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MIT Says Natural Gas Best To Lower Carbon Emissions
eldavojohn writes "This week MIT released a comprehensive, hundred-page report entitled 'The Future of Natural Gas' that outlined the many scenarios the United States faces when aiming to reduce carbon emissions. From the New York Times recap: 'The scenario goes like this, according to MIT: Nuclear power, renewable energy, and carbon capture and sequestration are relatively expensive next to gas. Conventional coal is no longer a major source of power generation in the United States. "Natural gas is the substantial winner in the electric sector: The substitution effect, mainly gas generation for coal generation, outweighs the demand reduction effect."' Will this urging help to produce a policy shift from renewable energy (like wind) to natural gas for the United States?"
That's nice and all, but you should keep in mind how lots of places in the U.S. get their natural gas these days. Through phracking.
It's not a good thing. There are huge environmental concerns. Flamable drinking water, Neurotoxins and other poisons in drinking water. There's even a movie about it.
TFS says:
Conventional coal is no longer a major source of power generation in the United States.
I call shenanigans. Coal is the #1 energy producer in the US. The US gets 30% of it's power capacity and nearly 50 percent of it's produced power from coal. I would love for that to be different but that is the current state of affairs and it is unlikely to change soon since the US has large coal reserves and it is much cheaper to produce power using coal than any other current fuel.
Enigma
Too bad that extracting natural gas usually involves pumping massive quantities of toxic chemicals directly in to the ground.
Thanks to the incredibly corrupt Bush Administration, Fracking isn't even subject to the clean water act. The Halliburton Loophole, named after Dick Chaney's true employer, has allowed entire towns to be polluted beyond repair.
Thousands have been sickened by this polluted water. Pets are losing their hair. People are getting cancer. The water out of some homes' faucets is actually flammable!!
citation needed?
The report is from the MIT Energy Initiative, which counts among its members: BP Technology Ventures, Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Total, Hess.
The Board of Advisors includes: "Tony Hayward Group Chief Executive, BP p.l.c."
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Huh? Methane is C1H4. Ethane is C2H6.
Watch Gasland.
This is such a bunch of FUD. Several UK studies show that very substantial carbon savings can arise from wind power even at 30% of total electricity provision.
The point about backup is that we have it already for existing plants; adding quite a bit of wind will have minimal impacts on this requirement, both in carbon and cost terms. Having substantial amounts of wind just means more intelligent load balancing from the grid operator, more flexible generation from existing fossil fuel/nuclear plant, and more demand management of consumption.
Again in the UK context, the Centre for Alternative Technology's recent Zero Carbon Britain report shows how the UK could fully decarbonise without gas by 2030 (though it would take quite radical action).
From TFA:
That doesn't invalidate it, but it's important for readers to know and should probably be in the summary.
The DOE table you linked to runs from 2003-2007, as shown below. Not sure where you got the '08 number. One surprise for me at least, is that from '06 to '07, the percentage actually decreased. Looking at the chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USRenewableElectricity.jpg) that you provided, shows a continued downward swing in that percentage, which is likely due to our constantly increasing demand. One other thing that needs to be made clear is that hydroelectric currently makes up 5.74% of all the renewable energy in the U.S...and I suspect that won't be increasing since there's so much opposition to dams. So, if you take out hydro, the amount of energy that renewables are producing is much smaller.
Energy Source 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Renewable Energy 6.150 6.261 6.424 6.909 6.813
I attempted to look further into the comments about CA, but some of the references on Wikipedia didn't work. http://www.eesi.org/publications/Fact%20Sheets/EC_Fact_Sheets/Factoid20.pdf for example.
Just another day in Paradise
Unfortunately, the information you link to undermines your case.
The most significant source of renewable power in the United States is hydroelectric power (it accounts for 67% of all renewable power in the US). The amount of hydroelectric power produced in 2008 is the same as it was in 1969.
From 2003 to 2008, the percentage of total power derived from renewables went from 6.26% to 6.70% - an increase of 7% over the course of 5 years. In terms of total energy, the only two renewable sources that showed big gains were biofuels (went from 4/10th of 1% to 1%) and wind (went from 1/10 of 1% to 3/10 of 1%). The biofuel component is mostly ethanol, which is highly controversial in terms of land use and energy return and unlikely to get significantly larger any time soon.
If you look beyond those 5 years, it's far more discouraging. Look at that hydroelectic chart again. In 1949, 30% of all the electricity used in the United States came from hydroelectric power. Today, it's 6%.
Your California numbers are just as bad. The vast bulk of renewables come from three sources - large scale hydro, small scale hydro and geothermal. All three are essentially either tapped out or have significant problems getting larger (you can't dam anything else and natural geothermal is largely tapped out - and injecting water into deep hot rocks has some significant geological dangers in a state full of fault lines).
I, too, want to move to a non-carbon economy. But even among the nerd-herd that is Slashdot, hardly anybody understands the sheer magnitude of power that is used to keep our 21st century civilization working. Wind has to grow 800% just to reach the current levels of hydroelectricity, and that's just 6% of electrical usage. And that hydropower is going to get smaller and smaller, as no one is creating new dams and existing dams are being shut down (for different environmental protection reasons). Land siting and usage issues, power transmission from places with good solar/wind potential to existing population centers, water problems - the list goes on and on.
"Significant" impact is decades away on a national scale. On a local scale, it can be transformative, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking we're 10 or 20 years away from being largely carbon-neutral. It simply can't happen - no matter how much we wish it were so. Best to just keep plugging away at it and being realistic and honest with the public - it's going to take a long time, but it can be done.