MIT Says Natural Gas Best To Lower Carbon Emissions 284
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?"
Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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It would be possible to build a power plant which was multi fuel or even convert an existing one to a different fuel. Steam turbines don't care what the source of heat to produce the steam is.
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It would be possible to build a power plant which was multi fuel or even convert an existing one to a different fuel. Steam turbines don't care what the source of heat to produce the steam is.
That's true for conventional steam turbines, but the really efficient natural gas plants are single fuel - they're built for NG. They use turbines that are a touch more like jet engines to help increase their thermal efficiency to over 50%.
You can convert a coal plant almost directly, but then you're stuck with the plant's existing ~30% efficiency.
Re:Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most modern natural gas turbines are "combustion turbines", which means they don't generate steam to turn the turbine*. Instead they use the hot exhaust to directly turn the turbines. The modern designs I have worked with generally have a "duel fuel" option, allowing them to run off of diesel fuel as well. They can also run off of syngas, which is basically the same as natural gas (but synthetic not natural), which is made from coal. And I know of one that was modified to run off of hydrogen (it was at a refinery that produced hydrogen as a by-product of refining).
Combustion turbines can burn basically anything that is a gas or can be atomized, it is a question of tweaking there combustion settings, comparable to making a car run off alcohol or whatever.
*Most combustion turbines I've work with are "combined cycle" which means they've added a Heat Recovery Steam Generator (HRSG) to boil water from the exhaust of the combustion turbine. The steam is then used to turn a steam turbine generator to produce even more power.
Re:Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
I've got a feeling that we're going to see a lot of energy barter in the future. Equatorial sites have plenty of sunshine. Not saying this is 100% certain but I think it's very conceivable that we see solar harvesting at the equator with power shipped pole-wards by super-conducting transmission lines. Nitrogen is supposed to be rather affordable by cryogenic standards though we might need to see more materials breakthroughs to get the temperature a little higher before this idea becomes fully economical. An
Re:Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Pumped storage is quite an expensive way to do electricity generation; there are considerable inherent losses in the system due to things like friction in pumps. On the other hand, it's the only known-viable large scale energy storage scheme; the other alternatives I've seen articles about (various kinds of batteries, pressurized gas, etc.) are neat but haven't demonstrated at anything like the scale of a pumped storage plant.
And all you need to build one is two lakes/reservoirs close to each other with a big height difference. So, maybe not in most of the Mid-West, but there's got to be plenty of suitable places in the Appalachians or the Cascades. Maybe others too.
Re:Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost? (Score:4, Interesting)
Pumped storage is quite an expensive way to do electricity generation; there are considerable inherent losses in the system due to things like friction in pumps.
90%+ efficiencies are not uncommon in the field. If you want to see inefficiences, try drilling a hole though the earth's crust at semi random locations to tap and process fossil fuels.
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Check your tax bill for the rest of the cost. It's not all bad though: your kids and grandkids will help you out with the cleanup costs.
Re:Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
and who do you suppose will pay for the cleanup of coal pollution?
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I believe that when we go 'full bore' we'd exhaust our supplies fairly quickly and have increased expenses.
Not to worry. My engineers are working on a system of getting the gaseous emissions from folks who eat pizza, Mexican, and drink lots of beer. Part of the plan is to open restaurants where you eat and capture the gas at the same time.
We're also working on a capture of gas from cattle.
Our mottoes are "Fart Powered", "Flatulence For Freedom!", "Passing the Wind and the Bucks" and "Make a Stink. Cut out the Terrorists!"
How can this be? (Score:2)
I admit I have not studied the answer yet. But... the energy release from burning 1 gram of coal is higher than the energy release for burning 1 gram of gas. SO how could it be the gas every beats coal for carbon reduction? I think also that of the two that gases tend to release more methane as well. In which case the greenhouse case is even worse than CO2.
Re:How can this be? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Better check your sources... [wikipedia.org]
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
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Methane clathrate (Score:3, Interesting)
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 c
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We're never going to 'run out' of oil in the traditional sense, but just like with oil, additional sources tend to come from more difficult to extract deposits leading to increased costs.
As such, I hope to retain NG for stuff that natural gas is better at, such as feedstock for chemical production and heating stuff that it's impractical to use nuclear electricity to do so(smelting, for example).
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Look...you mixing it all up!
Natural Gas doesn't pollute as much, they generate 3,000 MWh for 400 Simoleons. (0.13/MWh)
That is not enough power for our cities! I think we would need quite a bit of these plants and of course parks to mitigate the effects! Now if your considering this on a region basis, this shouldn't even be an issue because pollution can disappear over borders completely.
