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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?"
It could work.
Too much has to change around the transmission/distribution infrastructure for the renewables to work. And scaling the renewables up to current needs promises to make them no cleaner and potentially not even more carbon neutral than what we have now.
Like it or not, the future will have nuclear and cleaner versions of hydrocarbons before renewables.
Gas and nuclear may have similar costs, but they're hardly alike when it comes to environmental concerns.
Gas still produces CO2, and extraction is messy.
Nuclear produces no emissions, and it takes so little uranium to make a plant that the issues associated with mining are small.
I think the rest of the power comes from useless apostrophes that people put into harmless possessive pronouns.
"The US gets 30% of it is power capacity and nearly 50 percent of it is produced power from coal "
DId that make any sense at all?
Let's focus only on the 13 of carbon emissions in America which are electricity related:
Coal emits 2.1 lbs CO_2-eq per kWh generated. Oil 1.9, nat gas 1.3. Wind, solar, geothermal 0. If we instantaneously switched all 20 quads of energy from coal used to generate electricity to natural gas *tomorrow*, we'd save roughly 10% of our overall carbon emissions (coal is 1/3 of overall carbon emissions used almost entirely for electricity, and switching to gas saves 1/3 (1.3/2.1 ~= 2/3)). So the 10% is nice, but it's clearly not enough.
We've got to do better than that. Additional ways to do better include:
* Improving building envelope (air sealing and insulation) has a substantial impact on both heating and cooling load. Interested in the electricity portion -- focus on the southeast and the southwest explicitly. Work to improve the existing building infrastructure with regard to envelope.
* Strengthen building codes. There's no point in tightening up old buildings if we permit new buildings to be built leaky. This is especially important to do at the Federal level, because (a) most new construction is in the southeast and southwest, not northeast nor midwest, and (b) their Republican governments have shown no interest in passing state laws. Before you go off on a libertarian rant, keep in mind that even if a homeowner was savvy enough to understand the importance of a tight and well insulated home, he would have very little ability to measure/inspect the potential home because seeing through sheetrock is nontrivial. Building inspectors, on the other hand, are looking at the space before finish walls are installed, and therefore have a perfect opportunity to inspect for energy efficiency.
* Follow California's lead in ratcheting up energy efficiency requirements for appliances and electronics. Sure, they won't get it all right the first time -- that's true of just about all engineering projects -- but the overall impact is substantial. It's not just about saving money for customers, it's also about reducing the demand on the grid and at the power stations.
* White/green/solar roofs, particularly in urban areas, particularly in those with more sun exposure in warmer climes. This is a simple building/zoning code change, and it has a tangible impact over time.
* Local renewable. Solar or wind at the home or small commercial level, on site, helps not only reduce demand (from the utility, it appears to be the same thing), but it also reduces the demands on the local grid. This is important because it allows us to hold off on building larger capacity at the local level for as long as possible, a huge savings. Ways to foster this include tax credits, time-variable pricing (solar), and even simply ensuring that net-metering is legal everywhere.
* Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) have been enacted in roughly 30 states. Essentially, they require utilities to increase the percentage of renewable electricity in the mix of their electrons by a little bit each year or every few years. They define what counts as renewable (typically large hydro is excluded, biofuel may or may not be, wind and solar and geothermal are, some states allow a portion to be met with negawatts (efficiency improvements). The elegance is that the utilities can choose the technologies / facilities which make sense for them to meet the criteria, they can "bank" surplus credits, and if they come up short they pay a financial penalty which is severe enough to make compliance cheaper than punishment.
You'll notice I've entirely avoided mentioning nuclear power. I'm not opposed to it, but I also acknowledge that it's far more expensive for society than the pro-nuke folks let on, and it's far safer than the anti-nuke folks acknowledge. In either case, since it is more expensive than lots of alternatives, let's work on the alternatives and see how far we can push them. If we've legitimately pushed wind and solar and geothermal and efficiency as far as we can and
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Your last sentence in the summary is contrary to the main finding of the article in regards to power generation.
"Power Generation
" -the MIT research summary
They are not advocating moving away from renewable energy like wind or solar to natural gas but rather advocating the use of both to replace coal since wind and solar do not produce reliable energy.
