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Earth Power

Is Natural Gas Actually On Par With Coal for Greenhouse Gas Emissions? (iop.org) 238

Posted by EditorDavid from the emissions-impossible dept.
Is natural gas really a cleaner alternative to coal and oil? That claim "is facing increasing scrutiny," writes Slashdot reader sonlas: One significant concern with natural gas is the release of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, during its extraction, production, transportation, and processing. Methane is approximately 30 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2 over a 100-year period. (And methane leaks can occur at various stages of the gas supply chain, from wellhead emissions during drilling and extraction to leakage during transportation and distribution.) Additionally, intentional venting or flaring of methane also contributes to the problem.

An article published in Environmental Research Letters challenges the assumption that natural gas is a cleaner energy source compared to coal or oil. Their study takes into account the full lifecycle emissions of natural gas, including methane leakage rates, and arrives at a different conclusion. With a methane leakage rate of 7.5% and other relevant factors considered, the greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas can be on par with or even exceed those of coal. Even a lower methane leakage rate of 2% can diminish the environmental advantage of natural gas significantly.

A key aspect of this study is its focus on real-world methane leakage rates. Aerial measurements conducted in various oil and gas production regions in the U.S. revealed substantial methane leak rates ranging from 0.65% to a staggering 66.2%. (Similar leakage rates have been identified in other parts of the world.) These findings raise serious concerns about the climate impact of natural gas and cast doubt on its role as a so-called "transition energy" in the quest for cleaner and more sustainable energy sources, especially liquefied natural gas...

This complicates the search for sustainable energy solutions, especially in Europe where gas was included in the green taxonomy following a push from Germany.
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Is Natural Gas Actually On Par With Coal for Greenhouse Gas Emissions? More

Is Natural Gas Actually On Par With Coal for Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

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  • Some people (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Papaspud ( 2562773 )
    aren't going to be happy until everyone is living in a hut... of course they will have power.

    • Re:Some people (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @07:51AM (#63744030)

      Use the safest, cleanest, and cheapest power sources we have, which are geothermal where available, and nuclear everywhere else.

      For especially the latter this assumes an even ground: regulations that are targetted at actual safety rather than intentionally raising costs and introducing many layers of graft. Right now you can't even store the few barrels of nuclear waste anywhere (because of NIMBY) while pollution from coal and gas can go straight up the chimney, despite being more dangerous in every regard (even including radioisotopes!). Thus, an even ground would require putting a condom on every chimney and securely storing the output until it decays (nuclear waste stops being hot after a few decades, carbon waste stays forever). Most of those holiest-of-holy renewables are not that good either, failing to provide base load (thus requiring efficient storage which we don't have enough of) and having problems on their own. The latter can improve with better technology, but we need some power for now.

      • Re:Some people (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Kisai ( 213879 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @11:22AM (#63744374)

        Nope, but close.

        The reason "Natural gas" is better than coal is simply a question of it's renewability. You can generate natural gas from basically anything that rots. So landfill gas is an option. We literately should be capturing landfill gasses instead of letting the more potent gas leak into the atmosphere.

        Now as for "what is the most "green" power. That is a very geographically dependent issue. Pacific Coast (on any side of the ring of fire,) should be Geothermal as the first option, and Wind as the second option due to the mountainous terrain. They are the worst for Nuclear due to the potential for earthquakes and landslides flooding or burying a nuclear reaction in operation. You can have as many safety guardrails you want in place for Nuclear, but you can do nothing about peoples desire to save themselves in a disaster.

        Now, 2000km away from the Pacific coast and 100m above sea level, that's when you do Nuclear. Because the only option here is Wind or Solar otherwise. Now on the Atlantic coast, the same is true. No Nuclear in the US east of I95 or West of I5 and must be at 100m above sea level or above. That is your safe area for the foreseeable centuries.

