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.

Bad news & good for Renewable Energy....

Today’s post: Wednesday, 3-4-2009

I. First the bad news.:

A. We may be running out of time to deal with C02 and other causes of man-made global warming.:

1. California, where I live, though we’ve had recent rains, has now experienced 3 unusually dry years in a row. And Governor Schwarzenegger just proclaimed we may need to begin to ration water here. That may just be where we are in a normal set of dry years which will reverse later as it has done in the past. But it may not be normal and may be our new climate due to the definite warming California has experienced over the last 15 or 20 years.

If it is our new climate as driven by global warming, this trend will worsen as the C02 to warm our state further is already in the world’s atmosphere.
If so, we need large infrastructure investments in all these areas NOW:

a) desalination stations up and down the California coast –at least 20 and maybe 100 of them – AND new pipelines to get that usable water to the people, businesses, and farms that need it;
b) severe restrictions on lawn watering and large subsidies for installing and then requiring drip irrigation and soil water content monitoring and control systems both for urban areas and for farms;
c)large subsidies to install flush free urinals or very low flow ones in all dual use bathrooms and men’s rooms and leak repairing plumbing checks and repair;
AND,
d) even more rapid build-up of solar and wind electricity generation to replace the hydro power we will no longer get due to less rainfall and snowfall.

We may be already out of time and need all that NOW or within 6 months at least. Oops!! With what money? The State of California is already cutting services and adding taxes due to the current recession to keep from running out of money.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Virtually every other part of the world will have some similar problems supporting agriculture and providing water supplies soon if climate change begins to become this far along already.

2. The increase in sea level and shrinkage of the ice in Antarctica is beginning to occur faster than was originally predicted and the C02 to warm the world further and speed this up more is already in the world’s atmosphere.

But this one is potentially scarier. At some point huge chunks of ice will simply break off and drop into the sea. For very large chunks, that may produce tidal wave like effects. And this would speed the rise of sea levels around the world MUCH faster than now predicted. Such ice chunks will melt faster once that occurs as they will have more surface area exposed to the warmer temperatures.

For many islands and coastal areas that means that serious trouble may happen within 15 or 20 years; and there might be less warning than the people there now expect.

B. Some parts of our ability to add renewable energy are shrinking just as we need to increase it by over ten times instead.

Many alternative energy projects have been delayed or dropped due to:
the shrinkage in available credit; or from government support drying up due to the recession deleting the money the governments had allocated to support renewable energy; or from the sharp drop in oil prices making it harder to compete with oil now with the temporarily more expensive renewable energy sources.

I. Here’s some of the good news.:

A. The current severe recession is global and has resulted in dramatically reduced consumption of fossil fuels and has temporarily reduced our production of C02 by doing so.

Timewise that is actually a bit of a reprieve. We may have 5 to 10 years longer than we otherwise would have before we have to deal with more severe impacts from global warming. And, we might have that much more time to switch out of fossil fuels before global warming becomes impossible to reverse.

B. In the United States, Barack Obama won our election and became our President; & he and his administration have already made progress in moving our economy to use more renewable energy and become more energy efficient. (He may be premature in trying to increase the cost of using fossil fuels and removing their tax breaks while we are in a severe recession and do not yet have the renewable energy to replace them. But he will succeed in doing both to some degree I think. And, anything he does in those two areas, however small initially, will speed the development & use of energy sources other than fossil fuels.)

C. Businesses, entrepreneurs, and governments all over the world are developing innovations that will make renewable energy more available and cost less or help make our economy more energy efficient and able to do without fossil fuels.

Even better, they are beginning to put the best of what they already have to large scale use!! We are in a kind of a war where time is our enemy. And the successful generals in United States history, notably Patton & Grant, proved that attacking NOW with the best of what you have gets more results than trying to wait until conditions are perfect.

D. Germany has now proved that feed-in tariffs dramatically increase bringing renewable energy online without excessive government subsidy or economic disruption. And there is a good chance feed-in tariffs will soon be in use everywhere in the world. (See our post last week, on Wednesday, 2-25-2009.)

In summary, the global warming bad news is almost scarier than the news of the current recession. But the good news gives us ample reason to hope and ways to help speed up solutions.