Source [wikia.com]
In the end its all how we zone, not where our power comes from...
Black Start (Score:3, Informative)
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".
Re:Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you have it backwards - the price of NG has to drop below a certain level for them to use it, or the price of electricity has to rise above a certain level.
This is part of why electricity can be expensive in some areas - due to fears about nuclear, and (justified) concern about the pollution of coal, they're pretty much stuck with natural gas. Unfortunately, NG tends to be the cheapest to build a plant for, but the most expensive on fuel - and Natural Gas is one of the more volatile markets.
Re:CO2 not a pollutant, NG has more greenhouse eff (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:CO2 not a pollutant, NG has more greenhouse eff (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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CO2 is not a pollutant. It is in fact essential for the Earth's life cycle. Plants would not survive without it.
You don't seem to understand what a pollutant is. Anything can be a pollutant given sufficient quantities of it. High oxygen environments can cause explosive fires, even though oxygen is essential for animal life. So your argument falls flat on its face. Pollutants are all about quantity. It's not a specific quality that you can wave away through pointing out some beneficial aspect of it.
Meth
Re:CO2 not a pollutant, NG has more greenhouse eff (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Natural gas - dependent upon fuel cost? (Score:4, Interesting)
wait till you're bidding against (subsidized) PG&E to heat your home at 3X the current prices.
I live in Santa Clara, which has its own non-PG&E electric service. (From "local politicians going into the electricity business", as that bitch sneered in the the slick commercials for Prop 16- which would have required 2/3 of all voters to approve of their locality moving away from PG&E. That commercial was on every fucking commercial break last month and the POS almost passed.) Santa Clara charges 8 cents per kWh.
Lawrence Expressway is one block away, separating Santa Clara from Sunnyvale, which is served by PG&E. By my reckoning, electric bills in Sunnyvale are 50% higher, since the PG&E baseline rate is 12 cents per kWh. I don't know what this "3X rate hike" is all about, but I've heard it from other people in surrounding PG&E territory.
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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.
Not a good answer. We need solar or fusion. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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. [gaslandthemovie.com]
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Environmental impact is, in economic terms, all about externalizing costs. Furthermore, like any other cost the *margins* of environmental costs vary with volume and at some point consistently trend upward with scale.
That means that from an environmental economic perspective there is an optimal volume for something like natural gas. If reduce production, the slack is taken up by marginally dirtier sources. If we increase production, we are replacing marginally cleaner sources. At some point we end up lett
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(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 share
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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 [wikipedia.org].
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. [gaslandthemovie.com]
I thought you were talking about something else: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrack [wikipedia.org]
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I grew up on flammable drinking water with no fracking fracking involved!
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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.
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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 mor
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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
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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 [no-fuel.org]
http://130.226.56.153/rispubl/reports/ris-r-1608_186-195.pdf [130.226.56.153]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_power_source#European_super_grid [wikipedia.org]
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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
Summary is BS (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re:Summary is BS (Score:4, Interesting)
I am getting a bit tired of everyone dumping all over coal. Anthracite coal is probably the biggest supply of accessible fuel this country has. If you care about energy independence coal IS part of the picture and should be a big part. Yes there are problems like what to do with the ash but nuclear has the problem of hazardous waste as well; and I am confident both can be solved.
Coal can be used directly for heat in industrial processes as well and does not always have to be first used to generate electricity. You can't do that with hardly any of the renewables. I say put our energy in to figuring out how to scrub and sequester carbon efficiently and burn the heck out of our coal supplies; can't use them up if we try.
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Yes, because the primary concern when discussing potential fuel sources the the next millenium is deciding where to put the fucking apostrophe.
Have you got nothing better to do with your time ?
Who paid for the report? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who paid for the report? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gas and nuclear may have similar costs, but they're hardly alike when it comes to environmental concerns.
Gas still produces CO2, and extraction is messy.
Nuclear produces no emissions, and it takes so little uranium to make a plant that the issues associated with mining are small.
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It may not take a lot of uranium to run a power plant but it takes quite a lot of uranium ore to make a small amount of uranium suitible for a typical power plant. I have relatives who live in a small town that is/was a superfund clean up site due to the uranium mining in the area. Their little town even has it's own hospital due to the resulting cancer rates.
