In 2015, the US put less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than in any year since 1993, and it’s because of natural gas fracking. I wanted to understand: Is this a critical step towards slowing global warming? Or is have we made a deal with the devil?
**Note, I’m going to be sticking to global warming here, without reference to local air pollution or the water table. Only so much I can fit in one post!**
It seems like good news that we are emitting less CO2. US carbon emissions actually peaked in 2007, prior to the economic meltdown of 2008. But even as the economy recovered, carbon dioxide emissions kept declining every year, dropping by about 1.3% in 2015.
Carbon emissions are going down because dirty, carbon-intensive coal has been chased from the market by cheap natural gas created by fracking. As fracked gas has flooded the market, the demand for coal has crashed, with the price falling by half over the last five years. And because burning gas in a modern plant releases less than half of the carbon of burning coal, we have found it much easier to wean ourselves off of carbon.
But is this entirely a good thing?
Natural gas has a chemical name – methane – and methane is more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – molecule for molecule, about 37 times more powerful. Its power stems, paradoxically, from the fact that it lasts only a few years in the atmosphere before it decomposes to form CO2. Because there is never a lot of it in the atmosphere at any given time, all the bits we add have a much bigger impact.
This matters a lot because not all of the gas we extract ends up being burnt into energy. Inevitably, some methane leaks into the atmosphere, passing through pores in the concrete seals that are supposed to contain the gas to the well, or through imperfections in welds that hold the pipelines together. And if enough leaks, the methane could warm the planet to a greater degree than the carbon dioxide it burns into.
This is a situation where the exact numbers have huge policy implications. The folks at the Environmental Defense Fund did the world a service by publishing some numbers back in 2012, when they calculated an acceptable leak rate for natural gas, below which the switch from coal to gas slows down global warming.
The magic number is 3.2% – if less than 3.2% of gas gets into the environment, then switching from coal to gas will aid in our fight against warming. And in even better news, the gas industry more or less agrees — gas lobbying groups actually provide hyperlinks to the EDF website on this.
Now that we know the theory, all we have to do is get everyone to agree on what the actual leak rate is in real life.
For example, if the number is 2% – a 2009 estimate by the Environmental Protection Agency – then a switch to natural gas will provide both environmental and economic benefits. But if the number is 12% – as estimated by a researcher at Cornell – than natural gas is an unmitigated disaster that will hasten the boiling of the planet.
Who do you believe?
This problem comes up a lot in early work in any scientific field – initial estimates are all over the place. It happens because researchers use different measurement techniques, or sample from different locations. Or just plain make mistakes, which take a while to find and correct.
It was only recently that scientists started to care enough about the issue to invest in repeated measurements, and we are still learning exactly how to do them right. But more and more measurements are coming out near, or just below, that 3.2% figure. And while that might not be great news – I’d like us to be benefiting more from the death of coal – it gives cause for hope, for two reasons.
The first reason for hope is that if there is one thing engineers are good at, it’s making slow, steady improvements to things. If we are starting near 3% today, there is every reason to believe we’ll continue to lower this with incremental innovations if the right incentives exist.
The second reason for hope is that, at a 3% leak rate, the natural gas industry is letting $1.5 billion a year literally vanish into thin air. Incentives exist.
Now, I’ll be clear that I don’t think the industry will do everything it needs to on its own. Capitalism is made of people, and a significant fraction of people try to avoid change, even if it’s in their best interest. So having the threat of pain (in the form of government regulation) is almost certainly needed to move them in the right direction. And, just as important, the faster we drop this leak rate, the more benefit we get from the switch to gas.
But we appear to be doing fine for now, with a believable path to even better performance – one that didn’t exist in a coal-powered economy. And because methane lasts only a decade in the atmosphere, in the long run the effects of switching to gas are greater still. And let’s be clear that this is a long game: even under a Manhattan Project style investment in renewables, it would still take over a decade before solar and wind could effectively replace gas across the nation. The improvements we make now matter.
So while we build that cleaner future, fracked gas will dominate electricity production. And we are globally a little bit better off because it does.
Methane is a valuable resource. Relying on the fossil fuel industry to supply it seems to be our deal with the devil. Any leak from that distribution system is a re-introduction of hydrocarbons that the planet had successfully locked up ages ago. It adds to the problem.
Methane is also a renewable fuel that can be captured from the contemporary decomposition of organic matter (biogas). Promoting anaerobic digestion accelerates the process, so leakage must be kept below the rate at which the same material would introduce atmospheric methane naturally, but that is likely to be well within the performance tolerance of current techniques and materials. If that’s true, biogas production is actually reducing the amount of methane entering the atmosphere. Pound for pound, that is 37 times as effective as reducing CO2 emissions.
