Natural gas, with its reputation as a linchpin in the effort to wean the nation off dirtier fossil fuels and reduce global warming, may not be as clean over all as its proponents say.
Even as natural gas production in the United States increases and Washington gives it a warm embrace as a crucial component of America’s energy future, two coming studies try to poke holes in the clean-and-green reputation of natural gas. They suggest that the rush to develop the nation’s vast, unconventional sources of natural gas is logistically impractical and likely to do more to heat up the planet than mining and burning coal.
The problem, the studies suggest, is that planet-warming methane, the chief component of natural gas, is escaping into the atmosphere in far larger quantities than previously thought, with as much as 7.9 percent of it puffing out from shale gas wells, intentionally vented or flared, or seeping from loose pipe fittings along gas distribution lines. This offsets natural gas’s most important advantage as an energy source: it burns cleaner than other fossil fuels and releases lower carbon dioxide emissions.
“The old dogma of natural gas being better than coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions gets stated over and over without qualification,” said Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University and the lead author of one of the studies. Mr. Howarth said his analysis, which looked specifically at methane leakage rates in unconventional shale gas development, was among the first of its kind and that much more research was needed.
“I don’t think this is the end of the story,” said Mr. Howarth, who is an opponent of growing gas development in western New York. “I think this is just the beginning of the story, and before governments and the industry push ahead on gas development, at the very least we ought to do a better job of making measurements.”
The findings, which will be published this week, are certain to stir debate. For much of the last decade, the natural gas industry has carefully cultivated a green reputation, often with the help of environmental groups that embrace the resource as a clean-burning “bridge fuel” to a renewable energy future. The industry argues that it has vastly reduced the amount of fugitive methane with new technologies and upgraded pipe fittings and other equipment.
So considering the damage that frakkers are doing in other ways, is it possible that “clean” natural gas could end up worse than coal? Ugh. I wish our leaders would just have the good sense to shut down this massive expansion in drilling until we know what we are dealing with. Maybe all this stuff in this new report is wrong. But maybe it is right?
Bill Section 147
My guess is that if the report is a worst-case scenario then it is understated and the problem is actually much worse.
When was the last time an environmental disaster was over-sold? Denialists will point to global warming but their scientific case gets weaker every day. An Inconvenient Truth obviously wasn’t shrill enough.
Saying, “I told you so,” just is not as satisfying now as when I was an adolescent.
Villago Delenda Est
Pointy-headed egghead liberal elitist. Who are you going to believe? Him or T. Boone Pickens?
Cris
The actual numbers really matter. I’m not informed enough to make a judgment on natural gas (sounds like nobody is, and it requires more study), but here’s what I do know: environmentalists are experts at letting the perfect defeat the good.
Alternative energy gets attacked from the left as well as the right. Dams? They kill salmon. Windmills? Kill birds. Nuclear? Well shit, where do we start.
Every energy source creates impact, and we have to ask the right question. It’s not “is this the best it can be,” it’s “is this better than the alternative?”
Chet
Probably not worse than coal, which really is an ongoing environmental catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Probably not even as bad as oil, for that matter. But definitely worse than solar, wind, and nuclear.
PurpleGirl
We have to go with renewable sources — solar and wind. Ultimately we must replace, wherever possible, fossil fuels.
trollhattan
Right. The greenhouse impacts may end up worse than advertised and the true costs (including impacts) of extraction are onerous.
Coal, otoh, has some unique characteristics, including the incredible amount of toxic pollutants it puts directly into the air–metals, chemical compounds and a shocking amount of radionuclides. Then there’s the processing waste and fly ash waste (or river and valley enhancement
sludgemulch).No good choices in the fossil fuel category. None.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
energy independence, amirite!
or not, in the trib review of all places, there was a story on how foreign interests are buying up the rights, and the gas will be going overseas. which leaves pretty much no reason to bother, unless you are juiced in.
Dave
I am shocked at this turn of events! A limited source of energy you have to ignite to use is bad for the environment? Egads!
I understand we need oil/natural gas for some things (heavy transport, military vehicles). But every year we dick around with killing ourselves to squeeze another drop out of the ground, and not developing real energy alternatives, is just going to bury this country down the road.
BR
I’m sure everyone has heard of Gasland, but it’s very worth watching:
http://documentarystorm.com/indie-films/gasland/
So, James Hansen told us that if we didn’t stop using coal around 2015 we’d likely cross the point of no return, and given that natural gas is no better than coal, and tar sands / heavy oil are no better either, and nuclear is clearly awesome, peak oil is at most a few years away, maybe we have to finally accept that the right answer is intentional conservation like Jimmy Carter told us to do.
But I forgot, Carter was a failure, so we shouldn’t do that.
Chris
It is better (a lot better) if you don’t leak it and spill it.
The best way to ensure that, of course, is for the price to be high enough to make sure that businesses view “leaking, spilling, venting, and flaring” natural gas as a way to lose profits. That means it needs to be just below the cost of coal, gasoline, etc. :-)
Cris
Very well said. Greenhouse gases are the 800-pound gorilla in the room, but the room is full of 400-pound gorillas.