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
Using a cleaner burning fuel like natural gas would allow for generating facilities that capitalize on both the MHD effect and then the follow-on of traditionally 'boiling water to make steam" to drive a turbine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator
By adding an MHD system to a conventional plant, energy efficiency can be increased by 50% over a conventional facility. As we do more work with near-room temperature superconductors the efficiency would increase.
Tisha Hayes
A lot is going to have to change in the natural gas market to start replacing large amounts of our coal capacity with natural gas. Our distribution networks are hugely complex, aging, and very much tied to domestic supply.
Electric utilities built most of their base load capacity (coal, nuclear, hydro) before 1980, and a lot of this (the coal/nuclear part, that is) is coming up for replacement at the same time that demand has been creeping up, eating the surplus capacity afforded. The easy way out, especially with more investor-owned utilities (IOUs lol) and fewer state-owned, is to start adding to your generating fleet by installing plants which are only used several weeks a year at very high load. These are invariably plants which are cheap to build and expensive to run (because of fuel cost per kWh). NG-fired gas turbine generators are the dominating solution.
These low investment/NG-fired capacity upgrades all have their straws in the same glass, as it happens, and are being used for more and more weeks per year. Not only that, but they're also competing against the market that was practically made for NG, heating. We've been fortunate that, so far, the big summer peak in electricity consumption from air conditioning use has been on the opposite end of the year from the big winter peak in NG heating consumption. (with regard to both NG distribution and price reasons)
However, all this extra consumption is making NG prices are nuts, and--anecdote warning--I've seen a utility go a summer without running their GTs simply because it was actually cheaper to buy off another near-overloaded utility than to run peak plants on NG, which just never happened. Those prices aren't going to get any better running NG-fired capacity not only during the summer peak, but even during the not-to-be-sneezed-at winter peak. Coal is king, and the only way we're ever going to start replacing it or adapting to its decline in affordability is with thoughtful, long-term investments in efficient base load and phasing out of "temporary" capacity upgrades. This is not just a matter of one generation method/energy source being preferable to another, it's a systemic lack of strategy in our energy sector for preparing for changes which they already know will happen or imposed.
MIT and LurkerXXX are considering different questions and arriving at different answers.
MIT says that natural gas is the best practical low-carbon-emission fuel.
LurkerXXX notes that current production methods are just ducky, as long as you hate groundwater and like cancer.
This is high-school chemistry.
Coal is carbon (with impurities). Oxidation of carbon is exothermic and yields carbon dioxide.
Natural gas is hydrocarbons, compounds of carbon and hydrogen. As before, oxidation of carbon is exothermic. So is oxidation of hydrogen, which yields water. To get the same amount of energy, you can burn a certain amount of carbon, or a lesser amount of carbon and offset it with hydrogen, which gives you lower carbon dioxide emissions for the same energy output.
Methane is CH4, a hydrocarbon. It burns along with the rest of the natural gas. If you are getting methane in your exhaust, it is because you are running your fuel/air mixture too rich, and you aren't injecting enough air to burn the natural gas completely.
And, of course, burning uranium (or, better yet, thorium, but we don't have the engineering of the thorium fuel cycle worked out yet) in negative void coefficient pressurized water reactors is far better than burning coal or natural gas, since there are effectively NO greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear plants.
Besides, natural gas is far too valuable as a chemical processing feedstock to burn it to make electricity.
A meaningless statement. The fact is, nothing is a harmful in a small enough quantity, and nothing is safe in high enough quantity. You may as well argue that reducing salt intake to combat heart disease is stupid because sodium is necessary for survival.
However, you make a good point that methane is a horrible greenhouse gas, so reducing leaks of unburned methane would have to be a priority if we ramp up the natural gas infrastructure.
I think you have it backwards - the price of NG has to drop below a certain level for them to use it, or the price of electricity has to rise above a certain level.
This is part of why electricity can be expensive in some areas - due to fears about nuclear, and (justified) concern about the pollution of coal, they're pretty much stuck with natural gas. Unfortunately, NG tends to be the cheapest to build a plant for, but the most expensive on fuel - and Natural Gas is one of the more volatile markets.
I don't read AC A human right
In college I took a tour of a couple power plants as part of my courses. One of the power plants had this tower of a boiler where the coal dust was blown in the bottom and the soot was tossed out the top. The tour guide pointed out that the boilers had to be pre-heated with natural gas before the boiler could switch over to coal dust as fuel. Another power plant I toured had a more conventional, and less efficient, boiler that also used natural gas to get the fires going. It took me a split second to realize that these boilers could just as easily run on natural gas all the time if they chose to do so.
