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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?"
Well, I've been an advocate of replacing coal power with nuclear power for quite some time, but even I'll admit that NG generally results in less than half the CO2 emissions for the energy production, and relative to a reactor is far cheaper to build. And nuclear promises to be cheaper than solar/wind for the amount of electricity produced.
However, you need quite a lot of it. NG, while cheap in many areas, makes me hesitant because I believe that when we go 'full bore' we'd exhaust our supplies fairly quickly and have increased expenses. Thus I'd like to see nuclear electricity production while we keep NG for heating homes and chemical manufacturing. Heck, you'd have to be rather round-about to make steel using nuclear energy, you can use NG heat directly.
I don't read AC A human right
My first question on any study is who paid for it? That said, natural gas is a better alternative to oil and coal. The real problem with alternatives like solar, wind and to a lesser extent nuclear is the cost per Kwh. I can by electricity generated by coal, oil and gas between $1-2 dollars per Kwh. If I replaced my electric with solar panels and batteries, my cost would be $4-5 dollars per Kwh. Tax credits reduce that cost, but they are still being paid by someone. Natural gas and nuclear are excellent bridge technologies while alternatives are brought down in cost.
Burn more fossil fuel to lower CO2 emissions?
And this:
Manufacturers have been trying to introduce natural gas cars for decades. The technology is there, but nobody bought them and nobody will.
The price of natural gas is coupled to the price of oil. Look at the economic wars being fought over natural gas in Europe right now. No way will this be cheaper than other fossil fuels.
Wow, burning methane (CH4) produces less carbon emmisssion than longer chain hydrocarbons, and especially less than coal which is ALL carbon.
I guess nobody ever thought about that before.
But hang on, what if we got our energy from sources that don't have any carbon. Nuclear, Hydro, wind and geothhermal. Or even nuclear fusion. Until we get our own fusion generators going, we can use the one thats 93 million miles away.
We will not burn up all of the natural gas deposits for centuries to come. There is much more methane (natural gas) in hydrates than in all of the possible traditional natural gas reservoirs worldwide.
If you have been watching the news regarding the oil well disaster down in the Gulf of Mexico they have problems with hydrates condense out of the expanding column of oil and gas that forms hydrate ice crystals and blocks up the stack. (remember basic physics about expansion and temperature).
Hydrate deposits could be exploited in a controlled manner with the modest introduction of heat into a deep deposit to liberate the gas. To stop a well from producing, remove the heat.
Tisha Hayes
In North America, conventional natural gas reserves have been in decline for a while, and it's not expected that trend will reverse as unconventional sources (shale gas and coal-bed methane) are brought on stream. There are also legitimate concerns about groundwater contamination in association with shale gas and coal-bed methane projects, although it can be done safely if the work is done properly. Investment in natural gas will continue because it is a good option: it's clean, has less CO2 output per unit energy than other fossil fuels, there is substantial infrastructure built to deliver it, there's a decent reserve already, and even as North American supplies continue to dwindle, there is also quite a bit available world-wide that can be delivered via liquified natural gas terminals at sea ports.
However, supply of natural gas is still going to peak eventually like oil will. It's a temporary solution. So investment in renewable/sustainable energy sources should be the focus, and, no, policy should not shift from that. Natural gas certainly doesn't need any special financial encouragement because it's already an economically profitable option.
Switching to natural gas is at best a temporary solution, buying us a few decades or a century at most. Fission can buy us many hundreds or even a few thousands of years. Of the technologies currently available, only solar offers a real long term solution for the bulk of our energy requirements.
Only the title. Having read the review of the study (not the 100 page study itself) it seems that the study is a comparison of the various forms of energy production in the U.S. The study shows that natural gas is comparatively the cheapest bridge source for electricity production in terms of both cost (dollars) to produce and cost (in CO2, etc) to the environment. So my question was, why the focus on natural gas at all in the title? It may seem like a small thing, but in terms of presentation to the public it's huge. The title they used reads like an ad for the gas industry. Whereas, they could have chosen an unbiased title to give the study more credibility.
http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/energy-prices/
So you use more natural gas, less oil, producing slightly less carbon, but poison a lot of groundwater. People are forced to import water from places that aren't poisoned, requiring expensive water transport, burning more hydrocarbon fuel negating any possible benefit from switching to natural gas :-/
I guess hydraulic fracturing is the culprit, not natural gas, and the exemption for natural gas from being regulated can be overturned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing#The_FRAC_Act_of_2009 Let's hope politicians get this one right.
I am getting a bit tired of everyone dumping all over coal. Anthracite coal is probably the biggest supply of accessible fuel this country has. If you care about energy independence coal IS part of the picture and should be a big part. Yes there are problems like what to do with the ash but nuclear has the problem of hazardous waste as well; and I am confident both can be solved.
Coal can be used directly for heat in industrial processes as well and does not always have to be first used to generate electricity. You can't do that with hardly any of the renewables. I say put our energy in to figuring out how to scrub and sequester carbon efficiently and burn the heck out of our coal supplies; can't use them up if we try.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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CO2 is not a pollutant. It is in fact essential for the Earth's life cycle. Plants would not survive without it.
Water is not a pollutant, it is also essential in the earth's life cycle. We wouldn't survive without it. It still kills tens of thousands a year from overabundance.
I'll note that my reasoning behind getting rid of coal plants has always been more due to the pollution they produce than the CO2 they release.
No, the reason people are going for natural gas is the typical myopic management of today. Building a natural gas power plant is very cheap, even if the fuel isn't. Since people plan everything on the short term today, what matters is the low initial capital costs, even if you have to screw your customers in the long term.
It's also easy. Nuclear everyone's afraid of even though it has fewer deaths involved with it than pretty much any other industry, and coal is dirty. So getting approval for a natural gas plant is relatively quick and easy.
I don't read AC A human right
Onsite renewables like wind and solar (especially solar thermal for water heating) don't need any transmission/distribution infrastructure changes to work.
Where's your evidence that scaling up renewables like wind, solar, geothermal makes them no cleaner than coal or oil? Or creates anything like the dirty products of nuke plants?
Yes, the future will probably have more nuclear and slightly less dirty exhaustible fuels like oil, coal and gas. But that's because those dirty old industries are still favored by subsidies and momentum. Not by physics or economics. The renewables are easier to scale, and the factors keeping their legacy competitors propped up are being steadily removed or overmatched by the new industries. We don't have to like the old stuff, and we don't have to keep it, either.
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make install -not war
You don't need Ayn Rand or anything descending from the heavens to know that cost effectiveness is what is the issue. To date, solar simply isn't cost effective without subsidies, artificial inflation of other energy sources and the threat of other technology being regulated out of the markets. This also needs no tax cuts or anything because it's a simple fact of life. If you bank all your money on solar power, you will be a broke mother'fsker if the country moves to natural gas for it's carbon sequestering plans as solar will wither away with your savings.
Look, it doesn't take a genius to see the outside forces at play here. But it does take a fool to ignore them in order to chastise your political enemies.