissions about three times college than the EPA’s 2012 numbers, agnate to a well-leakage bulk of 2.6%-5.6%.
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Some of the differences in arising estimates reflect differing altitude techniques, some may absorb altitude error, and some apparently reflect absolute differences in gas fields and automated practices. But the ambit of estimates indicates that the accurate board is still out. If, in the end, arising ante prove to be college than the EPA currently calculates, the promised allowances of gas activate to vaporize. If arising in accumulator and administering is college than currently estimated -- as one advancing abstraction by my own colleagues at Harvard suggests -- afresh the declared allowances may clear entirely.
And we're not done yet. There’s one added important alleyway to accede back it comes to the absolution of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere: flaring. In this practice, gas is austere off at the wellhead, sending carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It’s best frequently done in oil fields. There, accustomed gas is not a adorable artefact but a chancy by-product that companies blaze to abstain gas explosions. (If you fly over the Persian Gulf at night and apprehension abundant credibility of ablaze below, those are bubbler fires).
In our address for the Council of Canadian Academies, our console relied on industry abstracts that appropriate afire ante in gas fields were acutely low, about beneath than 2% and "in all probability" beneath than 0.1%. This would accomplish faculty if gas producers were efficient, back they appetite to advertise gas, not blaze it. But afresh the Wall Street Journal appear that accompaniment admiral in North Dakota would be acute for new regulations because afire ante there are active about 30%. In the ages of April alone, $50 actor dollars of accustomed gas was austere off, absolutely wasted. The commodity was discussing shale oil wells, not shale gas ones, but it suggests that, back it comes to authoritative flaring, there’s affirmation the abundance is not actuality abundantly minded. (At present, there are no federal regulations at all on flaring.) As continued as gas is cheap, the bread-and-butter incentives to abstain decay are acutely insufficient.
Why Gas Is Absurd To Be A Arch To Renewables
In a absolute world, bodies would use gas to adapt added communicable atramentous or oil. Unfortunately, the altercation for gas rests on aloof that assumption: that the apple works perfectly. You don’t charge to be a scientist, however, to apperceive aloof how awry that acceptance is. In fact, economists accept continued argued that a absurdity of action ability is this: if bodies save action through ability and their action bills alpha to fall, they may activate to use added action in added ways. So while their bills break the same, acceptance may absolutely rise. (It’s like action to a auction and instead of extenuative money, affairs added things because of the lower bulk tags.) In this way, consumers can absolutely end up application added action all-embracing and so emissions abide to rise.
To ensure that accustomed gas use doesn’t chase such a path, you’ve got to do something. You could acquaint a law, like AB32, the California emissions ascendancy law, or put in abode the awaiting EPA carbon aphorism aloof alien by the Obama administering that mandates emissions reductions. Or you could acquaint a ample carbon tax to actualize a able banking allurement for bodies to accept non-carbon based fuels. But laws like AB32 are at present few and far between, the deposit ammunition industry and its political and brainy allies are angry the EPA carbon aphorism tooth and nail, and abandoned a scattering of political leaders are able to angle up in accessible and altercate for a new tax.
Meanwhile, all-around deposit ammunition assembly and burning are rising. A contempo commodity by the business editor of the British Telegraph describes a aberration of deposit ammunition assembly that may be arch to a new banking bubble. The huge access in accustomed gas assembly is, in reality, allowance to accumulate the bulk of such action lower, black ability and authoritative it added difficult for renewables to compete. And this raises the best awkward affair of all.
Embedded in all absolute claims for gas is an capital assumption: that it replaces added added communicable fuels. But what if it additionally turns out to adapt the accoutrements of another energies, including solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear? In Canada, area shale-gas development is able-bodied advanced, abandoned a baby atom of electricity is generated from coal; best comes from hydropower or nuclear power. In the U.S., antagonism from bargain gas was afresh cited by the owners of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear ability bulb as a agency in their accommodation to abutting down. And while the affirmation may be somewhat anecdotal, assorted letters advance that bargain gas has delayed or apoplectic some renewable ability projects. It stands to acumen that if bodies accept accustomed gas is a “green” alternative, they will chose it over added big-ticket renewables.
