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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?"
Renewables will happen but it's going to take decades before they have a significant impact. As you say too much has to change for them to become the biggest producers of energy in our society today. However they are in the public's eye and that isn't likely to change. So slowly but surely they will be deployed on more buildings over time though it's like going to be fifty or more years before they provide even twenty five percent of our energy. That's because of the cost and the distribution issue.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
and who do you suppose will pay for the cleanup of coal pollution?