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It may not take a lot of uranium to run a power plant but it takes quite a lot of uranium ore to make a small amount of uranium suitible for a typical power plant. I have relatives who live in a small town that is/was a superfund clean up site due to the uranium mining in the area. Their little town even has it's own hospital due to the resulting cancer rates.
Nuclear is a wide scope that encompasses many types of reactors. Nuclear does not merely include old dirty Light Water Pressurised Reactors, even if you use the words "typical power plant". I would greatly suggest spending an afternoon browsing through the virtually limitless info on the various types of reactors on Wikipedia. For instance Heavy Water Pressurised Reactors like the CANDU design can run from unenriched uranium amongst other fuel sources such as already "spent" fuel that is being stored underg
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"Nuclear produces no emissions"
You've got to be kidding, right? It's a political football just trying to find a state that will take nuclear's "emissions."
Re:Who paid for the report? (Score:5, Informative)
The report is from the MIT Energy Initiative, which counts among its members: BP Technology Ventures, Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Total, Hess.
The Board of Advisors includes: "Tony Hayward Group Chief Executive, BP p.l.c."
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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.
Where did you get those numbers? I guess you made them up, but if that's really what you're paying, you're getting ripped off.
According to this [doe.gov], the average price for residential electricity in the U.S. is 10.86 cents per kWh.
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Capacity would be measured in kW or MW, not in kWh. Capacity is the amount of power that can be produced by the facility at any given time, not the total amount of energy that the facility could produce over its lifetime. Whatever the case, the numbers make no sense as listed in the OP.
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"A major sponsor of the report is the American Clean Skies Foundation, a Washington think tank created and funded by the natural gas industry."
What's with the title? (Score:2)
So, is this just an advertisement for the natural gas industry? Why not title it something like, "The Future of Energy Production in the U.S.'?
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Yes, it's a study. Hopefully, it's a scientific study. Are you too lunkheaded to understand basic scientific method?
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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
Clean Air, Dirty Water (Score:4, Informative)
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? [vanityfair.com]
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yep this was all in Gasland. http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/613/index.html [pbs.org]
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So you use more natural gas, less oil, producing slightly less carbon, but poison a lot of groundwater. People are forced to import water from places that aren't poisoned, requiring expensive water transport, burning more hydrocarbon fuel negating any possible benefit from switching to natural gas :-/
I guess hydraulic fracturing is the culprit, not natural gas, and the exemption for natural gas from being regulated can be overturned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing#The_FRAC_Act_of_2009 [wikipedia.org]
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gas companies should definitely be held accountable for the damage they are causing. I don't see that happening any time soon though...
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Yeah that's another solution. I'm a fan of regulation (sometimes associated with big government and/or socialism). But if these companies and the people involved with the flawed decision-making were really made accountable that would stop the problem too.
Time to get a price on solar panels.
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Cats and dogs living together!
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Hmm? The well water from my grandparents farm in Michigan in the early 80's was flammable. But as far as I know, it had been like that for at least a century.
Carbon to Hydrogen Ratio (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, other sources produce no carbon, but they can't compete with Natural Gas's price.
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It's also not a hydrocarbon nor is it something you can get out of the ground.
Re:Carbon to Hydrogen Ratio (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? Methane is C1H4. Ethane is C2H6.
Re:Carbon to Hydrogen Ratio (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/energy-prices/ [bloomberg.com]
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Your confusing ethane, [wikipedia.org] C2H6, with methane, [wikipedia.org] CH4.
Who'da thunk it (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
There's not one single approach which will work (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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I'd mod you up to 11, if I could
Thanks! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 w
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I'd guess you've never seen or experienced a superinsulated residence.
I guess you've never paid for one. Just because these exist, doesn't make them a good idea. Economically, there are diminishing returns from insulating your house and at some point the cost of insulating a house is going to exceed the value gained. My view is that current insulation of homes in the US is pretty close to that sweet spot. I'm not surprised that Germany is further along. They have a combination of higher real estate prices, longer winters, and ideological distortion of the energy markets that
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And let us not forget that the index also has a weather component, which strictly is a function of loca
did you actually read the article? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Natural gas supply is in decline (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Magnetohydrodynamic generators (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
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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 producin
CNG and India (Score:2, Informative)
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.
The transistion to nat gas should be smooth but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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
report sponsored by Natural Gas industry (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
That doesn't invalidate it, but it's important for readers to know and should probably be in the summary.
In Pennsylvania There Is No Doubt (Score:2)
The latest edition to Pennsylvania's vast natural gas reserves, the Mercellus Shale find, is our only hope in this state to recover from de-investment since the steel industry was obliterated in the 1970s, and the coal industry before that.