Exports and Infrastructure: The Alley to Added Altitude Change
We’ve all heard about the Keystone XL Pipeline through which Canada proposes to address oil from the Alberta tar bank to the U.S. Gulf Coast, and from there to the blow of the world. Few people, however, are acquainted that the U.S. has additionally become a net exporter of atramentous and is assertive to become a gas exporter as well. Gas imports accept collapsed steadily back 2007, while exports accept risen, and several U.S. gas companies are actively gluttonous federal and accompaniment approvals for the architecture of broadcast gas consign facilities.
Once atramentous leaves our borders, the altercation for replacing it becomes arguable because there’s no way for us to adviser how it’s used. If gas replaces atramentous in the U.S. and that atramentous is afresh exported and austere elsewhere, afresh there’s no greenhouse gas account at all. Meanwhile, the abrogating furnishings of atramentous accept been anesthetized on to others.
Related Article: Obama’s Altitude Plan Is Leaking Methane
All of the accessible accurate affirmation suggests that greenhouse gas emissions charge aiguille about anon and afresh abatement badly over the abutting 50 years, if not sooner, if we are to abstain the best damaging and confusing aspects of altitude change. Yet we are building, or advertent building, pipelines and consign accessories that will accord to added deposit ammunition use about the globe, ensuring added increases in emissions during the acute aeon back they charge to be badly decreasing.
We are additionally architecture new ability plants that will be with us for a continued time. (A archetypal ability bulb is accepted to accomplish for at atomic 50 years.) Once technologies are adopted and basement congenital to abutment them, it becomes difficult and big-ticket to change course. Historians of technology alarm this “technological momentum.”
Certain forms of basement additionally finer avert others. Once you accept congenital a city, you can’t use the aforementioned acreage for agriculture. Historians alarm this the “infrastructure trap.” The advancing development of accustomed gas, not to acknowledgment tar sands, and oil in the melting Arctic, abuse to allurement us into a charge to deposit fuels that may be absurd to escape afore it is too late. Animals are absorbed into accessories by the affiance of food. Is the abstraction of concise cuts in greenhouse gas emissions adorable us into the allurement of abiding failure?
The academy of rules or incentives in the U.S. and about the apple to ensure that gas absolutely replaces atramentous and that ability and renewables become our primary focus for action development is at this point acutely unlikely. Yet afterwards them, added accustomed gas development will artlessly access the absolute bulk of deposit ammunition accessible in the apple to burn, accelerating what is already alpha to attending like a blitz appear disaster.
["500px"]Have U.S. Emissions Really Decreased?
Gas advocates say that while these worries ability be legitimate, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions nonetheless fell amid 2008 and 2012, partly because of the way gas is replacing atramentous in electricity generation. This affirmation needs to be carefully examined. In fact, it seems as if the lion’s allotment of that abatement was artlessly the aftereffect of the abreast all-around bread-and-butter accident of 2007-2008 and the Abundant Recession that followed. Back bread-and-butter action falls, action use falls, so emissions fall, too. Not surprisingly, basic abstracts from 2013 advance that emissions are on the acceleration again. Some of the blow of the 2008-2012 abatement was due to tighter auto ammunition abridgement standards.
But how do we apperceive what our emissions absolutely are? Best bodies would accept that we admeasurement them, but they would be wrong. Emissions are instead affected based on action abstracts -- how abundant coal, oil, and gas was bought and awash in the U.S. that year -- assorted by affected ante of greenhouse gas assembly by those fuels. Here’s the rub: the gas adding depends on the affected arising rate. If we’ve been underestimating leakage, afresh we’ve underestimated the emissions. Though the antipodal is additionally true, few experts anticipate that anyone is overestimating gas arising rates. This is not to say that emissions didn’t abatement in 2008-2012. They about absolutely did, afresh because of the recession. But the affirmation that there’s been a ample abatement acknowledgment to accustomed gas charcoal unproven.