        Look no further than the war in Ukraine for an example of why Nuclear plants can not be guaranteed to be run safe forever. Chernobyl, where the most infamous nuclear incident happened, wound up in the middle of a war zone and the Russian soldiers dug into the irradiated materials. These people did not learn about nuclear safety, when Chernobyl melted down. Nobody in the West knew about it until radioactive material was picked up in Western Europe without any nuclear bomb event being registered.

        The reason Nuclear is such a bug bear comes to two issues:
        - Nuclear material proliferation
        - Nuclear safety due to "bean counter" short-term profits being put ahead of long term safety. To them, who cares if someone dies, or exceeds their lifetime exposure to radiation. You cut a check to them and go "sorry we shortened your life, here's what the insurance company says your life is worth. Have fun"

        Like the bigger Three Mile Island/Chernobyl/Fukushima events simply should never happen, and it's this reason why nuclear reactors in countries known for cutting corners (eg China, India) have to be scrutinized as though the people are always lying about properly building, maintaining and operating it. I trust the US and Japan to "operate" a reactor safely, if they were government operated. But they aren't. All nuclear power reactors are private businesses with no plan with how to retire the reactor. They expect to just defuel it and then let it rot away. Ask what they have been doing with the money they made with the reactor? Where's the bond for decommissioning the reactor?

        Anyway my point is, there is room for Nuclear, as long as it's planned and engineered to be unable to fail from natural disasters, and designed to automatically SCRAM if safety features are defeated or warnings are ignored . A Nuclear facility is more likely to survive a Tornado or Hurricane if the entire thing is concrete and anchored to the bedrock. It will likewise survive storm surge, tsunami's and the entire foreseeable sea level rise (85m above current) if they're only built at 100m above sea level.

        Again, 20 years ago I was more readily going to say "no nuclear, not ever" but today I'm more willing to concede the fact that it's better to have the entire thermal electric capacity of a country be nuclear and not a single coal, oil, gas, or waste-to-energy facility in sight.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mspohr ( 589790 )

        Safest, cleanest, cheapest power sources are wind and solar.
        (Now I know the basement dwellers will all chime in with .... "but the sun and wind don't run all the time" ... so let me say that this "problem" has been studied extensively and it has been shown that about four hours of battery can resolve it.)
        Geothermal is very limited to a few locations so is pretty much irrelevant.
        Nuclear is by far the most expensive and it's not due to NIMBYism or regulations, etc. It's due to high cost of construction and op

        • Nuclear waste is a small number of well-contained barrels. Coal/gas waste is an enormous amount of radioactives, pollutants, and carbon that goes up the chimney.

        • It can solve it for a concrete box apartment in Sunny California where heating and cooling loads are negligible year-round.

          But not everyone in California lives in concrete box apartments, and not all of California is Sunny, as attested to by the fact that they can barely keep their lights on.

          The "studies" you refer to (I've skimmed many and had deep visibility in a few) are all predicated on unrealistic assumptions about mass behavior and the existence of worst-case peak energy needs, as distinct from avera

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
            Insulation of existing homes in California (or Wisconsin) can be improved which helps with the issue and can offer good returns on money spent but is disruptive and there would likely be a lack of people to do the work if scaled up. Improving building codes for new buildings should very much be on the table but addressing existing buildings is required. I'm looking at what I can do to improve my house.

            • I spent a 2k last winter putting down an extra 10 inches of fiberglass and airsealing what I could without completely ripping up my ceiling and starting over. I saved maybe 5-10% on my heating, but more importantly I inched back from "beyond the capacity of my furnace" to "just inside the capacity of my furnace" during peak heating loads.

              There's still a draft and I know for a fact I'd get a shit blower door number compared with a house that's air-sealed properly when built.

              Retrofitting to that standard woul

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by drnb ( 2434720 )

          And, yes, nuclear waste is a problem that nobody has solved.

          Actually it has been largely solved. New reactor designs can consume old waste as fuel. Thereby generating power while also cleaning up part of the legacy problem. Converting high level waste that is a problem for tens of thousands of years to low level waste that is a problem for a few centuries. The latter easier to manage by magnitudes.