OzoneR
In New York State, we already did
Woodorw L. Goode, IV
John, a good general rule is “Never believe any of the claims of a new technology’s evangelists”, with the corollary being “Put even less trust in the claims of an established industry’s lobbyists.”
When nuclear power was being promoted, many of its enthusiasts said it would be so cheap to produce that electric bills would plummet (“we won’t even need meters” was one claim)– and so safe that you might eventually see reactors in every car, instead of internal-combustion engines.
I’m not a scientist, but I am a historian– and the history on just about every technology is that it always has some shortcomings that take some of the glow off it. Even the dwarf wheat promoted by Norman Baurlog– which helped reduce world hunger dramatically (making Paul Ehrlich appear to be a crank) turns out to have a price tag: higher incidence of diabetes in world regions that didn’t used to have it.
More to the point: Even if it were 100% clean, there’s a limited supply of natural gas in the world and it takes a long time to create more. It might be a better solution than oil (which will run out sooner) but it will also run out (much faster, if everyone suddenly switches to it) so it isn’t the answer either.
Not that solar or wind will give everyone a pony, but at least we won’t run out of that.
Villago Delenda Est
@Dave:
Ronald Reagan sabotaged the best chance we had to avoid a grim future 30 years ago (Carter’s energy initiatives) out of pure political spite, on the order of the deserting coward assmalistration shelving all monitoring of Al-Qaida because the Clinton Administration guys suggested it might be of importance.
Corner Stone
Don’t go fucking emo on us Cole. Let’s give them a chance to get this right. Then, if it turns out we’re fucked we can always do something about that later.
BR
@PurpleGirl:
The problem is the scale at which we’d need to construct alternatives is so far beyond industrial capacity, it’s amazing. Saul Griffith gives a great talk that tries not to be optimistic or pessimistic – just engineer-y:
http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recalculated
Basically to have even a 1/3 chance of not going past the temperature of no return (2C of warming), we’d have to change everything to alternative energy by the 2030s. To do that we’d have to, globally:
1. Build energy structures so large in scale they’d roughly be the size of the continental United States (when you add up the land area for wind, solar, solar thermal, etc.)
2. Build solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear plants, etc. at rates roughly 2 to 5 times current industrial capacity, and maintain that building rate for 20 years.
3. Invest in energy conservation on top of that.
Joel
Not entirely sure, but the whole natural gas “alternative” kind of struck me as a ruse. I mean, fossil fuels are fossil fuels. You burn them, you get carbon dioxide. That’s how combustion works.
Seanly
Good sense and maximize corporate profits are mutually exclusive.
Cris
And his heirs have the House, blocking funding for the NOAA’s climate service.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha, such naivete. There’s *money* to be made and as long as our Fearless Leaders can point to jobs going back home, fuck the environment.
And what everybody above said about Gasland. Watch it and you’ll see the “clean” fallacy that is natural gas production.
BR
@Joel:
The nominal argument was the natural gas produces more joules per ton of CO2 when burned than coal, so in that sense it was thought to be better. But this study (and others) show that to not make sense when you look at the whole life cycle. It’s like ethanol – it looks likes a great alternative if you don’t factor in the production part.
Chris
By the way, to help out with the numbers: CH4 (methane / natural gas) is about 12 times as potent in terms of greenhouse effect as CO2 (carbon dioxide).
Of course, burning CH4 results in CO2 as well (plus 2 H2O molecules). So if you compare coal to methane, you can see that they’re sort of similar right there: you get extra energy from the hydrogen, and your total emission is CO2 and H2O. If you burn coal, you just get CO2, as coal is pure (hah) carbon.
The big problem with coal is that it’s never anywhere near pure, and both the extraction and burning produce lots of pretty nasty pollution. Natural gas is also not completely pure—aside from the odorant added so that leaks are obvious, it contains various other hydrocarbons in small quantities, and sometimes a tiny bit of sulfur compounds—but on the whole, it burns much more cleanly than coal. It is also directly useable as a vehicle fuel, which is not the case for coal.
Not entirely incidentally H2O—water vapor—is itself a greenhouse gas. There’s two important facts about CH4 and H2O as greenhouse gases, though: H2O comes out of the air (as rain), and CH4 degrades rapidly. So while CH4 is 12 times worse than CO2, it only lasts a few years before it breaks down. The CO2 itself persists for a much longer period before it gets recycled into other items.
kerFuFFler
@Cris: You’re so right!
I’m all for more windmills—–in the US, each year wind power kill 0.088% of the birds killed by house cats.
http://www.evwind.es/noticias.php?id_not=10948
Joel
I do recall Jim Fallows writing on the fact that burning coal will be inescapable to fuel the world’s energy future, and how the Chinese are working on making it a genuinely cleaner option… The article contained a disappointing lack of scientific justification, but I am marginally hopeful. Anyone who has been to interior China knows they have a huge incentive to clean up coal.
I’m much less hopeful that any solid innovation on that front will arise from this country, given the political climate.
Cris
In that case we’ll go underground, get some heavy rest.
