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.

Comments

Re:What a retarded measure

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it has fallen. Replacing coal with nat gas generation (which is by far the biggest factor), tends to do that.

Re:Misleading data

[dj245]

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.

If you look at the source, it seems fairly straightforward that they are simply multiplying the amount of fuel used by the amount of CO2 emitted per BTU of that fuel. That analysis if flawed in several ways, but saying that renewables are affecting this in a large way is not correct. Solar + Wind only produced 22,490 Million Kilowatt-hours in January 2017, or 6.5% of the total electricity produced in January 2017. Hydro and Geothermal production rate hasn't increased significantly in decades, so I will exclude them for now.

The big driver of this reduced carbon intensity is the shift from coal to natural gas for electricity production. In 2016, coal produced 1,240,089 Million Kilowatt-hours of electricity, down from a high of around 2,000,000 Million Kilowatt-hours in 2005-2007. The last time coal electricity production was this low was in 1985, and it will probably be even lower in 2018.

Meanwhile, natural gas electricity production was 1,380,293 Million Kilowatt-hours in 2016, the highest ever, and significantly increased from the 291,946 Million Kilowatt-hours produced in 1985. It will probably be even higher in 2018. Natural gas produces less CO2 than coal, so this is the major factor here.

It is worth noting that nuclear power production in January 2017 was 73,121 Million Kilowatt-hours, or 21.2% of total production. Demand has been basically flat at 4 Billion Giga-watt-hours per year since 2004. Natural gas and renewables are slurping up the slack in coal, but natural gas is a much more dominant factor.