          • Actually it has been largely solved. New reactor designs can consume old waste as fuel.
            Lol, and how would that physically work?
            Be my guest to provide some links.

            Hint: nuclear waste does not "vanish" by putting it into "a new reactor design". Dumbass. A no brainer. No one can be so stupid to believe that. But then we have Sonlas and the MadMan.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
              Fast breeders can extract additional energy from the original source materials but the costs associated with fueling and refueling such reactors have generally rendered them uneconomic. If these costs were lowered then more energy could be extracted per unit of energy which would mean that for a given energy output there would be less waste.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
            Fast breeder reactors have been around a long time and failed to be commercially viable. The idea that they will solve the issue has been floated for decades and failed each time. It would be great if it did offer a solution but it might have to be run at a loss specifically to address waste. There are nations that some countries would not want running such reactors.

    • Missing the important point: reduce methane leaks (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @10:38AM (#63744286) Homepage

      Comments here are missing the important point of the article [iop.org]:

      The article points out that a low-cost (and possibly even negative cost!) way to reduce one factor in global warming is to stop methane leakage from natural gas wells.

      You're complaining that dealing with greenhouse emissions will reduce your standard of living. Well, the article discusses a way of reducing greenhouse emissions that won't reduce your standard of living.

    • We really need to ban pinto beansâ¦.. (Score:4, Funny)

      by pollarda ( 632730 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @11:31AM (#63744408)
      And lima, navy, kidney, fava, black and other types of beans as they too create methane and contribute to global warming.
    • What "everyone"? This is just Act II of the watermelons trying to get rid of an energy source. Couple this with the various [bbc.com] shenanigans [france24.com] to reduce the food supply, and you've got the makings of another Great Leap Forward.

  • Define Emissions (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @07:49AM (#63744020) Homepage

    I remember commercials as a child stating Natural Gas is "clean alternative". I think they were targeting Oil and Coal.

    The issue with coal is not just CO2, but a whole lot of other emissions. Those coal emissions are a direct cause of many health issues, like asthma. But IIRC, coal threw up so much particulate pollution, it actually reduced the amount of Sun energy reaching the Earth. Thus reducing some warming, but of course, you could not breath in that atmosphere.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      right, but they changed "cleaner" to mean "lower greenhouse emissions" so they could ignore all the other factors. Because this is a propaganda piece, not serious news.

    • Indeed, also the ash is a big toxic hazard, with high potential for ecological catastrophe including groundwater contamination.

      So is it better for greenhouse? Maybe not. It's it cleaner in general? Absolutely.

  • This complicates search for sustainable energy? (Score:3, Informative)

    by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @07:54AM (#63744042)

    No it doesn't. Natural gas isn't part of a "search for sustainable energy" at all. If it were, this would simplify it.

    Obviously, we don't need to search hard wrt to natural gas, we simply need to prevent leakage, something there's an economic motivation to do anyway.

    What's with the recent shit to obvious pro-Republican messaging? This isn't news for nerds, its culture war propaganda.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      "something there's an economic motivation to do anyway." No, there isn't. It's cheaper to flare it off. If it significantly profitable, they'd already be doing it. It isn't and they ain't.

      • I never really understood 'flaring it off'.

        You'd think if you're already channelling it and burning it anyway... you'd power a generator with it and use it for some of your site power needs if nothing else.

        Just burning it off as a pretty intermittent light and heat source seems deliberately wasteful.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Setting up a small mobile power plant to burn various mixtures of impure gasses isn't cheap. It's cheaper to fix the leaks, but even that would cost them money, though they might be able to turn a very small profit on it. Not a large enough profit, though. So they'd rather invest their money elsewhere.

          • Almost like regulation is a vital and necessary part of capitalism, that without it there's no incentive for private industry to weigh negative externalities into their costs or consider reducing them at all.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

            A methane tax is the simplest way to solve this. Every ton of methane removed from the ground cost a certain amount of money. Every ton destroyed or placed back in the ground earns the same amount back.

