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Carbon Intensity is Falling in Industrial, Electric Power Sectors (arstechnica.com)
Over the last seven years, the electrical power sector has gone from being one of the most carbon-emitting sectors of the American economy per unit of fuel consumed to one of the least carbon-emitting sectors. From a report on ArsTechnica: That's according to new data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Despite the good news, the EIA's numbers show that, since 1975, the carbon emissions of the US transportation sector per unit of fuel used has hardly changed at all. The EIA measured relative emissions across the US economy as "carbon intensity -- an average of the amount of carbon any sector gives off as it consumes different kinds of fuel. The measurements were applied to five sectors of the US economy: transportation, commercial, residential, electric, and industrial.
"Per unit of fuel used"
What exactly is the expected result when the fuel is the same and the efficiency of the heat engine is already at or near the practical limit? As long as the fuel used is gasoline or diesel, there will be a practical limit to how far this can go. If they had picked 1930 as their arbitrary date they would get different results. If we all switched our cars to CNG, we'd have much higher "intensity", if we used coal it would be lower. Not sure what the point is.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The only reason why it's falling is because they count renewables as "fuel". So of course per unit of "fuel" consumed (and remember, solar radiation count as "fuel"), they emit less CO2. It doesn't mean the process of CO2 emitting thermal power plants actually improved.
Natural gas has been so cheap that power plants switched to it even they didn't have to.
There is no, nor has there ever been a "war on coal." That is a lie started by Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
Coal's decline is 100% caused by the free markets.
Over the last seven years, the electrical power sector has gone from being one of the most carbon-emitting sectors of the American economy per unit of fuel consumed to one of the least carbon-emitting sectors.
Have no fear, the Good'ol US of A is about to change that! Hooraaa!!
Carbon per unit of fuel used... well DUH, of course it hasn't changed. The fuel is the same. Gasoline has the same amount of carbon in it today that it did 50 years ago. Using this metric they can completely ignore improvements in fuel economy and reductions in fuel used per passenger-mile, which have been ENORMOUS over the reporting period.
Liars, cheats, and scoundrels, they are.
With the next couple of years, we will see the transportation sector drop in emissions, a great deal.
Tesla is forcing 1 major car maker to switch (BMW), and the others will be forced to follow suit in about 2-3 years. However, by 2020, about 1/3 to 1/2 of new cars in America will likely be EVs. In addition, car sales in America will have dropped a great deal simply because nobody paying above $25K will want to buy an ICE, while those below 25K, will simply buy the one time expensive now used ICE cars that will be going for less than 10K for a 2-4 year old car.
Add to that the fact that Burlington Northern is in the process of switching ALL of their engines to nat gas, which they will have done in less than 5 years, will drop 5-6% of America's diesel use. Yup. Diesel useage is already going down, and will go down by about 1% a year. Then as the electric semis jump in from Tesla, that will by 2024, bring diesel down 1-5% a year, depending on how good tesla does.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
While the summary says "amount of carbon any sector gives off as it consumes different kinds of fuel", TFA elaborates - what they are measuring is kilograms of CO2 per million BTUs used. So you can see that the electrical sector is moving towards a lower CO2 mix. Interestingly, the industrial sector is also lowering CO2, and the article credits this to wider use of biofuels which don't get counted as net CO2 contributions.
That coal does no one any good just lieing there in the ground.
...when you consider that wind/solar are getting something like 400x the subsidies per megawatt hour that coal, oil, and ng are receiving.
-Styopa
Their metric is "kg of CO2 per million BTUs of fuel"?
"electricity sector has shown the most change in the last decade ... EIA attributes this to increasing amounts of nuclear, wind, hydroelectric, and solar power"
How much "fuel" goes into wind, hydro and solar? If it's zero fuel in, zero carbon out, how can it improve the "carbon intensity" of the electrical power sector? Neither the ars article nor the eia.gov website really explains this. My *guess* is that they are taking the electricity output of renewables in kWh, converting that to BTUs, calling that the amount of "fuel" in and considering the CO2 output '0'.
"the carbon emissions of the US transportation sector per unit of fuel used has hardly changed at all."
If renewables produce zero carbon output but use a non-zero amount of "fuel" in electricity generation, how can they compare that to transportation without considering fuel efficiency? Wouldn't it be more accurate to talk about transportation in terms of how much "fuel" is used to move a particular amount of mass over a particular distance? It takes a certain amount of BTUs to move 1kg of mass 1km. If the transportation sector can move the same amount of mass over the same distances with a fraction of the fuel, it hardly seems fair to claim that the "carbon intensity" is unchanged since 1975.
Carbon intensity is not efficiency, which is what you seem to be interested in.
Carbon intensity is, instead, a measure of where the energy comes from: not how efficiently it is used; but, how much of the energy comes from oxidizing carbon instead of from some other source.
If you divide carbon intensity (carbon per million BTUs of energy) by the efficiency (amount of produce product per million BTUs of energy) you would get a measure of the carbon emitted per unit of product. So the carbon intensity is one factor in the greenhouse emissions, but not the only factor. It's the factor that accounts for the fuel type.
... and, no, don't blame me for the silly units of kilograms of carbon per million BTUs; I didn't invent them.
Basically every carbon atom that goes into your tank comes out the tailpipe as soot, CO2, and a very smalll quantity (these days) of unburned alkanes. Since that means that the CO2 emitted per unit consumed by the engine is approximately constant...
No, it's not constant. Carbon intensity is the amount of carbon emitted per unit energy (not per unit carbon). If you're burning hydrogen, your carbon intensity is zero. If you're burning anthracite, your carbon intensity is 104. If you're burning natural gas, your carbon intensity is halfway in between.
