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?"

Comments

Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost?

[Firethorn]

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.

Re:Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost?

[Overzeetop]

We need multiple sources. I like solar from a purist standpoint: it's the primary source for all energy on earth save geothermal and nuclear (though it could technically be responsible for those, we'll ignore that). Still, I think solar conversion to electricity is still a long way from long term commerical viability. (yes, it's been done, but I don't see anybody making a killing in solar farms, despite the energy source being free)

Nuclear has the advantage of being cheap (at least, according to my electric bill, it's less than half the cost of coal per kWh)
Solar has the advantage of being great for A/C induced peaking loads
NG is very good for peaking loads which are not concurrent with solar generation

Of course hydroelectric is great for peaking, too - especially if practiced like France and Switzerland. The Swiss buy power from the French (nuclear) during off-peak and use it to pump water into dammed lakes, then generate power through those dams during peak periods and sell it back to the French. The challenege is that there are only so many areas which can be powered this way do to the need for proper topography.

Re:Carbon to Hydrogen Ratio

[TooMuchToDo]

The price of natural gas is extremely low currently ($4-5/per million BTU) due to the economic recession. If the economy were to pick back up, the price would rise quickly, thereby cancelling out a great deal of the economic benefit:

http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/energy-prices/

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Re:CO2 not a pollutant, NG has more greenhouse eff

[Firethorn]

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.