Not part of my tours but I have read about how some diesel powered generators have been converted to using natural gas or propane as fuel by injecting the gaseous fuels into the combustion cylinder much like how a conventional gasoline engine does. The ignition of the fuel still requires a small amount of diesel fuel to be injected into the cylinder. With this conversion just about any diesel cycle engine can use just about any ratio of diesel fuel to gaseous fuel to run.
Power plants have for the longest time have been flexible in what fuel they use. They will burn what ever is cheapest or whatever is available. One of those power plants I toured still had it's old wood burning boiler as a last resort backup. I would guess they figured it would cost money to dismantle and remove the thing and as long as they had no need for the room in the plant it did no harm in keeping it there. Oh, that boiler could burn coal just as easily as wood. It could probably also burn straw, corn, soybeans, discarded plastic, old tennis shoes, grass clippings, dispatched zombies, or whatever else you could think of. As long as the fuel met certain minimum conditions then it should work as fuel. Might have to mix the fuels a bit to achieve a proper burn but the boiler shouldn't care if you put the old tennis shoes in with the zombies.
The reason these power plants have not already switched to natural gas should be obvious, it's cheaper. Not only that but with the threat of "cap and tax" hanging over their heads few will switch to natural gas even if it is cheaper. They need the history of being "dirty" so that if a cap on CO2 emissions is placed upon them the reduction of CO2 output can be done as easily, and cheaply, as throwing a switch over to natural gas.
Then there is the issue of how to get the natural gas. Natural gas tends to be in the same places as the oil. If we can't drill for oil then we can't drill for natural gas. If we burn the natural gas for fuel what are we to do with all that oil? Obviously we'd burn that too. If the government imposes a "cap and tax" scheme on industrial scale uses of coal and oil the price of natural gas will climb to adjust for supply and demand. That will make coal and oil cheaper for the smaller scale uses.
I've been telling people that if "cap and tax" passes into law then I'm buying a coal fired furnace for my home.
When it comes to CO2 output per kilowatt hour produced nuclear power is second only to hydroelectric. We've dammed up all the rivers we can. Wind power requires the use of carbon heavy materials like plastics and aluminum. (The aluminum does not contain the carbon but the carbon is used to reduce the aluminum ore to pure aluminum releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the air. Also there is much heat and electricity required typically meaning burning large amounts of fossil fuels in the process.)
The only real option available to reduce our carbon footprint, and reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy, is nuclear power. The problem is politics are killing both nuclear power and domestic fossil fuels. The politicians want so hard to please everyone in the country but something has to give or we are going to find ourselves capped and taxed out of an economy. I find evidence in human caused global warming unconvincing so I really don't care if the powers that be permit more drilling or more nuclear power plants
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is in fact essential for the Earth's life cycle. Plants would not survive without it.
You don't seem to understand what a pollutant is. Anything can be a pollutant given sufficient quantities of it. High oxygen environments can cause explosive fires, even though oxygen is essential for animal life. So your argument falls flat on its face. Pollutants are all about quantity. It's not a specific quality that you can wave away through pointing out some beneficial aspect of it.
Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Any methane infrastructure will necessarily have emissions.
Pointing to a preliminary analysis, with no details, and the author has ALREADY found grave errors in isn't exactly a very convincing argument.
AccountKiller
This is a great post! I was going to post something like this if no one else did. This 99% fixation on OMG WE NEED MORE POWER PLANTS! Instead of looking to REDUCE DEMAND is plain nuts. It's been pure propaganda and brainwashing of the population for decades now. I know why they do it, to keep wall street traders and speculators and the entrenched energy companies rich. Super insulate ONCE, save forever, or ignore rational insulation and efficiencies that are quite possible and keep up the propaganda that we "need" more power plants, of any kind, and keep paying through the nose month after year after decade for your energy. Freakin loony tunes how many people they have brainwashed against the realities of actual do-able energy savings that are possible using off the shelf technologies.
I've worked on several superinsulation projects, the heating and cooling savings are ginormous, simply *astounding*. The energy industry does NOT want this pushed, they got millions to throw around lobbying, so it isn't pushed. We're talking dropping your energy demands down to 20-10% sometimes of what they were previously, it's that good. It is by far and away the best ROI "energy dollar" that can be spent.