Carbon intensity is a measure of what's in your fuel. Basically, it tells you how much carbon was in the fuel producing your energy.
The reference is seen by clicking the link in Ars Technica article linked in the summary, here: https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
(as you point out, carbon produced in the supply chain should also, logically, be included).
...when you consider that wind/solar are getting something like 400x the subsidies per megawatt hour that coal, oil, and ng are receiving.
Depends on how you count subsidies. Typical subsidies quoted for fossil fuel production are quoted at $27 billion per year (http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2014/07/OCI_US_FF_Subsidies_Final_Screen.pdf ), and more for transporting the fuel. Much more, of course, if you count the cost of providing security in the Middle East, which many people think we only do because of the oil. https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
Specifically, it measures carbon intensity, which is a measurement of how much carbon is in the fuel-- basically, it's talking about the fuel source, not the end use. If that doesn't happen to be what you're interested in that, fine enough, but it is not "meaningless".
And the environmental cost of ripping out 100 years worth of gasoline delivery infrastructure and replacing it with "something else"...
If there's any hundred year old infrastructure still in use, I expect we should rip it out and replace it with something else.
In sane countries like the US, coal is not a 4-letter expletive but a source of energy; the workers are given greater respect in the US versus being written off completely in coal-phobic countries.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
MsMash, please no more progressive dribble. Why don't you post these as submissions and get people to vote on them?
Actually, it isn't a retarded measure, you just need to understand what it is sayig. Basically it says that our advances in internal combustion technology have made a negligible difference in the amount of carbon emitted while burning petroleum products, or in application terms, technology woun't make petroleum based ICEs much cleaner.
No it does not say that AT ALL.
What it says is that internal combustion engines don't sequester the carbon from the fuel. Essentially every bit of it is burned to carbon dioxide and emitted into the atmosphere.
The transportation sector has made LOTS of progress with respect to emitting less carbon per passenger mile or ton-mile of cargo (even though "carbon" is not the target of most of the improvements). Engines are more efficient and mileage is greater. Some of the fleet is being switched over to electricity, which doesn't emit any carbon from fuel - at least at the vehicle. More of it is running lower-carbon-per-unit-energy fuel, such as natural gas.
But if you insist on measuring carbon emission against unit-of-fuel-consumed, for any given fuel type you will NEVER see ANY CHANGE. A given amount of a given type of fuel will contain a given amount of carbon, and it will all be emitted as the fuel is used.
Nyah!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So when the entire world runs on electricity provided by solar cells, and there are no white men left alive, what will the liberals hate next. Where is the bold new country they can turn their smug rightful sense of superiority against.
People need something to struggle against. When injustice, and CO2 have been conquered, who will be the new enemy? Pepsi Cola?
and the reason people have bought bigger vehicles (and thus not helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions) as fuel efficiency increased is because governments did not have the mental acuity and testicular fortitude to increase gas taxes as fuel efficiency increased, which would have led to people having the same cost as before for operating a vehicle of the same size as before, so they would have stuck with the smaller vehicles they were happy enough with before (and are still happy with in most other countries in the world.)
If you want to use efficiency gains for environmental benefit, you must increase the cost per unit of the input fuel at a rate equal to the efficiency gains. That reduces the consumption of the fuel in the economy and the emissions, and has no negative impact on utility. It's so logical that it has no chance in hell of ever being adopted as government policy.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I'm sure some of the people replying to this don't understand how we measure emissions, or renewables content per unit produced, or how you deal with efficiency improvements (for a process) versus total usage.
Let's assume you all took decent 400 and 500 level college courses in these subject areas, and realized that the electrical grid was powered by fairly carbon-intensive (or GHG-creating or "polluting") methods until quite recently.
But under PURPA, electrical energy providers (utilities) have to buy excess cheap energy from renewables if they are market spot at a lower price point than non-renewables. This means that, if the sun is shining, you have to buy the really really cheap solar PV energy being produced, even if you don't want to (because the sun will go down in a few hours). This market force helps Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of Capitalism resist the massive extraction, processing, and contractual subsidies for fossil fuels so that renewables are, not just in theory, but in practice, cheaper than fossil fuels.
And every time we build another solar PV plant or wind turbine, and it's cranking out power, you have to buy it. So we pay for it, so we build more. It's the virtuous circle of capitalism. And it cares nothing for your ideology. It just crushes the coal and spits it out as trash. Which it is.
Thanks for playing. Oh, and yes, Pepsi and Coke both use artificially lowered water costs and crop costs to make their colored sugar water with massive government subsidies, so they are next. It's either that or turn off the taps that give you water to drink and shower with.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
to quote:
"Although burning biomass releases carbon into the atmosphere, the EIA doesnâ(TM)t count those emissions as energy-related CO2 emissions because most kinds of biofuel absorb CO2 from the atmosphere as growing plants."
Why does this not apply to "fossil fuels"? The carbon in fossil fuels was absorbed by plants from the atmosphere, just on a somewhat larger timescale.
And fossil fuels *are* a renewable resource. The timescale is just rather long. (Actually, one ought to classify "fossil fuels" as solar-power biomass, since that is what it is.)
Conversely, Solar power is not renewable. Once all the energy from the themonuclear fission/fusion reactions in the sun has been released, it will not be renewed -- again though, the timescale is somewhat long.
I have to masturbate onto a model of a coal mine just to get relief.
Solar and wind kill the planet with their manufacture, and nobody cares. In addition, the favored sources don't provide the reliability and ease of hydrocarbons.
Coal/Oil? All you need is a spark.
Solar/Wind? You have to consume energy and materials before you even get to having a chance at energy production.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.