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Study Finds Methane Leaks Negate Benefits of Natural Gas-Powered Vehicles
Lasrick writes "Coral Davenport at the NY Times reports on a study to be published on Friday: '...a surprising new report...concludes that switching buses and trucks from traditional diesel fuel to natural gas could actually harm the planet's climate.' The report apparently documents that the leaks of methane that occur when drilling for natural gas more than make up for the climate change benefits of using natural gas as a transportation fuel. The report will be published Friday in the journal Science."
The title implies that we should abandon gas as an alternative to diesel/petrol.
This is done by falsely implying that pollution due to methane leaks are an inherit part of the drilling process.
Instead, what we should really do is improve the drilling techniques to avoid/minimize leakage.
Sigs are for the weak.
I'm expecting a report any time now regarding hydrogen-fueled vehicles, and leaks of hydrogen. See, ozone and hydrogen are hypergolic; they react on contact, so each ozone molecule that reacts is no longer there. Net result, because hydrogen naturally rises to the stratosphere where the Earth's ozone layer is, hydrogen leaks could lead to a bigger ozone hole than the chlorocarbons made....
Being able to populate the planet with 8 billion people that are all able to travel at greater than walking speed is bound to have an impact.
You can bet your booty that if we invented a way to power our vehicles with unicorn farts, in some way the release of so many unicorn farts would, yet again, harm the environment.
Basically it's not about having no impact but about distributing and minimizing it.
By the way, what exactly is the thought behind replacing one fossil fuel with another?
The study concludes that there is already about 50 percent more methane in the atmosphere than previously estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency, a signal that more methane is leaking from the natural gas production chain than previously thought.
So the EPA just came up with a guess, and now that they're wrong they blame it on leaky pipes? Methane is produced by many other sources besides drilling, including natural plant growth. Considering how poorly the CO2 alarmist models have matched actual global temperatures, the EPA definitely needs to study and understand the cause prior to enacting more regulations that will jack up my heating bill even further.
The article places blame on natural gas drilling and production for methane leaks, saying it negates the emissions advantages of using it as a transportation fuel.
So we only use it as a transportation fuel, and abiding the wisdom of this study we will stop producing it, since it isn't used for heating homes, as an industrial fuel or used in power plants?
I would guess that vehicle fueling is the smallest category of use of natural gas and even if we abandoned it totally as a vehicle fuel it would not change the amount of natural gas produced. So going back to diesel in all the vehicles that now use it would be a net gain in greenhouse gas production, since there would be almost no change in methane leaks from gas production.
... in out atmosphere , whereas the CO2 released from burning it hangs around for hundreds if not thousands of years until its reabsorbed.
(And yes I am aware that the escaped methane ends up as CO2 after those 10 odd years , but its a tiny amount compared to the amount we release by burning).
Does anyone get the impression that our civilization is doomed? Short of finding a way of making practical nuclear fusion reactors work, something that has been always "30 years from now" since the time I was in middle school forty years ago, there seems to be no solution to our future energy needs that don't do evil things to our planet's climate that eventually will doom our civilization.
You are 100% correct no matter what the source of energy. The course we are on is unsustainable at our current rate of energy consumption. Tom Murphy's excellent essay "Galactic-Scale Energy" made the case rather well (and it deserves its own Slashdot entry if it hasn't already had one -- I'm too lazy too look it up). About 1400 years from now (which is less time into the future than we are from the fall of the Roman Empire) we will be using more energy than is currently produced by the entirety of the sun if we don't back off on the growth of our energy consumption, which is showing no signs of easing up. It doesn't matter if the source of the energy is fossil fuels, nuclear fusion, or some future magic, the earth cannot host that amount of energy consumption. The planet will have reached its thermodynamic limit long before then.
When you see those clean burning logos, that means no black plumes from diesel engines. That is good for people's health. It is not too surprising that there are no climate benefits. Part of the advantage for natural gas over coal is that combined cycle gas turbines are about 60% efficient while coal plants are 30 to 40% efficient. For the internal combustion engines in buses, the efficiency is about the same for both diesel and natural gas. And, diesel also has more hydrogen than coal in its makeup. But, producing a methane fuel cell is probably easier than producing a diesel fuel cell so natural gas buses have the potential to be more climate friendly than diesel buses sooner. Add that methane may be a useful hydrogen carrier for hydrogen fuel cells and the development of a methane infrastructure for trucks and buses is likely a smart move.
I think you're right but I think the principal problem is population growth.
It seems to me that most of our problems are driven by the excess billions of people we support.
There are a fair number of people who advocate a more off the grid approach, with a lot of emphasis on localized, smaller scale agriculture and light industry.
Basically you spend half your time on small-scale agriculture and the rest on local light industry. This removes a lot of the transportation and mass production for a consumer economy energy consumption.
The downside is you live like it's 1850, and I'm not sure how readily I'm willing to give up modern medicine.
This wonderful research was brought to you by: (source) The study, conducted by the University of Texas and sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund and nine petroleum companies,. Main idea there was the gas leaks from fracking sites is more than estimated by EPA but much less than environmental groups.
One of the minor finding of this research was, compared to liquid hydrocarbons, the gaseous hydrocarbon burns cleanly and produces less carbon dioxide, but leaks more in the present day (paraphrased and emphasis by me) infrastructure. One would think the right thing to do is to plug the damned leaks, especially because the leakers are distributed according to power rule. (nothing to do with political power, power rule is a statistical term). Like 80% of crime committed by 20% of criminals, or 80% income earned by 20% of the employed, 80% of the leaks come from 20% of the leakers and 1% of the leakers basically account for 50% of all leaks. So it would be very cost effective to go after the leaks, plug it and make natural gas better than liquids as transportation fuel.
The immobile consumers of energy (offices, homes, factories) have alternatives to fossil fuels to varying degrees, mostly in the form of renewable electricity. But the transportation sector (except of electrified rail) relies totally on fossil fuels. Planes burn kerosene, no alternatives in sight. Trucks burn diesel some vague alternatives for delivery loops on the horizon, none for long distance haulers, yet. Diesel locomotives drag a long chain of LPG , CNG rail cars, but don't have the ability to use one of them as the fuel tank. But if the natural gas prices keep dropping, we can expect them to take a look. The railroads phased out all the steam locomotives and switched diesel in just one decade in 1950s. Cars have some alternatives within striking distance. No alternatives to fossil fules in sea cargo side either. The dependency of transportation sector on fossil fuels is not likely to be shaken for considerable future. Taking the effort to plug the leaks and switching to gaseous hydrocarbons instead of liquid hydrocarbons is the most viable thing to do to tackle climate change.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
People have been selling the idea that our civilization is doomed for centuries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Quibble: Ten years is the mean lifetime of methane in the atmosphere. The half-life is even less, about seven years.
The major sink is reaction with hydroxyl (OH-) radicals in the upper atmosphere. The second biggest sink is consumption by soil bacteria.
More info here.