            A corporation is not designed to do anything other than make money. With a methane tax, they don't need to think about how green something is and they don't need to do something unprofitable. All they need to think about is how to save money, because the leaking methane will cost them. If the leak is tiny, th

    • No it doesn't. Natural gas isn't part of a "search for sustainable energy" at all. If it were, this would simplify it.

      Yes it is unfortunately, Germany is going to build 25GW worth of new natural gas plants for example: https://www.enerdata.net/publi... [enerdata.net]

      At some point it's theoretically supposed to burn clean hydrogen that doesn't exist yet, so it's going to be gas until then.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        Germany is going to build 25GW worth of new natural gas plants

        New plants. So they won't be building them with existing methane leaks. What's the problem?

        • It's a direct response to the OP saying that natural gas isn't part of the transition plan.

          But since you ask - even if the new plants are 100% leak-proof, leakage still happens elsewhere along the extraction chain, and there are still carbon and particulate emissions.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Most of the leaks aren't at the plants, but are in the processing and pipelines. So that argument doesn't hold ANY water.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by PPH ( 736903 )

            in the processing and pipelines

            New processing and pipelines: Build them without leaks.

            Existing processing and pipelines: May already leak. But they'll leak anyway whether they serve new demand or not (leaks are proportional to pressure, not flow).

            The income from new sales will finance repairs to existing infrastructure. Unless it's Burisma Holdings. In which case, it goes in the Biden family pockets.

  • The solution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rally2xs ( 1093023 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @08:02AM (#63744050)

    ...is obviously, until renewables are ready to take over, to quite leaking NG. Construct wind and solar as quickly as possible, eliminate peaker plant necessity by storing excess power either with batteries or maybe gravity - weights lifted to a height, etc. Ultimately we need to quite burning - combining things with the atmosphere's oxygen - completely. Everywhere. The way to do it is to make alternatives cheaper than burning things. That's the only way you get poor countries to do it. And we need everyone doing it. No drilling nor mining "fuels." We need to stop that, and do energy cheaper than that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      No, renewables aren't ready to take over. The reason is the lack of grid-scale storage. (The storage would need to be sizeable to handle a prolonged pause in the renewable generation.) The best way to minimize the size of the storage needed is to use a mix of sources, like solar + wind + (something else as an emergency backup) + (a power transmission agreement with somebody else). The emergency backup doesn't need to be able to come on-line quickly, as the storage should give you over 48 hours of prep t

      • The emergency backup doesn't need to be able to come on-line quickly, as the storage should give you over 48 hours of prep time. And it doesn't need to be clean, as this is a rarely used emergency backup. But you need to be able to depend on it after it sits around unused for a few years.

        When they compare the cost of various types of generation, they should include that one - plants that are needed for contingencies but are normally rarely used. That would probably be the most expensive generation there is, and would have to be taxpayer funded, because the private sector is not going to build power plants that only run occasionally.

        (If it weren't for politics, you might be able to eliminate the backup and depend on the power-sharing arrangement...but you can't avoid politics.)

        It requires someone else to have a surplus at the same time you have a shortage. That is hardly guaranteed even among great allies.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by q_e_t ( 5104099 )
          Also included should be cost of carbon, etc. All of these elements. Cost of intermittency is harder to factor in.

  • We will always burn gas, may as well get energy... (Score:5, Informative)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @08:12AM (#63744074)

    Humanity will have to deal with natural gas from here on out for a long time, so we may as well get energy from it.

    Even if all cars in the world went electric, and all planes, cargo ships and heavy mining and farming equipment went biodiesel, we still need petroleum for certain industries, like, say, chemical industries, for things like manufacturing medicines, fertilizers, and plastics (even if we discarded all single use plastics). And guess what? That oil has natural gas associated with it.

