Natural gas might be a good transition fuel....

Today's post: Wednesday, 9-23-2009

We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.

At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

Nuclear energy might help but despite the decent track record of many current nuclear plants that generate electricity as causing far less negative health impacts than other existing alternatives, its potential dangers are enormous. Nuclear also has both very high capital costs and is politically difficult to build even when done right. So, it can help somewhat and likely will become somewhat more used. But nuclear looks more like a supporting solution rather than one that can help enough by itself.

Coal is abundant. But it’s now mined and burned in ways that are extremely harmful to the environment and our health in addition to producing the most CO2. And, we already burn something like 10 times too much coal as far as CO2 release is concerned. CO2 sequestration from coal burning now looks to be expensive and quite limited. And, although coal can be used to make gasoline and other fuels both directly and by feeding the CO2 from burning coal into a feedstock for algae to produce biofuels, coal looks like a fuel that we will mostly need to wind down using as fast as possible.

So, the case for massive increases in renewable energy is overwhelmingly strong.

But even the best case scenarios suggest we will build more renewable energy far too slowly in the short term.

Earlier this week, I saw a potentially promising piece on NPR about having natural gas be a major transition fuel to help fill this gap.

Natural gas can run cars and trucks and already does so albeit on a very small scale. And, on a much bigger scale, natural gas is already used to generate electricity instead of coal.

In addition, all of coal is carbon, while methane, the main gas in natural gas has 4 hydrogen atoms and only one carbon atom in each molecule. So it produces far less CO2 as it’s burned than coal and somewhat less than gasoline. It also tends to burn far cleaner than coal and somewhat cleaner than gasoline. Although it does cost money and the risk must be managed, natural gas also costs far less to transport than coal.

So, if we had an abundant supply, we might be able to stop using more coal and petroleum and gradually substitute natural gas for half the petroleum and coal we now use.

That abundant supply of natural gas may actually exist in the United States and Canada now. It seems that it may be far less harmful to the environment and far less expensive to produce natural gas from shale deposits than it would be to use them to produce a petroleum substitute. In the United States, a large chunk of East Texas, about 60 % of Pennsylvania and Ohio, about 35% of New York state, and virtually all of West Virginia and Wisconsin have very large deposits of such shale. And, though the NPR article didn’t mention them or map them, I’ve heard that Canada has as much or more such shale.

So, most of our resources should be directed to sharply and quickly increasing our energy efficiency and building more renewable energy.

Some should be used to make liquid fuels from coal to give the coal mining regions a more humane transition than they would otherwise get as far less coal is used. In addition, those fuels can replace fuels from petroleum to make it last longer, enable its cost to rise more slowly, and increase the energy independence of the United States, Canada, and China.

Some of our resources should be used to make cost-effective biofuels not competitive with forests or farmland to replace petroleum for the same reasons.

Some of our resources likely will be used to build more nuclear plants in part to provide a stable 24 hour source of electricity to smooth out the supply from more variable renewable sources.

But converting from gasoline and coal in favor of natural gas on a large scale and using the natural gas from this new source of supply to do so may make good sense.

We may well not be able to stop burning too much coal and petroleum fast enough doing everything else unless we do.

And, the increased use of natural gas looks to be faster to increase than anything else except increased energy efficiency.

T. Boone Pickens has been saying so for many months now. But, to me, he didn’t make that case as persuasively as this NPR piece did.

I’ve long thought he was and is absolutely correct about wind power. But now it looks like he may well have been right about his views on using natural gas as well.