Next up, build out a better internet! It's ludicrous in the 21st century to have millions of people commute daily to go sit in front of a screen with an internet connection. That's bob cratchet and a quill pen action, we don't need that physical presence in the office all the time. We could eliminate millions of transportation miles, millions of lost production hours, by car or bus or train, and eliminate all this supposed "need" for huge SUV energy hog office towers, the ones with huge lights blaring all night long advertising to the space aliens.
There's tons and tons of places that we could be reducing demand at, without reducing quality of life at all, but wall street and the big energy cartels don't like that, and they run the nation. You saving money is not what they like, taking your money every month in big chunks is what they like, and they'll keep shoving propaganda like this article at people as long as it takes to keep you faked out, or feed you BS like "good cents" homes. That's a joke level.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superinsulation
It is *not* necessary to have 100% backup for wind, that's an old canard. For a start there is such as thing as 'demand control' where load is disconnected (eg automatically without notice in return for a fee or discount upfront) or load is shifted (by big price signals). It already happens. If, in extremis, we had 100% demand-controllable load then we would need 0% backup.
Secondly, your post seems to carry the assumption that the fossil/nuke alternatives have capacity (reliability) factors of 100%: they don't.
And indeed one *good* feature of a typical renewables mix over (say) big nukes is that no big chunk can fail all at once (ie in a matter of a few cycles or seconds). We had the UK's biggest nuke cut out for no especially good reason a couple of years ago, and the result in short order was 500,000 people spread over the UK being load-shed involuntarily (which is another form of demand control of course).
Likewise I think the 20% value you vote is plucked from the air and insupportable, apart from anything else different geographic areas and populations and usage patterns will influence what can be managed in the local grid on any given hour/day/month. There can be no magic fixed threshold given physics as I understand it.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
(as BP did by passing the risks of DWH onto everyone else who was dependent on the Gulf to make a living).
It is entirely possible (perhaps not likely, but possible) that BP can't pay and goes bankrupt.
Imagine that there are a bunch of companies producing the same product. Half of them produce it safely, the other half have a 10% risk each year causing an environmental disaster costing a fortune in excess of their assets, but the production price is halved. In that case the unsafe ones are going to outcompete the safe ones, leaving only the unsafe ones (which are regularly replaced as disasters strike, but shareholders get their dividends each year for the ones which survive).
Market economics don't prevent environmental disasters even when environmental costs are entirely and fairly paid by the polluter. The only market economy remedy is requiring all companies to take out insurance for the very worst theoretical environmental disaster they could possibly cause.
There are other remedies for this problem which don't rely on market mechanisms, of course. Including the current one of letting society pay when companies can't...
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
What is "significant impact"? Renewables already constituted 7.4% of US energy consumption by 2008, which was a year before Obama started dramatically increasing investment in renewables. Before the US entered the Great Recession, after a decade of Oil War in which energy prices were finally high enough to make reducing energy consumption a national consensus. Before BP killed the Gulf with the consequences of offshore oil/gas drilling. That fraction had already jumped by the beginning of 2009 (still before those propelling events), just as it had been swiftly rising - though for only a few years.
California (1/7th of all Americans) already generates 31% of its electricity from renewables, 12% from non-hydropower. Again, this is all before the recent catastrophes and stimuli produce a new wave of generation plants, which are under construction.
It doesn't have to take decades before renewables have significant impact. In fact, close to 10% is already significant impact. Renewable plants are faster to build than exhaustible power systems, and are much easier/cheaper to build distributed around the country than centralized exhaustible power plants. Contrary to your statement, onsite generation by solar and wind is an advantage over centralized petrofuels in terms of our existing distribution, which onsite can largely ignore but petrofuels cannot. If we spent a $TRILLION on renewables for a decade, the way we will have spent a $TRILLION+ in Iraq on Oil War for a decade, we'd probably have at least 25% of our power coming from renewables. The resulting boom in the US domestic economy, both stimulated by investment in new technology/labor and unshackled from shipping money and jobs to foreign oil suppliers, would even further accelerate renewable fuel switchover, making subsidies unnecessary. If we canceled all the subsidies to petrofuels like oil, coal, gas and nukes, we'd see even faster conversion as a freer market finally played on a leveled playing field.
We don't have fifty years to leave exhaustible fuels for renewables. Fortunately, we don't need more than 10-20 to do it.