ChrisB
Brought to you by your friends at Coal, Inc.
cleek
@Cris:
silence! your reasonableness is interrupting my 2 minutes of anger!
Chris
@kerFuFFler: Ah, but once we have a little over 100 times as much wind power, it will be up to something under 10%! :-)
BR
@Cris:
The problem is that that question is always asked while requiring only supply side solutions the problem. Our national energy discussions always remind me of our budget discussions – everything is on the table except military cuts, tax increases, or corporate subsidy cuts. Same here – everything is on the table except conservation, public transit, high-speed rail, carbon fee-and-dividend, etc.
Chris
@Chris: … or, under 10% (posted too fast, tried to edit, edit failed)
Villago Delenda Est
Those birds shouldn’t look like tasty one-bite snacks with wings, it would improve their survivability chances.
Southern Beale
Oh well, if you’re going to listen to the pointy-headed DFHs at those liberally-biased Northeastern universities then sure …
Villago Delenda Est
@BR:
Conservation is for wussies. I have heard that directly from Dark Lord Cheney.
kerFuFFler
@BR: It also seems like we can also try to use less energy. I’ve noticed that a lot of public indoor spaces (libraries, concert halls, schools, malls…) seem way over heated in the Winter. Why should the thermostat be set at 75 degrees when people could just dress more warmly? Ten degrees lower would be a huge savings, but people now seem to have an expectation that it is always supposed to be 75——except in the Summer when they want it 68.
Just Some Fuckhead
@PurpleGirl:
If we use up all the wind, the planet is going to get even hotter, which means we’ll have to use a whole lot more solar to even things out.
Cris
Those things infringe on my liberties!
BR
@kerFuFFler:
Agreed. I think conservation is the number one target. One of the difficulties, though, is that people are highly price sensitive – it’s hard to get people to conserve unless prices are high. Which is where a fee-and-dividend carbon tax comes in:
http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2010/04/25/scientist-james-hansen-proposes-%E2%80%9Cpeople%E2%80%99s-climate-stewardship-act%E2%80%9D-a-simple-carbon-fee-with-revenue-returned-to-americans/
RalfW
In our anti-science, anti-empiricism conserva-world it doesn’t matter.
I was at an event last night with Mark Ritchie, Minnesota’s Secretary of State as one of the panelists. He said he is rarely afraid of things, but the one thing that sets him on edge, and even terrifies him some times, is the right-wing tendency to not believe in he future.
For people who think the world will end in a few years in Rapture, who gives a shit if methane is escaping at alarming rates, or that well water is being infiltrated with diesel fuel and toxic chemicals.
Heat your God-given McMansion with ‘clean’ natural gas until you are transported out of your Hummer and directly to the pearly gates.
RalfW
In our anti-science, anti-empiricism conserva-world it doesn’t matter.
I was at an event last night with Mark Ritchie, Minnesota’s Secretary of State as one of the panelists. He said he is rarely afraid of things, but the one thing that sets him on edge, and even terrifies him some times, is the right-wing tendency to not believe in the future.
For people who think the world will end in a few years in Rapture, who gives a shit if methane is escaping at alarming rates, or that well water is being infiltrated with diesel fuel and toxic chemicals.
Heat your God-given McMansion with ‘clean’ natural gas until you are transported out of your Hummer and directly to the pearly gates.
Citizen_X
@BR:
All conservation efforts help our energy/environment problem. But they still can’t get us all the way there. Cris’ point about choosing the least worst mix of sources still applies.
Roger Moore
A lot of this depends on technical stuff, like the residence time of methane in the atmosphere relative to carbon dioxide. Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it will naturally oxidize at some rate and be no worse than carbon dioxide. So released methane is a big short term problem- bad- but less of a long term problem. Whether it’s good on balance is a very tricky question and depends in part on how important various time horizons are.
kerFuFFler
Ethanol is supposed to be really bad when you look at the whole picture—-soil depletion, wasted food on a hungry planet, energy consumed during production…. The only reasons it gets so much attention are 1) Iowa is an early primary state, and 2) agribusiness (subsidies and all…) supports it.
Villago Delenda Est
@RalfW:
Alas, you’re onto something there. Which is why so many fundies reject environmentalism in its totality. They are not operating from a basis in reality…it’s all fantasy.
mclaren
Introduction to combustion for non-scientists:
[1] All fossil fuels are made of hydrocarbons. That means a combo of hydrogen atoms and carbon atoms, usually with some nitrogen and oxygen in the mix. BTW all organic material on earth is made of some combo of CHON, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen.
[2] When you burn fossil fuels, you will release carbon into the enivronment. There is no way to avoid this. The only question is: how much carbon will you release? And in what form? I.e., how will the carbon be bound to other elements?
[3] If we want to avoid putting carbon into the atmosphere (probably a good idea given the rapidity of global warming which appears to be occurring far faster than climatologists’ worst-case models predict), you’re going to want to avoid burning fossil fuels. Natural gas is a fossil fuel.
