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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
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Natural Gas is mostly Methane. Since methane has the smallest ratio of carbon to hydrogen at 2 carbons, per 6 hydrogens, it is the best hydrocarbon to burn if you are trying to reduce carbon emissions.
Yeah, other sources produce no carbon, but they can't compete with Natural Gas's price.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
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.
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
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.
Yep, right now you see natural gas electrical generation at peaking plants as they can come on-line very quickly.
For jump starting a conventional plant that would be called "black start capability" as most power plants do not have enough electrical generating capacity to bring the plant on-line. Natural gas powered plants and hydroelectric are also referred to as facilities that are "black start".
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Watch Gasland.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Please mod parent up. Gasland is a documentary on natural gas and completely relevant to this discussion.
Better check your sources...
Natural gas: 53.6 MJ/kg
Anthracite Coal: 32.5 MJ/kg
Bituminous Coal: 24 MJ/Kg
Natural gas has around twice the energy per gram of coal, depending on whether you're looking at Anthracite or Bituminous.
Now, it's tilted way the other way if you look at volume - Coal is 72.4 or 20 MJ/Liter, vs .0364 MJ/L or 9 if you compress it.
As John pointed out, Coal is mainly carbon. 'Natural Gas' is mainly Methane, or CH4.
C+O2 -> Energy +CO2
CH4 + 2 O2 -> 2 Energy + 2 H2O + CO2.
Add in that NG plants can be more efficient than coal plants, 60+% vs ~30%, and you get a LOT less carbon dioxide from NG than coal.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
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).
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
All taxicabs in the main cities in India run on Compressed Natural Gas. So do the public transport buses in many cities. It takes 800$ to convert a regular petrol burning to car to run on either petrol or CNG. Some individual owned cars all have also been converted. CNG prices are around 60% of petrol prices in India, so it takes a year or two (depending on how much you drive) to break even on your 800$ conversion cost.
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.
From TFA:
That doesn't invalidate it, but it's important for readers to know and should probably be in the summary.
Not trying to sound like that singularity-guy Kurzweil here, but if you look at how quickly solar power grows it does look very promising.
People complain about solar hype, but show me any other sector of the global economy that grows by more than 40% every year for over a decade.
If there is such a sector, it is surely also extremely hyped. Like mobile phones?
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.
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make install -not war
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
It proposes increased CNG use while ignoring the energy density and transportation issues.
It's among the easiest of fuels to transport as you can pipe it around easily and it doesn't have nearly as great a problem with groundwater contamination as heavier hydrocarbons. The energy density argument is rather bogus too; gas power plants are more efficient these days than oil or coal plants as they're run at much higher temperatures, and you don't transport it in the same way. One of the main ways in which the UK has reduced its carbon output over the past 2 decades has been by switching to producing electricity using gas, and this is despite the amount of electrical power required not decreasing (I think it's increased).
You would think, based on this, that natural gas is the be-all, end-all of fuels and is damn near perfect in every way. While it is lower carbon than coal, and slightly lower than oil, this is absolutely not the case. Effectively, this focuses on only the best aspects of gas and only the worst of nuclear and every other energy source. it uses the best case for gas and worst case for all others
OTOH, they can point to real case studies where the benefits are directly quantifiable. The technology exists now, and has done for decades; the kinks in it have been ironed out. It's definitely practical. (It also doesn't preclude investing in other technologies as well.)
Now, this should not surprise anyone: the major funding for this came almost entirely from the gas industry, who has recently been using heavy PR to cultivate a much "greener" image than it really is entitled to. The major funding and supporting agency is "The American Clean Skies Foundation." This foundation is funded almost exclusively by Chesapeake Energy corporation - one of the largest natural gas producers in the US. YES, THAT'S RIGHT - THIS WAS BOUGHT AND PAID FOR BY A GAS COMPANY
You'd rather it was funded by the nuclear industry? Or the RIAA maybe? (Powering America on the burning ambitions of a generation of artists!!) Seriously, while you're absolutely right to be careful of what they say, you can't just reject it out of hand because there actually is evidence that it is better (i.e., more flexible, cheaper, more efficient per ton of CO2, etc. There's quite a few metrics.) The companies involved think they can make money (duh!) and serve some other goals at the same time. To claim that their natural financial interest makes them ineligible to say anything on the topic just marks you out as one of the Loony Left (or perhaps the Raving Right; I've lost track of which part of the political spectrum is currently claiming the forefront of rabid anti-corporatism at the moment).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
wind, the need for 100% backup of generating capacity
SOURCE
I'll give you some sources to the contrary. please read.
http://www.no-fuel.org/index.php?id=242
http://130.226.56.153/rispubl/reports/ris-r-1608_186-195.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_power_source#European_super_grid
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
You are right, of course. Solar power is not cost effective. Government subsidies for green tech distort the market, and are unsustainable. The only sane thing to do is wait for Ayn Rand to descend from the heavens and tell us what to do (I obviously can't predict what that will be, but I bet it'll involve income tax cuts for the upper brackets). And none of that matters anyway, because there's no such thing as global warming.
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.
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
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
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.
Well... yeah. If you ignore the externalities (like pollution, or dependence on foreign oil), then solar is not cost effective (and neither is wind or biodiesel or any other renewable source). That's the whole point of subsidies and the other stuff you mention; the free market doesn't account for externalities, that's why they're externalities.
If you bank all your money on solar power,
Who said anything about "all" the money? I think a diversified approach would work best.
I also think that a carbon tax would be a much better solution than subsidies for particular technologies, since it would encourage people to use the most effective emission-reducing measures, rather than the ones that happen to be in vogue with the regulators. But it doesn't look like we'll get that anytime soon.
I think the term was...oh, yeah:
C L I M A T E G A T E?
People in this group are natural thinkers. Are we also natural forgettors?
Al Gore shows the two, seemingly identical charts on roll-arounds because he wants to hide a one fact, and create another: that CO2, per the fossil record and no one's opinion, actually COOLS the planet, not heats it. The 800-year delay is the data that gets lost because they're on different charts. After the ocean has been "hot" 800 years, the CO2 in the ocean is released in great quantity and resolves the problem.
Then we have all that "here's how we make this information up" discussions from a dozen various "science" outlets.
So who GIVES A SHIT about tuning for zero-carbon? I think we have much bigger problems.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
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.
Re-read the DOE site.
Annual usage is ~20 TRILLION cubic feet. - 22,834,120 Million cubic feet is 22.8 Trillion.
Our proven reserves are only about 8 years worth, extended to ~50 years if you assume level use and that the unproven reserves(IE guesses) are accurate.
I don't read AC A human right
Sorry, but Rand's philosophy is all about not having people tell her what to do. Other than that, it was pretty much her telling people what to do. Its a subtle distinction, but it does illustrate a common characteristic of people who identify themselves as Libertarians.
Mod parent up.
Although to add more detail than the AC had:
I haven't had an opportunity to read the MIT report, but the article summary indicates that it is describing a solution to lower carbon emissions.
We need to see the forest through the trees - who cares if it reduces carbon emissions if it poisons our water? There are numerous cases of groundwater aquifers becoming undrinkable shortly after gas drilling (specifically modern hydraulic fracturing drilling) began. The gas industry continues to defend themselves by saying there is "no conclusive evidence" - But how is it that multiple towns have perfectly drinkable water for decades and then the water becomes undrinkable (saturated with pollutants including methane itself - some people near drilling sites can light their tapwater on fire.) within a year or two of drilling operations commencing?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?