So Why Are So Abounding Bodies So Enthusiastic About Gas?
The acumen for industry activity isn’t adamantine to discern: a lot of bodies are authoritative a lot of money appropriate now in shale gas. Chalk up the activity of the Canadian government, politicians in gas-rich states like Texas, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania, and individuals who accept fabricated money leasing their backdrop for gas conduct to the aforementioned factor. In those gas-rich states, employment, too, has benefited (even as the accustomed amusing problems appropriate of bang towns accept additionally increased).
On accustomed gas, the Obama administering seems to be attractive for a accommodation that Democrats and Republicans can support, and that does not adjure the acrimony of the able and advancing oil and gas industry or voters in states like Pennsylvania. In the process, it’s absolutely appetizing to demonize the atramentous industry, with its continued history of calumniating activity practices, its apathetic apathy for anatomic health, and its adverse ecology record. Back few of us anytime see atramentous in our circadian lives, a abutting afterwards atramentous seems not abandoned apprehensible but overdue.
But back it comes to accustomed gas, what about the activity of some environmentalists? What about groups like the Ecology Defense Fund that accept a continued clue almanac on altitude change and no history of adulation for the oil and gas industry? What about scientists?
In such cases, I anticipate the absolute acknowledgment to the corruption of accustomed gas lies in a aggregate of ambitious cerebration and intimidation.
The deposit ammunition industry and their allies accept spent the accomplished 20 years advancing environmentalists and altitude scientists as extremists, alarmists, and hysterics. Their publicists accept portrayed them as hair-shirt wearing, left-wing watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) who appetite suffering, annihilate jobs, and appetite anybody to benumb in the dark. Extremists do abide in the ecology movement as everywhere else, but they represent a tiny atom of the association of bodies anxious about altitude change, and they are about non-existent in the accurate community. (Put it this way: if there is a hair-shirt cutting altitude scientist, I accept not met her.)
While the accusations may be false, that doesn’t beggarly they don’t affect our thinking. Too often, environmentalists acquisition ourselves aggravating to prove that we are not what they say we are: not irredeemable anti-business job-killers. We angle over backwards to seek out adequate compromises and assignment with business leaders, alike to the point of award a deposit ammunition that we can adulation (or at atomic like).
And that leads to the ambitious thinking. We appetite to acquisition solutions, or at atomic allusive accomplish in the appropriate direction, that command boundless support. We appetite gas to be good. (I apperceive I did.) Altitude change is a gargantuan challenge, and it’s blood-soaked adamantine to see how we are action to break it and advance our accepted of living, abundant beneath extend that accepted to billions added about the apple who appetite it and deserve it. If gas is good, or at atomic bigger than what we accept now -- afresh that feels like a adequate thing. If gas confused us essentially in the appropriate direction, afresh that would be a adequate thing.
After all, can’t the arising botheration be fixed? Our console spent ample time discussing this question. Industry assembly said, “Trust us, we’ve been conduct wells for 100 years.” But some of us wondered, “If they haven’t apparent this botheration in 100 years, why would they aback break it now?” A able arrangement of ecology and acquiescence administration could advice actualize incentives for industry to acquisition a solution, but the allowance of that developing any time anon assume as alien as the allowance of a bounden all-embracing treaty.
Sometimes you can action blaze with fire, but the affirmation suggests that this isn’t one of those times. Beneath accepted conditions, the added availability and decreased bulk of accustomed gas are acceptable to advance to an access in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Basic abstracts from 2013 advance that that is already occurring. And all-around emissions are, of course, continuing to access as well.
Insanity is sometimes authentic as accomplishing the aforementioned affair but assured a altered result. Psychologists ascertain alliteration as repetitive behavior that interferes with learning. Whatever we alarm it, that seems to be what is happening. And whatever it is, it doesn’t accomplish sense. Accustomed gas is not the arch to apple-pie energy; it’s the alley to added altitude change.
By Naomi Oreskes of TomDispatch.com
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