[4] This means geothermal, wind, solar or nuclear power. Of these, only nuclear has the potential to provide a steady (let’s repeat that word: STEADY) supply of energy within the reasonable near term at anything like a remotely economic cost using technology which currently exists.
For those who recoil with horror at the prospect of nuclear power after the Fukushima incident: liquid thorium breeder reactors. Google it. Thorium, incidentally, is about as common as lead.
kdaug
@Corner Stone:
Oh, no, mate – we’re fucked: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/star-disintegration.html. (Psst – this is from NASA).
If GRB 110328A comes close to hitting this solar system, it ain’t the end of humanity. It’s the end of all life – plants, roaches, bacteria, the whole shebang. Game over, man.
“The best explanation at the moment is that we happen to be looking down the barrel of this jet,” said Andrew Levan at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, who led the Chandra observations.
Good times.
ETA: Most gamma ray bursts we’ve ever witnessed have lasted for minutes, an hour or two tops. This one has been going on for a week. (So far).
ruemara
@RalfW:
this.
I read this article on the issues of natural gas a couple of days ago. It’s terrifying what we are doing to the planet in search of easier ways to do stupid stuff and/or kill each other. It’s like there is no concept of future consequences at all.
trollhattan
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Heh, indoozle. You from Oklahoma, per chance? I’m familiar with the work of “your” senators.
BR
@Citizen_X:
Unfortunately, they’ll have to. As I commented above (with my link to Saul Griffith), we don’t have the ability to build alternatives up fast enough to meet the needs of the climate, to mitigate peak oil, etc. So yes, we should pursue alternatives. Specifically I think solar hot water for homes and businesses, solar thermal, microhydro, and wind are our best bets, because PV requires a lot of exotic materials, nuclear is expensive and unsolved, and geothermal, tidal, and hydro are spotty.
bkny
said Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University and the lead author of one of the studies.
just watch … professor howarth will be defunded immediately.
Villago Delenda Est
The planet will recover, not to worry.
No one will be around to see it, though…
Mandramas
Climate impact is an issue, but the fact that eventualy fossil and nuclear fuel will over, is the real core of the issue. Until we reach fussion thermoelectrics reactors, of course.
matryoshka
@RalfW: Coupled with dominionism, an irrational fear of socialism, and total disdain for the benefits of government, this is a serious problem.
On the other hand, it’s totally uncool to get all “emo” about anything, so who gives a f*ck?
Violet
I’m guessing everyone’s seen this graphic by now:
What if solar got the same subsidies as fossil fuels?
PeakVT
@kerFuFFler: People feel cold at different temperatures. Just ask any married couple.
The place to address the problem is in energy rejection, which in buildings mainly means better controlling the thermal envelope. Turning down the heat helps in a drafty, uninsulated building, but not so much in one that is upgraded.
mclaren
@Mandramas:
Utterly totally provably WRONG. Using 5x the planet’s current energy usage, thorium breeder reactors have the capacity to provide all the energy we could ever need for at least the next 100,000 years.
Please.
Stop spewing out this “peak uranium” crap, people.
Thorium breeder reactors create nuclear fuel. Read a book sometime, folks. Learn something.
BR
@mclaren:
Go watch Into Eternity and then tell me we have the waste situation figured out:
http://documentarystorm.com/indie-films/into-eternity/
Roger Moore
@mclaren:
Plus sulfur and phosphorous at moderately high levels and a whole bunch of other stuff as traces. The sulfur is fairly important from a fuel standpoint because burning it produces strong acids that do all kinds of nasty things to the environment.
mclaren
@BR:
We’ve got the waste situation figured out.
First, the high-level nuclear waste decays fast. Iodine-131 has a half-life of 8.02 days. That means that after about 10 months 99.99% of the I-131 will have decayed.
Second, the high-level nuclear waste is the stuff that generates lots of radiation per unit time. The low-level nuclear waste, like Cesium-137, decays much more slowly with a much longer halflife, but as a result it generates much much less radiation per unit time. So you’ve got a fairly good situation: the more intensely radioactive the nuclear waste, the faster it decays.
Third, the real danger with nuclear waste isn’t the radiation so much as the chemistry. Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 prove dangerous because they’re chemically very similar to potassium, and potassium is part of human bone, so the human body will incoporate potassium from the environment into your bones (just as we create new layers of skin every day to replace old skin that’s worn out, we create new bone every day to replace the older bone). This is a big issue because once radiocesium or radiostrontium gets into your bones, it stays there, and even though the radioactivity from Cesium-137 or Strontium-90 is relatively low, it keeps emitting radiation for decades, which is definitely not good for children and other living things.
So the solution in the case of low-level nuclear waste is simple: isolate it the hell away from the evironment so it can’t get out to get into your bones.
We know how to do this chemically. Bond the low-level nuclear waste with glass in such a way that without absurdly high temperatures (as in a blast furance) the low-level waste can’t possibly escape into the surrounding environment.
The nuclear waste situation has been figured out. It’s just human irrationality and mindless animal panic that prevents facilities like the Yuca Flats depository from accepting the waste.