Given the other systemic negatives of fracking, including geologic disruption, the loss of surface water and the release of contaminates and carcinogens into the human environment, any short-term CO2 gains seem less promising. Tightening up the plumbing doesn’t really balance the equation — developing non-fossil methane sources does.
Fred, I agree that it’s a deal with the devil. Yet this devil is keeping our houses, businesses, and industry powered, at least for the time being; today the only viable alternative to gas is coal. I’m very much in favor of a dramatic increase in government support for renewables to keep us from going over the environmental cliff, but solar (as an example) is only 1% of the grid today, so even if we add all of today’s solar capacity every year it will be decades before it can take a significant load off of fossil fuels.
The question to me isn’t whether gas is good for the environment – we know the answer is “no”. But practically, knowing it will take two or three decades (or more) to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, are we better off allowing gas investment during this period of transition? Gas can give us better GHG results than coal today, and that difference will grow. Whereas if we stop fracking now, coal will take its place, and further GHG improvements are unlikely.
Finally, you are absolutely right that are other systemic negatives for gas beyond GHG, but they exist for coal too – it wasn’t that long ago when towns in WV had to be evacuated for water poisoning! By all means, we should get rid of both as soon as we can. But given that we have to choose one or the other, the balance of the evidence *for now* favor gas over coal.
Let me ask you the same question: If we don’t do more fracking, what should we do in the next decade for energy while we spin up our investments in renewables? What are your thoughts?
I realize that the economy of scale favors existing technologies and infrastructure. Ramping up biogas production wil take time and perhaps the potential output is inadequate to diminish the use of coal or natural gas . My larger point is that we should adamantly resist justifying the same tactic (mining nature for fossil hydrocarbons) and expecting a different result.
GHG may improve while fracking further depletes a finite resource. When it is effectively exhausted, our economic model will simply return to coal because that will again be the cheapest alternative. Meanwhile, are we actually investing in renewables as though our lives depend upon it? “Spinning up” sounds like market-speak for ensuring corporate profit. I am afraid the real solution is significant cultural and economic change. Having a future is the ROI.
One thing we can do now is conserve. It’s not just about driving less or turning down the thermostat, either. It’s about making sustainability a top priority for every use of energy. For example, buildings are designed for 30 years, vehicles for 10 and smart devices for a mere 18 months. This is ridiculous. These things cost the planet as much or more to produce as they do to operate. Somehow, we have to slow down and learn to value durability and lasting utility. Conservation is a corporate responsibility.
Fracking might buy some time, but time for what? Big Oil&Gas is not going to use the profit to fund its own demise. That’s why this argument just kicks the can down the road. We will regret it.
I’m not sure this is entirely relevant, but I feel like passing it along. Recently I studied natural gas use in my home. What I found was that my house gas system, i.e. all the pipes past the gas meter, which supply gas to three different appliances, leaks about a cubic foot of gas every twenty days. This is of course a tiny percentage of the amount of gas we actually use in the appliances, but I found it interesting. What I couldn’t figure out is whether or not this is “normal.” Traditionally, gas leaks are not found by the way I was measuring (which was to observe the meter over the course of a day or two, while all appliances, pilot lights, etc. were off). The traditional methods are not that sensitive – they are only sensitive to “dangerous” rates of leakage.
My attempts to find out more information on a gas/plumbing discussion board actually got me banned; apparently the board administrator found this to be a taboo topic. My guess is that a lot of houses leak this much, and that the entire infrastructure of production, pipes, storage, etc. leaks this much. And undoubtedly fracking leaks quite a bit too. Have you seen the videos of burning gas on the surfaces of streams or lakes in fracking country?
That is a great experiment – I’ve never heard of anyone doing it. To see what the impact of your leak rate is, I checked the web to see what average home consumption might be. You can see numbers here: http://www.peoplesgas.com/company/ournaturalgassystem/naturalgasfactslinks/. They may or may not be good, but my guess is that they are order-of-magnitude correct – at 168 cu ft per day estimated at this site, that would mean your leak rate would be 0.03%. I can live with that.
I would assume a home leak rate would be pretty low, because we have a high density of noses-per-square-foot. Across a city it should be larger if only because people aren’t around to sniff out the problems. Water pipes are even worse than natural gas, because the infrastructure tends to be older, and it’s harder to measure still. I found one estimate that US cities leak a little less than a percent of natural gas: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-natural-gas-leaks/. By contrast, I found one source that pegged water leaks at 30%! Yikes.
Sorry you got tossed off a discussion board for being provocative. I vote you should keep doing it, though