If people would drive less and be less wasteful and learn to plan ahead, etc., we wouldn’t need to even be talking about this. Putting natural gas in gas tanks is going to unleash a whole new set of bad habits and no one will conserve energy if they always thing the next acceptable thing is just around the corner.

The missing dimension is the natural gas leakage rate, which the US government and industry estimate at 1.5% – leakage through valves, pipes, compression stations, and by deliberate venting to blow and purge the system.

Natural gas is 90% methane, and methane’s global warming potential (GWP) – over 100 years – tells us that it traps 25 times more heat than CO2. BUT – and it’s a big but – methane’s natural life in the atmosphere is 8.4 years, not 100. Over 20 years, its GWP tells us that it traps 72 times more heat than CO2, and over 8.4 years it probably traps over 100 times more CO2.

The global industry produced 3,000 billion cubic meters of gas in 2008, releasing 6 billion tonnes of direct CO2 when burnt, representing 16% of global CO2 emissions, and some 8% of the cause of global warming.

When you take that 1.5% leakage rate, and apply a GWP of 100 for its short term atmospheric heating impact, you get some very scary results.

The leakage rate adds 38 billion tonnes of methane, which turn into 10 billion tonnes of CO2e over the short term – which is, quite frankly what matters. This increases gas’s carbon equivalent impact to 16 billion tonnes of CO2e a year.

Before we get excited about using the gas industry as a pathway to total renewables, someone needs to crunch the numbers really solidly, and refactor its comparative weighting in terms of short-term GWP, as we may be embarking on a total disaster. I would far rather see all of our efforts devoted to the complete shift to renewables, which is completely feasible.

The choice of 100 years as the timeframe for GWPs was an arbitrary, non-scientific decision, taken at a time (in the early 1990s?) when most people thought that 100 years was the logical time-frame for tackling climate change.

We now know that decisions made in the next 4-8 years are critical, and with this in mind, we ought to recalibrate every greenhouse gas for its impact over ten years, not 100. This would really mess with CDM and offset calculations, but it would stop us from investing in slow, long-term offsets while turning a blind eye to the immediate impact of methane. (The black carbon debate needs to come in here, too).

[JR: Put a price on CO2, and there will be a real motivation to eliminate this leakage. BUT the really good news is that methane is a more short-lived gas, and we are certainly not talking about more than two or three decades as a major bridging fuel.]

If carbon’s the issue, why not push ahead with current near-zero generation sources? (Wind, nuclear, CSP, hydro, etc.)

But let’s be careful: natural gas combustion may produce less global warming pollution than coal combustion, but we have to account for full life-cycle emissions. On this point, natural gas production, processing, transmission, and distribution produce a significant amount of global warming pollution. For example, a 2004 study by the Society of Chemical Industries indicates that 2%-4% of all natural gas is lost to leakage. This is confirmed by global warming pollution inventories in many of the Rocky Mountain states where natural gas production, processing, transmission, and distribution is one of the top sources of these state’s global warming pollution. Indeed, an inventory of global warming emissions in La Plata County, Colorado county showed that 75% of the county’s total GHG emissions came from 4 sources: natural gas burned by the industry during operations, direct industry methane emissions, industry venting of entrained CO2, and the industry’s electrical use during operations. And the pollution we’re typically talking about is methane which is 25 times as potent as CO2. Individually and collectively, this undermines — perhaps fatally — the meme that “natural gas produces less global warming pollution as coal.”

Furthermore, the natural gas industry is used to political dominance and unlikely to acquiesce to simply a “transition” role. They’re going to want a firm foothold made up of serious tax breaks and financial incentives. And I have little doubt that they’ll fight tooth and nail to use the frame that “natural gas is a climate gamechanger” to fight for serious weakening of environmental protections — even common sense measures which would improve the efficiency of natural gas production by sealing those leaks (through, e.g., broader deployment of programs like EPA’s Natural Gas STAR program and policies to break down structural barriers in how the industry operates which have prevented the wide-scale use of these measures, many of which are cost-effective).

Already, the natural gas industry has fought for unjustified exemptions from such bedrock laws as the Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Water Act, and National Environmental Policy Act. In their world, anything that protects public health and the environment is a “costly, unnecessary burden.” And the impacts of landscape-scale development in the Western U.S. are dramatic, fragmenting wildlife habitat, degrading watersheds, and inducing serious air quality concerns that you’d think were limited to industrialized urban centers, not wide-open Western landscapes.

Thus, if natural gas is going to play a key role, let’s be cognizant of its limitations, and cognizant of the political playing field that natural gas operates on. It’s not an even playing field. And exuberant posts like this are, frankly, not very helpful, providing the natural gas industry with far too much political cover to undermine conservation protections necessary to ensure that communities faced with natural gas production do not have their watersheds and lands compromised — watersheds and lands that will become particular important to provide resiliency in the face of a deteriorating climate.

And once industry engages, as it will, in climate negotiations, don’t think that they will content themselves, as noted above, to their proper niche as a “transition fuel.” They may use that term, but they’re going to want a far more firm foothold in our economy than that.

Best,
Erik S.G.

(I wish that were a joke.)

A successful PR campaign probably has to emphasize the bridging nature of the role of natural gas. And show how it can play a really vital role for the intermediate future before being eliminated in the long run. This is a tough sell – both to those who have to fund such a campaign now, and to the population at large, which wants to solve problems rather than temporary fixes.

But the more I learn, the more I do think that natural gas can play a significant, positive role over the next half century when it comes our carbon footprint.