Since NatGas prices are now trading at obscenely low levels, I'm hoping for more expansion (and driller taxation) in my state to at least make up somewhat for 30 years of economic decline, and the expectation is that NatGas prices now have nowhere to go but back up after
No coal? Not likely (Score:2)
Conventional coal is no longer a major source of power generation in the United States.
Yeah right. The US is to coal what Saudi Arabia is to oil. I cannot conceive of any scenario by which coal will not be a major player for the next 40 years. I'd love to be wrong but I seriously doubt I am.
Natural Gas (Score:2)
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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?
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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.
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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
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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
Renewables Advantages Over Exhaustibles (Score:4, Insightful)
What is "significant impact"? Renewables already constituted 7.4% of US energy consumption [doe.gov] 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 [wikipedia.org] (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.
Re:Renewables Advantages Over Exhaustibles (Score:4, Informative)
The DOE table you linked to runs from 2003-2007, as shown below. Not sure where you got the '08 number. One surprise for me at least, is that from '06 to '07, the percentage actually decreased. Looking at the chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USRenewableElectricity.jpg) that you provided, shows a continued downward swing in that percentage, which is likely due to our constantly increasing demand. One other thing that needs to be made clear is that hydroelectric currently makes up 5.74% of all the renewable energy in the U.S...and I suspect that won't be increasing since there's so much opposition to dams. So, if you take out hydro, the amount of energy that renewables are producing is much smaller.
Energy Source 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Renewable Energy 6.150 6.261 6.424 6.909 6.813
I attempted to look further into the comments about CA, but some of the references on Wikipedia didn't work. http://www.eesi.org/publications/Fact%20Sheets/EC_Fact_Sheets/Factoid20.pdf [eesi.org] for example.
Re:Renewables Advantages Over Exhaustibles (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, the information you link to undermines your case.
The most significant source of renewable power in the United States is hydroelectric power (it accounts for 67% of all renewable power in the US). The amount of hydroelectric power produced in 2008 is the same as it was in 1969 [wikipedia.org].
From 2003 to 2008, the percentage of total power derived from renewables [doe.gov] went from 6.26% to 6.70% - an increase of 7% over the course of 5 years. In terms of total energy, the only two renewable sources that showed big gains were biofuels (went from 4/10th of 1% to 1%) and wind (went from 1/10 of 1% to 3/10 of 1%). The biofuel component is mostly ethanol, which is highly controversial in terms of land use and energy return and unlikely to get significantly larger any time soon.
If you look beyond those 5 years, it's far more discouraging. Look at that hydroelectic chart [wikipedia.org] again. In 1949, 30% of all the electricity used in the United States came from hydroelectric power. Today, it's 6%.
Your California numbers are just as bad. The vast bulk of renewables come from three sources - large scale hydro, small scale hydro and geothermal. All three are essentially either tapped out or have significant problems getting larger (you can't dam anything else and natural geothermal is largely tapped out - and injecting water into deep hot rocks has some significant geological dangers in a state full of fault lines).
I, too, want to move to a non-carbon economy. But even among the nerd-herd that is Slashdot, hardly anybody understands the sheer magnitude of power that is used to keep our 21st century civilization working. Wind has to grow 800% just to reach the current levels of hydroelectricity, and that's just 6% of electrical usage. And that hydropower is going to get smaller and smaller, as no one is creating new dams and existing dams are being shut down (for different environmental protection reasons). Land siting and usage issues, power transmission from places with good solar/wind potential to existing population centers, water problems - the list goes on and on.
"Significant" impact is decades away on a national scale. On a local scale, it can be transformative, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking we're 10 or 20 years away from being largely carbon-neutral. It simply can't happen - no matter how much we wish it were so. Best to just keep plugging away at it and being realistic and honest with the public - it's going to take a long time, but it can be done.
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My credibility comes from the facts. If you choose to ignore them because of some Bush-era talking points you insist on clinging to, that's your problem. I'm not interested in convincing people like you who insisted we go into Iraq and stay there. You will just have to get dragged along with everyone else as we claw our way out of the hole you forced us to dig there.
It's an oil war. What made Iraq unusual among all the targets for invasion was its oil. The UN controlled Iraq's oil when it was under Saddam H
Natural gas between energy sectors (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Watch Gasland.
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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 t
Re:Natural gas has one advantage over renewables (Score:4, Interesting)
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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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.