Ironically, all this mindless hysterical panic about nuclear waste leading to endless lawsuits delaying the opening of the Yucca Flats depository, is actually leading to a more dangerous situation because it forces nuclear facilities to keep their spent fuel rods in cooling ponds, instead of shipping ’em to Yucca Flats.
So by panicking, the population of the U.S. has created the very situation they seek to avoid. Standard, typical, usual, and quotidian.
Poopyman
@Villago Delenda Est: Chill the fuck out. In case it isn’t obvious, the gamma rays are already here, or else Chandra wouldn’t have observed them. Also too, the thing is 3 point fuckin’ 8 billion LY out. Way too far for even this ginormous a GR source to do harm.
Nobody’s gonna die from GRB 110328A. Hell, it didn’t even mess with the satellite instrumentation.
The Ancient Randonneur (formerly known as The Grand Panjandrum)
In other great news: Biomass power may not be as carbon neutral as proponents claim.
Poopyman
@Roger Moore:
Don’t even have to burn it. Just look at coal mine runoff issues.
Bob Loblaw
It seems to me, since this blog is currently obsessed with figuring out what is and isn’t legitimate grounds for Democratic and administration criticism, the serial walkbacks and failures on environmentalism since the stimulus would have to rank pretty highly on that list.
Oh well, it’s only the fucking planet. We can probably get another one.
PurpleGirl
@BR:
Will we or won’t we run out of fossil fuels?
Is it better to wait until we do to do the research or transition to other energies?
We could have been doing the transition since President Carter, but he hurt so many people’s feelings that research was stopped.
So, what do we do for power?
johnnymags
When is force-injecting harmful toxins into the earth ever a good idea? Watch Gasland and see. There is a literal Red Zone left behind by these mother frakkers.
mclaren
@johnnymags:
Good point. As fossil fuels get depleted, it becomes more costly — and more environmentally hazardous — to extract ’em.
Frakking appears to permanently contaminate aquifers, rendering them poisonous and unusuable for centuries. Double plus ungood, Winston.
Cris
Holy fucking triple-word score bingo
nancydarling
@RalfW: I was petitioning at Basin Springs Park in Eureka Springs at a 350.org event a couple of years ago. I can’t remember the exact environmental issue on the petitions for Blanche and Mark, but about a third of the people I asked to sign told me they didn’t have to worry about it because the end was coming soon. I immediately put on my little Christian vacation Bible school hat and told them that a day was like a thousand years in the mind of God and they couldn’t really know the end was nigh. I was able to convince a few, but not many.
Mark S.
@kdaug:
If we are seeing it, it’s already “hit” us. Fortunately, it’s 3.8 billion light years away.
Roger Moore
@mclaren:
You’ve made two minor errors here. First of all, potassium is not especially concentrated in the bone; it’s used as an electrolyte throughout the body. That’s why, for example, potassium rich foods are supposed to be helpful to prevent muscle cramps. Second of all, while cesium is chemically similar to potassium, strontium is not. Strontium is chemically close to calcium. Obviously calcium is a major component of our bones, so strontium’s chemical similarity means that it is incorporated into bone. So while radioactive strontium and cesium are both dangerous, it’s for slightly different reasons.
As an aside, biological activity is also why radioiodine is so nasty. Our bodies don’t use much iodine, but what little we use is specifically used by the thyroid and tends to concentrate there. That means a dose of radioiodine tends to specifically target and damage the thyroid. This targeting effect makes thyroid cancer unusually easy to treat, since the radioiodine will destroy cancerous thyroid tissue as easily as healthy thyroid, though it comes at the expense of dependence on synthetic thyroid hormone.
nancydarling
Don’t have time to read the whole thread, but one of the quickest ways to reduce fossil fuel use is through efficiency. Van Jones had visions of thousands of jobs retrofitting buildings and houses with insulation, etc. Then Beck started on him and he was thrown under the bus. I’m afraid there is going to have to be a lot more pain felt by a lot more people before we do the right things. We used to be able to pull together and do great things—I’m not so sure any more. We are looking more and more like a Phillip Dick dystopia—The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
Chris
@kdaug: Oh no! We only have four billion years left! :-)
BR
@PurpleGirl:
Well of course some day we will run out of all non-renewable resources that can’t be recycled. And the peak of production for oil is at most a few years away, with other resources only a few decades off.
As for what we will do for power, we need to come to terms with the Limits to Growth, and accept that we will have to live on an energy income (day-to-day insolation, wind, etc.) rather than an energy inheritance, and live at roughly the energy level that billions of people in the world already live at.
Cris
I’m not even sure that was true before. We (humans) do pull together, but usually not until disaster is staring right in our face and punching repeatedly.
(One counterexample, which I think I got from Bill McKibbin: Antarctica. Without threat of war, or loss of profit, or alien invasion, the countries of the world agreed to keep the continent neutral.)
HyperIon
Jobs for leak finders and leak pluggers!