--
make install -not war
Wow! More BS packed into a single sentence than I've ever seen...
Wind is only intermittent on a small scale. On larger scales, it's plenty reliable, and more than 20% of capacity could well be supplied by it.
Wind won't replace all other power sources, sure, but that doesn't mean natural gas will be the base load provider, either.
With enough installed wind capacity, base-load and peaking could be provided by hydro, both utilizing current dams, and using pumped-hydro supplied from wind power at times when supply exceeds demand.
Base load could also be provided by nuclear, or even solar, as liquid-sodium solar-thermal power plants are being testing out, which would allow for substantial electricity production over-night, and for a couple days into a solar lull (which very, very rarely happens in the deserts, anyhow).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Check your tax bill for the rest of the cost. It's not all bad though: your kids and grandkids will help you out with the cleanup costs.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Sulfur is essential for some life on earth as well, but that doesn't mean it's not a pollutant when you spray large quantities of it into the atmosphere (hooray for acid rain!).
Yes, but it's much, much shorter lived, and so has much less impact.
The link you cite is about automobiles. Yes, if you have many millions of poorly maintained vehicles driving around, and average people fueling up every day, you can expect lots of leaks. When you're talking about a single pipeline to a power plant, you shouldn't expect much leakage at all. There's a lot of experts, and money working on preventing any such leaks before they happen. That's the main benefit of centralization after all.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Hey petroleum and natural gas are renewable energy too. They just take hundreds of thousands of years to renew.
I'd guess you've never seen or experienced a superinsulated residence. "They" don't push it from the reasons I state, it would collapse energy prices because demand would drop. The energy cartels are some of the biggest lobbying and influence kahunas out there, they fund "studies" like this MIT propaganda piece.
There's a reason there's a push for the "passive house" in places like Germany where energy prices are high and winters are long..it *works*.
Go outside in the winter in some chilly northern clime with a T shirt and shorts, then try it in an insulated snowsuit/ snowmobile suit, see which works better on "saving energy". Same with your house/building, it's dogshit simple to see this. It can be done new construction or retrofit, I have worked on both kinds. Try a house in Maine in January, comfy inside, with NO heater running during the day, and just a very small supplement at night when it is below zero F. It can and does work that well.
Part of getting it adopted is educating people that superinsulation (R55 or better all around, planned air intake and exhaust with a heat exchanger, triple pane windows with pull down insulated covers for at night, etc) exists and can work, that's why I posted the above with the link, so people can see they have some options.
Heating and cooling buildings is the number one energy use in the nation, dropping demand, while retaining the same or even better comfort levels (planned air in and out means you can run a much better air filter, keeps the inside cleaner, plus the house is quieter), would greatly negate this "need" for more plants and using all this fuel, natgas coal nukes whatever. Those boys are in the energy SELLING business, at best they will pay lipservice to the energy savings business, mostly for PR purposes to look green trendy when they are anything but. They are in no way sha[pe or form ever going to push rational conservation as an option, it makes them loads LESS money. There's nothing new to patent, no giant wall street speculation is needed, no one company can gobble up a whole region worth of the insulation business because any carpentry crew can do it. This is off the shelf, already invented long ago stuff, just MORE of it with a few other efficiency tweaks involved.
Superinsulation works with air conditioning as well. Another project I worked on in Missouri was in the summer, the lady there called us up after the install/retrofit was finished and complained we "broke" her air conditioner. She was so used to it kicking on every half hour or hour during the summer, hearing it, when it went more than a day and didn't come on she thought it was broken. I asked her if it was still nice and cool inside, she goes "yes.." "that's what you paid for ma'am". It really does work that well.
and who do you suppose will pay for the cleanup of coal pollution?
It may not take a lot of uranium to run a power plant but it takes quite a lot of uranium ore to make a small amount of uranium suitible for a typical power plant. I have relatives who live in a small town that is/was a superfund clean up site due to the uranium mining in the area. Their little town even has it's own hospital due to the resulting cancer rates.
Nuclear is a wide scope that encompasses many types of reactors. Nuclear does not merely include old dirty Light Water Pressurised Reactors, even if you use the words "typical power plant". I would greatly suggest spending an afternoon browsing through the virtually limitless info on the various types of reactors on Wikipedia. For instance Heavy Water Pressurised Reactors like the CANDU design can run from unenriched uranium amongst other fuel sources such as already "spent" fuel that is being stored underground.