EDF video/Gizmodo GIF
A massive gas well leak in California northwest of Los Angeles has sickened dozens, forced the relocation of thousands of residents and two schools, and caused untold damage to our climate. As Massachusetts lawmakers consider subsidizing new or expanded fracked gas pipelines, the Porter Ranch gas geyser is fresh evidence that locking in our gas addiction would be a climate disaster.
Activists in the San Fernando Valley community of Porter Ranch have spent years trying to stop oil & gas drilling, but California has gone full-speed ahead anyway. This leak began October 23 and Louis Sahagun of the Los Angeles Times reports tests have shown hydrogen sulfide levels in the area at 183 parts per billion — six times the state standard for a chemical that can be poisonous. Gizmodo’s Alissa Walker calls it the biggest environmental crisis since the Gulf oil disaster. A relief well won’t stop it for months.
According to Mashable’s Andrew Freedman, Environmental Defense Fund estimates the size of the leak at an astounding 62 million standard cubic feet of methane per day:
“That’s the same short-term greenhouse gas impact as the emissions from 7 million cars,” the group says on its website.
Timothy O’Connor, who directs EDF’s oil and gas program in California, said the Aliso Canyon leak is of a size and scope that is “unprecedented for California.” It’s about equal to the emissions from eight or nine coal-fired power plants, he said in an interview.
As utilities have increasingly turned to natural gas as the country’s main source of fuel for generating electricity, displacing coal, they often tout its climate benefits as a cleaner burning fuel. However, research shows that if leaks of methane, which is a more potent but shorter-acting climate pollutant compared to carbon dioxide, are not curtailed, the climate benefits of natural gas can be dramatically lessened or negated entirely.
This graph shows why gas is so dangerous for our climate. If you only consider end-stage power plant carbon emissions (blue), you can make fracked gas seem much better for the climate than coal. But that’s just one stage of the process. If you include methane leaks (white) – a much stronger climate disrupter than carbon – fracked shale gas is just as bad or worse for our climate than coal:
This morning, New England is getting 51% of its power from gas and 30% from nuclear, leaving us dangerously dependent on just two energy sources. We’re only getting 2% of our power from wind and a tiny fraction from solar. No one’s saying we can quit gas tomorrow, but shouldn’t we dramatically expand solar and onshore & offshore wind before we spend billions on new fracked gas pipelines?
Email your legislators right now to ask them to commit Massachusetts to clean energy in any new energy bill.
The gas from that well has already been recovered and processed. It’s then put back in that well for storage. It’s basically California’s version of the Quincy tank.
Except it turns out that it leaks, and it’s hard to fix the leak.
The gas that is leaking could come from a conventional play, from tight gas, fracked gas, even coalbed methane. The problem isn’t how the gas was extracted, it’s how it was stored.
I’m not arguing for or against fracked gas in this post — merely pointing out that this particular disaster isn’t related to fracking per se.
Natural gas is definitely not a larger source of greenhouse gas than coal. The bar chart is incorrect.
Also, regarding the assertion that solar should dramatically be increased: Solar has already been dramatically increased, and in the grand total, its footprint is still negligible. The solar technology is simply not scalable on the same level with natural gas, coal or nuclear.
Wind, on the other hand, carries much more promise as a scalable alternative. But, like solar, wind needs to be backed up by conventional energy generators – which means natural gas & diesel generators.
Which means this, among other things: If the problem you’re trying to address is risk in natural gas storage (the accident in California…) then building wind infrastructure will not reduce the risk of natural gas storage accidents, since you need that storage handy to kick in when wind energy stands down.
… or nuclear… whichever way you want to look at it. Wind is just second order solar… ‘fossil fuels’ are just third order. The processes that power the sun are nuclear and everything that ever lived and died (animals, plants, etc) was given life by our sun, which is just a hugeous nuclear reaction. More energy than we could ever use in a day is injected into our atmosphere every hour. And, without which, we wouldn’t have those ‘fossil fuels’…. which is just the storage of the energy in the ground.
In fact, it is just this massive injection of solar energy that is exactly the problem. We’re capturing it and storing it in the atmosphere with the so called ‘greenhouse gasses’ instead of allowing it to reflect harmlessly (or uselessly, however you want to look at it… ) back into space. Or we could convert it to useful energy. The potential for solar (and by this I include wind) is, to quote Ben Kenobi, ‘more powerful than you can ever imagine.’
But then again, as noted above, it’s always been about storage: we took the solar energy that was stored as carbon in the earths crust, applied some alchemical jujitsu to it to make of it what we wanted and stored the remaining product — which we considered ‘waste’ — unthinkingly in our atmosphere. That ‘waste’ ended up trapping even more energy which we are seeing as heat. Our problem, strictly speaking, really is simply more energy than we know what to do with…
You are correct that we need storage for ‘when wind energy stands down’ but that doesn’t have to be natural gas. In some parts of Europe excess solar energy (including wind) is used to carry water uphill and the water, once elevated, is released to create hydrodynamic energy when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. This, too, is a form of storage. The storage of natural gas is an altogether simple engineering problem. In this day and age, failure to adequately engineer properly is likely traced to regulatory disfunction. If we could be assured of safe handling of natural gas we’d have no qualms about the safe handling of nuclear.