BR
@Cris:
The Arctic on the other hand, will soon be a feeding frenzy of oil and gas drilling as the ice cap melts…
nancydarling
@trollhattan: There was a Senate committee hearing on this subject this AM. Inhofe, yet again, proved himself to be an ignorant, troglodyte, a**hole. Meanwhile, here in Arkansas, there have been swarms of small quakes, possibly due to the injection wells disposing of fracking fluids. There was an issue a couple of years ago with drilling companies lying about what was in the fracking fluids they were spreading on farmers fields and pastures, for a fee of course. I don’t know if that is still going on.
Moonbatman
DENIERS!!!!1!!
RAPING MOTHER GAIA WITH THEIR UNHOLY HYDRAULIC FRACKING
Cornell shale study debunked
Peace Out. The Power is Yours.
themann1086
Natural gas was never suppose to be anything more than a stop-gap, to hold us over while we switched to even cleaner fuels. But we can’t even do that right…
mclaren
@Roger Moore:
Thanks for pointing out my errors. I stand corrected.
Corner Stone
@kdaug:
Now, now. Don’t go emo on us kdaug. Give the GRB a chance to fully illuminate our planet, and lay out its plan for radiation ala jet exhaust in our faces.
Then if it turns out we disagree with the GRB we can rally our forces to fully whinge about it!
Because after-action is always more powerful than pro-action!
TJ
Used to work in industrial gases. From my knowledge of the equipment involved, 7.9% losses would be a conservative estimate. Losses at a regular old gas well, compression train, and pipeline usually run over 10%.
chopper
the dumbest thing about fracking and gas is that you have to invest quite a bit into infrastructure, yet the source peaks right quick. like you drill and you pump crap into the ground, start producing gas and then your throughput peaks and takes a crap in no time.
so you have to move and drill a new well and start again.
it isn’t very economical at all, even ignoring the environmental nightmare.
frouglas
I think one thing that should be noted is that the study referenced refers to shale gas, which makes up about 13% of US production. not to say this isn’t going to grow, but I wonder if the emission rates from extraction are worse from shale gas than from other sources. worldwide (though I can’t find figures on it quickly) I would guess the proportion is even lower than in the US.
@Joel at 24 – Fallows’ piece was basically a propaganda piece for the coal industry. he selectively left out the most recent data in arguing that the growth of coal was inevitable, citing growth statistics from 1995-2008 rather than the most recently available data at the time of the article, which showed two years of declining coal consumption. clean coal would be great, it’s true. but the fallows piece argues for that by dismissing the feasibility of renewables, which I think is distinctly less great. (you can read my whole criticism of his article here if you’re interested)
I think what it’s really going to come down to is all of the sources people are talking about, with a heavy focus on demand-side initiatives to slow growth in total generation. better designed nuclear plants will probably be necessary, natural gas will probably be necessary, and heavy renewable development as well.
Neurovore
Nuclear energy is currently the safest and most practical source of energy that we have available to us. Despite the best efforts of media sources to engage in yellow journalism of the worst kind, there have only been two deaths at Fukushima Daiichi, and these were unrelated to the operation of the reactors themselves. Seventeen workers were exposed to a minor dose of radiation but the contaminated particles were easily cleaned off on-site and it was not enough to cause radiation sickness. There have been no-ill effects on the public from the incident and the levels of iodine-131 and cesium-37 have been well below the maximum exposure limit of 300 Bq/Kg set for adults and has been below the 100 Bq/Kg limit for infants since the 24th of last month. Even so, these limits set by the Japanese government are extremely conservative since the WHO allows for up to 3,000 Bq/Kg of iodine-131. While this was a “perfect storm” of an earthquake and tsunami affecting a structure that was designed for a magnitude of 8.0 rather than 8.9, few other structures would be able to take this much punishment and have so few casualties. If this were a hydroelectric dam we would probably see a repeat of the infamous Banqiao disaster in China, while a coal-burning facility would have blanketed the surrounding area with heavy metal-laden coal slurry and toxic fumes. A natural gas plant would have gone KABOOM!
While thorium is even more abundant than uranium we will not be running out of either anytime soon because uranium is quite plentiful and the uranium mining industry in the US and elsewhere is in shambles because of the lack of demand as no new nuclear reactors have been built in decades. The supply of terrestrial uranium is finite but then it could be argued that sunlight is finite because the sun will turn into a white dwarf one day. There are more than enough uranium and thorium deposits to last us for the foreseeable future, and upon failing that uranium can be extracted from sea water and it would still remain a viable option as the price nuclear power is relatively insensitive to increases in the cost of uranium per pound. Finally, breeder reactors can maintain and increase the availability of nuclear fuel even more so. In short, while nuclear energy might be the only practical option at the moment for large scale electricity generation, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
nancydarling
Here’s a link to an historic bridge collapse yesterday in Conway County, Arkansas. The bridge had a 3-ton limit and the truck carrying fracking fluids, owned by SweetH20 Transfer out of Decatur, TX, weighed 9 tons. The bridge was built in 1890 and was on the list of National Historic Places.
http://www.todaysthv.com/news/article/153099/2/Truck-collapses-historic-Conway-Co-bridge
Prometheus Shrugged
As far as most costs/benefits are concerned, natural gas is essentially in the same category as petroleum. The only difference is that the U.S. has a higher percentage of know global reserves of natural gas than for petroleum, and it has the T. Boone Pickens lobby to push for its use. The widespread perception that it’s more environmentally friendly has always baffled me, but I guess that comes from people comparing the nice clean invisible water coming out of the tailpipes of buses running on methane, as opposed to the sooty particulates coming from diesel engines.
