Monday, January 30, 2012

Switching from Coal to Natural Gas Accomplishes Little or Nothing

By Press Action

When natural gas’ supporters tell you that the fossil fuel is cleaner burning than coal, don’t let them confuse you. The fact that natural gas-fired power plants emit lower levels of carbon dioxide than plants that run on coal does not mean natural gas is a “clean"-burning fossil fuel.

Case in point: The newest power plant in South Florida, Florida Power & Light’s West County Energy Center in Palm Beach County, is now the region’s largest source of greenhouse gases. The natural gas-fired power plant discharged 5.1 million tons of carbon dioxide, the most important of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. The figure comes from a new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database of the nation’s largest sources of greenhouse gases.

The data, collected under EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting program, shows 2010 U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from large industrial facilities and from suppliers of certain fossil fuels and industrial gases.

The plant’s owners and others argue that the figure is misleading because the West County Energy Center is one of the largest power plants in the nation. Indeed, the combined-cycle, natural gas-fired plant has a generating capacity of about 3,785 MW.

The West County plant is located in the Everglades bioregion and the Everglades Agricultural Area, just north of the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. The plant receives its natural gas through a lateral built off the Gulfstream Natural Gas System, an interstate pipeline system that originates in Mobile, Ala., and crosses the Gulf of Mexico, making landfall near Tampa and then sending gas southeast to Palm Beach County.

The first phase of the West County plant opened in 2009 and the second phase in 2011. The plant produces 36% less carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than the average plant in the United States, FPL says, allowing the company to shift production to the plant from older, less efficient plants.

But, according to Joe Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy, a switch from coal-fired generation to natural gas “accomplishes little or nothing” with regard to global warming.

“Building lots of new gas plants doesn’t make much sense since we need to sharply reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the next few decades if we’re to have any chance to avoid catastrophic global warming,” Romm said.

Last summer, the International Energy Agency issued a report titled “Are We Entering a Golden Age of Gas?” At a press conference announcing the report, IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka said that “while natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, it is still a fossil fuel. … An expansion of gas use alone is no panacea for climate change.”

The dash to gas, according to the IEA report, would put emissions “on a long-term trajectory consistent with stabilising the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at around 650 ppm, suggesting a long-term temperature rise of over 3.5°C.”

The temperature rise might not sound like much, but global temperatures have varied by only a few tenths of a degree in the relatively stable climate of the last 10,000 years.

“The effects of gas are actually worse than stated above, because the IEA didn’t account for ‘fugitive emissions,’ all the methane that leaks out along the journey from the ground to the gas plant,” James Wright wrote on his Planet James blog. “The oft-heard talking point ‘gas is 50% cleaner than coal’ ignores fugitive emissions. These emissions are difficult to measure, but one recent study concluded when they are taken into account, gas turns out to be more or less comparable to coal on a 100-year timescale, and far worse on a 20-year timescale.”

In a study released in September 2011, the National Center for Atmospheric Research found that “the substitution of gas for coal as an energy source results in increased rather than decreased global warming for many decades.”

“Relying more on natural gas would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, but it would do little to help solve the climate problem,” said NCAR Senior Researcher Tom Wigley, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia. “It would be many decades before it would slow down global warming at all, and even then it would just be making a difference around the edges.”

According to Romm, “If you want to have a serious chance at averting catastrophic global warming, then we need to start phasing out all fossil fuels as soon as possible. Natural gas isn’t a bridge fuel from a climate perspective. Carbon-free power is the bridge fuel until we can figure out how to go carbon negative on a large scale in the second half of the century.”

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