I’d like to just build on some points of petr.
Hydrogen fusion has been a fantasy of nuclear power proponents for decades. The fusion reaction generates 3-4 times as much energy as a fission reaction. A major and so far insurmountable obstacle to terrestrial hydrogen fusion is “containment” — how to initiate and then sustain the fusion reaction in a controlled way.
Even if we find a way to contain a fusion reaction, it will be extraordinarily challenging to invent and build a mechanism for constructively harvesting the energy released by the reaction. Some form of wireless radiative transmission would be very high on the list of candidate approaches.
Nature has already solved the problem for us. The sun (like nearly every star) is a massive fusion reactor, and it uses broad-spectrum radiation to transfer the energy it creates to us, in the form of light. The total energy content of solar radiation impinging the surface of the earth is THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more than the world-wide energy budget (2.8 MEJ vs 430 EJ) — if we but harvested it.
More specifically (from the above cite), in 2001 the US consumed about 3.04 TW of energy. It would require about 2.0% of the land area of the US (assuming no change in collector efficiency) to replace that with solar energy. We currently cover about 1.5% of our land area by public roads.
One way to store solar energy is to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen and store the resulting hydrogen gas (there are others). The technology already exists to store that hydrogen gas safely, so that it is available for use by hydrogen-fueled automobiles.
Participants have criticized my commentary about the climate change denialism of our weather broadcasters as being “Debbie Downer”. I suggest that the real “Debbie Downers” are those who paint such an unrealistically bleak picture of sustainable energy alternatives.
Here is a Honda hydrogen-fueled vehicle unveiled last October. Funny how little we hear about that.
Honda Clarity — Hydrogen-powered vehicle
I invite you to make a stronger argument (with cites, for example) against the bar chart than simply asserting that it’s wrong. Natural gas is the only source that leaks methane. Methane most certainly IS an enormously powerful greenhouse gas, much more powerful than CO2 (per unit mass).
Your second paragraph is a non-sequitur. Solar may have been dramatically increased in the US, but that’s because it started as a vanishingly small part of the mix. A dramatic increase of a really small number is still a really small number. It does not follow that solar technology “is simply not scalable on the same lovel with natural gas, coal, or nuclear” — the experience of Germany (among others) demonstrates that.
Your last paragraph is just plain incorrect. The risk associated with natural gas storage is surely proportional to the number of storage facilities and the amount of natural gas stored in each. More natural gas storage means more risk. Less natural gas storage means less risk.
Changing the energy mix so that it is dominated by sustainable alternative energy sources, with gas as a backup, greatly decreases the amount of gas that is needed and therefore the amount of gas that needs to be stored.
Building alternative energy infrastructure therefore most certainly DOES reduce the risk of natural gas storage accidents.
We really need to stop the bull shit if we want to convince anyone to come over to our side.
Does not compute.
It appears that this is an attempt to reference two comments from CMD on another thread — this and this. Each was uprated by the thebaker, each argued that there’s nothing wrong with calling record-breaking heat “nice weather”.
As always with this participant, it’s not at all clear what “our side” is intended to mean.
It would be nice if there were any community standards enforced.
Next time “Great Molasses Flood of 1919 shows ginger snaps have fatal consequences”
This is really too much IMHO.
I don’t get your point. If I did it (misleading title) people would be all over me, calling me a liar. The author then brings more onto himself (herself?) by complaining about trolls. Stomv a troll? He’s the one who pointed out the error. I was just ignoring this post until his comment.
PS I thought my Molasses Flood reference was in line with the BMG exhortation to Please contribute bold, witty, incisive and substantive commentary. I’ll admit it’s not substantive but I’m hardly the only one here guilty of that.
I don’t know about mike_cote, I thought your comment was fair game and witty.
I don’t think the “troll” reference is at you or stomv.
Again, that is just my personal opinion and “to each his own” as some people say.
LOL ROFLMAO! Oh SNAP! just too easy! To ho just too easy!
It’s contrary to the point being made in this post.
I do not have the stomach to actually watch Fox/Fake “News” to see how long it takes for someone to make this ludicrous claim, which I only dare to state “ironically”.
In the short run, natural gas (if it is not leaked in large quantities) offers the chance to reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared to coal, but it’s clear that the delivery system is full of leaks. There is also little reason to believe that producers, without extremely strict regulation and the threat of massive fines, can be trusted to avoid leaks. In addition, long-term development of natural gas will crowd out cleaner energy sources, preventing the level of cuts necessary to avert he worst consequences of intensifying climate change/human-caused global warming. If this is a useful bridge fuel, it needs to be a very small bridge.