Mandramas
@mclaren: Well, that is cool. I suggest you to start constructing large electrical ships, large electrical trucks or trains, large electrical mining equipment, since when oil went over, you still will need to extract and move fissible material, being it Thorium or Uranium.
Thorium breeder reactors looks like a very interesting technology, but the fact that they create their own fuel is not really correct; they simply requires more raw thorium, but not have the complex industry needed for other fissible fuel rods excepts for the original deployment. Since thorium is a lot more abundant and safer that Uranium, you will have 1000 years of Thorium, but they will eventually exhaust. No engine can generate more “fuel”; it is a Second Thermodinamycs Law violation. Also, no engine can’t have 100% efficiency. Read a book yourself, please.
That said, thank you for mentioning this point, since it is a really interesting technology I didn’t knew.
Mandramas
@Neurovore: The problem is not domestic or even industrial electricity, since Hydroelectric and Nuclear, as you said, are practical options. The problem are batteries. Oil’s big tech advantage, right nows, is the internal combustion engine.
In a post oil peak world, you won’t have the stupids big cars that are so common on America. Trains will have to replace cars, and air travel will be less common y more expensive. Telecommuting will have to be a lot more common that now. Cities will have to be redesigned to be medium sizes, specialized, and interconnected. Farming will have to be redesigned to use electrical farming equipment.
Of course, free market philosophy will prevent to reach those goals; I hopes that India and China saves the civilization deploying money on R&D of those subjects; it is clear America won’t lead a new non-oil industry revolution. In fact, it is most probably that USA declare a couple more of oil related wars to control oil availability.
chopper
@Mandramas:
thorium is pretty cool, but it’s abundance is tempered by the fact that it’s generally spread out. so it isn’t too easy to purify.
that being said, you’re right, even assuming the thorium cycle is a great source of electricity, that doesn’t do much of anything to solve our oil woes. nuclear energy will never run our transportation sector, nor will it ever provide feedstock for our petrochemical/industrial/pharmaceutical/agrichemical industries. unless someone knows of a way to make plastic from electrons, i’m all ears.
someguy
Okay, I’m convinced. All energy sources blow ass, except for the ones we can’t possibly use at this time. Therefore I’m going to sit here and do nothing because we’re DOOMED, DOOMED, DOOOMED, have a temper tantrum, curse Ronald Reagan, and threaten to vote for somebody other than Obama in the primaries. I figure this puts me in the center mass of BJ readers.
Jebus. This is like showing up to give blood but having the nurse slit your wrists instead.
kdaug
@Chris: Do NOT disrupt my hair-on-fire moment.
Neurovore
@Mandramas
In regards to your prior question about how breeder reactors work, they do not violate the second law of thermodynamics because you are releasing thermal energy from the breaking of atoms of an element, transforming that element into a different element, and increasing entropy while doing so because heat transfer increases entropy. You are decreasing the energy and entropy of the fuel to increase the energy and entropy of water, from which you can extract work. The products are subsequently used again to produce entropy by fission and increased entropy.
Here is something you might like to read on the subject
http://www.3rd1000.com/nuclear/nuke101g.htm
@chopper
In regards to finding a replacement for oil in regards to plastics and liquid fuels, the higher operating temperatures of some reactor designs would hypothetically allow you to start synthesizing hydrocarbons using the Fischer–Tropsch process because you can thermochemically produce hydrogen cheaply at temperatures of 950°C or above.
In each of the leading thermochemical processes the high-temperature (800-1000°C), low-pressure endothermic (heat absorbing) decomposition of sulfuric acid produces oxygen and sulfur dioxide:
H2SO4 ==> H2O + SO2 + 1/2O2
There are then several possibilities. In the iodine-sulfur (IS) process iodine combines with the SO2 and water to produce hydrogen iodide which then dissociates to hydrogen and iodine. This is the Bunsen reaction and is exothermic, occurring at low temperature (120°C):
I2 + SO2 + 2H2O ==> 2HI + H2SO4
The HI then dissociates to hydrogen and iodine at about 350°C, endothermically:
2HI ==> H2 + I2
This can deliver hydrogen at high pressure.
Combining all this, the net reaction is then:
H2O ==> H2 + 1/2O2
All the reagents other than water are recycled, there are no effluents.
You would then need a source of carbon to combine with the hydrogen that you have just produced to carry out Fischer–Tropsch reactions. You could stick to traditional carbon sources such as fossil fuels but these are dirty and polluting. Livestock waste is another possibility but the demand would quickly outstrip the supply. Ideally, it might be possible to extract the carbon from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but that would take a lot of filtration as carbon dioxide is a very light and diffuse gas.
Using the Fischer–Tropsch process with nuclear energy derived hydrogen, you could hypothetically synthesize any number of hydrocarbons that you would need, ranging from polymer chains for use in plastics to artificial fertilizers, and even synthetic fuels like dimethyl ether, methanol, or synthetic gasoline that would be carbon neutral when burned if you made them from carbon extracted from the atmosphere to begin with.
These sorts of applications for nuclear technology have been on the drawing board for awhile now, just that there has been little incentive to research and make use of them simply because of the traditional fear the public has of nuclear energy in addition to the availability and ubiquity of fossil fuels. For more on using nuclear energy for hydrocarbon synthesis, you can take a look at the online magazine, New Papyrus here:
http://newpapyrusmagazine.blogspot.com/2008/01/nuclear-energy.html
chopper
sounds like it costs a fuck of a lot more than crude oil does.
Chris
@chopper:
Well, as always, “it depends”.
South Africa’s SASOL makes oil right now, at a profit, from coal. It’s quite an ugly process though.
The “prettier” / “greener” processes are still too expensive, especially the capital and insurance cost of doing it with a high temperature nuclear reactor. There are some possibilities for using concentrated solar power (with a different set of chemical processes) for making fuel, with potential long-term large-scale costs of roughly $100/barrel as well.
Neurovore
The Fischer-Tropsch process was used by Germany during World War II using coal gasification as its feedstock to produce fuel after the economic sanctions placed against it. The Fischer-Tropsch process is also the current technique to produce synthetic fertilizers from natural gas. In this case, the input of thermochemically produced hydrogen from nuclear process heat and atmospheric or ammonia derived carbon would probably be cheaper. There is also the fact that both inputs are freely available instead of being at the mercy of oil cartels in politically unstable regions of the world that we buy most of our oil from. If we could domestically produce all of our fuels and related materials synthetically, we would save an awful lot of money nationally from having to prop up tinpot dictators around the world or destabilizing regimes that are a threat to our oil interests.
Mandramas
@Neurovore: Yes, I guessed the same, after reading the wiki. I’m just pissed that @mclaren: phrased that like Thorium reactors are perpetual movement machines. Eventually, the fuel will degrade.
If your option to create hydrocarbures is unfeasible, i guess that we will need to create plastics from genetically engineered algae.
TheF79
Coal-fired plants produce 1.1 tons CO2/MWh on average plus a bunch of SO2 and NOX, while gas-fired plants produce 0.5 tons CO2/MWh, close to zero SO2 and some NOX. Those are the downstream emissions. If the upstream emissions from natural gas extraction exceed the upstream emissions from coal extraction (all that mining equipment doesn’t run on magic) by a large enough amount (equivalent to the downstream difference), then natural gas is worse than coal, and if it doesn’t, then gas is cleaner than coal.
This seems like a relatively straight-forward empirical question with a bit of a tricky measurement issue.
Wolfdaughter
@BR:
I think this scenario is unnecessarily pessimistic. But in any case, if we embarked on a Manhattan Project for developing renewables, this would give lots of people employment. Yes, the federal government would initially be the employer, but spinoffs would soon become available which would give opportunities for private enterprise as well.
Wolfdaughter
@mclaren:
What’s the lead time on building a thorium reactor? And, frankly, I don’t believe that it poses no risk. I’ll accept that the theoretical risk is probably lower than with the type of reactor at Fukushima, but how do we know? Are any thorium plants operating now?
Why not invest the time and money needed to build thorium reactors into more renewals and improving their technology?
jonas
Something’s fishy here, and it’s not only the hydrofracking fluids seeping into our watershed. Who funded this study? Because its conclusions seem suspiciously tailored to bolster claims about “clean coal” vs. natural gas. This is not to say shale gas is any better, but the coal industry has been reeling in recent years from gas-industry sponsored studies that claim gas (esp. shale hydrofracking) is a true “green” alternative to other fossil fuel energy sources.
I bet another study is rapidly forthcoming, no doubt from another respectable, Ivy League university, sponsored by the “Association for Responsible Gas Extraction” pointing out the flaws in this study.
JR in WV
I live in a gas&oil patch that was first drilled back in the early 1900s. You used to be able to tell where you were on a walk by the various sounds of gas bubbling from old transmission lines and production/gathering lines, which were buried in creek beds.
It is better now, since Pennzoil sold their rights in the field to companies principally interested in gas production rather than Pennsylvania Grade Crude for lube oil, but still, it bubbles from the pipes. NOT from the undisturbed ground.
Additionally, when you read about a spill of drilling fluids into a rural creek, and they say it isn’t a waterway used for public drinking water supply, that’s a lie. All little rural streams eventually enter larger streams that pass through towns that, you guessed it, take water from the river, chlorinate it, and pump it into people’s homes for DRINKING water.
But you see, that’s more than 12 miles from the spill, so it doesn’t count. Even if the spill is Marcellus fraking water, and radioactive by means of carrying radium up from the deep formations. This would be the same radium which decays to produce radon in folks’ basements.
There’s very little good about deep shale methane production. Very little. Except the big money made by the big companies who stole folks’ mineral rights 150 years ago for a song.
JR