    As TFA says, methane is a greenhouse gas much more powerful than CO2, so that gas has to be burned no mater what. May as well get energy from it, instead of doing like Russia, or my country (Venezuela) does, and simply burn it, period (or worse, just vent it).

    https://www.iea.org/reports/me... [iea.org]

    But, let's wave our magic wand and "stop oil" 100%. No more oil extraction whatsoever (which is not feasible in the short, medium or even long term, hence the need for a magic wand). Are we cool then? No more natural gas extraction? Wrong!

    You see, our technologial world needs helium. We need helium for medicine, and for some cool experiments and some cool science we cover from time to time in this "news for nerds, stuff that matters" site. And guess what? More often than not, the helium we can get* has methane associeated with it. And, again, as TFA says, methane is a greenhouse gas much more powerful than CO2, so that gas has to be burned no mater what. May as well get energy from it, instead of simply burn it...

    So, I'd say, we will need to keep deriving energy from natural gas for a looooooong time.

    * All the helium we get comes from radioactive decay and is trapped in rock formations, all the helium from planetary formation scaped to space long ago

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      "so we may as well get energy from it.", you mean until we start cooking and using it won't matter.

  • Psychos (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) *

    > the greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas can be on par with or even exceed those of coal.

    Mercury and fine particle pollution have a direct and immediate negative impact on human health.

    Your greenhouse gas theory has yet to be proved significant.

    The End is Nigh people really don't seem to care about human well-being when the rubber hits the road.

    At least LK-99 and zpm devices seem to be coming to the fore at just about the right time to save us from these whackos.

    Edit: Upon proofreading I realize t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dryeo ( 100693 )

      Rubber hitting the road does produce a lot of micro-particles that are not good for the health. Meanwhile, as the price of food increases rapidly due to weather events that may well be climate related and here to stay, it is harder to have well being.

  • And a solar powered conveyor belt system to every household. Work from home and all problems with emissions are eliminated. Now if I could just go to the store and not get shot. Oh well, one step at a time.

  • Nowhere in the article does it say that natural gas is not "cleaner" than other fossil fuels. Actually, the string "clean*" hasn't been used anywhere in the article. The person who wrote the summary seems to confuse the concepts of clean energy and greenhouse gas emissions. Natural gas burns clean, it emits CO2 and water vapor, but you don't get all the crap that comes with other fossil fuels such as sulfur and arsenic. So, yes, natural gas is a clean energy when you use it, but the article finds out that i

  • As soon as Europe needed gas--it was suddenly bad here.

  • The entire purpose of the study is to find out how much methane leakage is possible to offset the CO2 benefit of Natural gas. That's the only real value this paper provides. They find the number is in the very high single digit percentages, then proceed to list unconventional extraction methods and incredibly acidic / sour extraction processes which may actually reach that number.

    That is it. That is the answer. If you have a really really shit natural gas source that requires unconventional extraction, and

  • The goal is to get completely off all fossil fuels and completely to renewable energy. Biomass and green hydrogen are the the only forms of burning that have any chance of being environmentally tolerable. Biomass almost always makes a bunch of particulates, and green hydrogen is still a pipedream. Meanwhile, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and hydro all work and wonderfully. Meanwhile, battery, pumped hydro, thermal, compressed air, and several other storage technologies mean that peaking plants are comp

    • They work wonderfully, but you would have to coat the area of a few states with solar and wind to generate enough energy for the US, that isn't counting storing it

  • Take away natural gas (Score:3)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @11:16AM (#63744362)
    And you get nuclear, or living like a Quaker, renewables can't make up the difference

  • Nuclear is the solution (Score:3)

    by atomicalgebra ( 4566883 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @11:22AM (#63744378)
    Nuclear has always been the solution.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Nuclear has always been the very opposite of the solution. The only reason it ever was somewhat successful is because you need civilian nuclear power to build the bomb.

      • Germans, like you, think a solution involves lots of dead people. Which is why you oppose nuclear because it will save lives.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Bullshit. Read this and weep: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/a... [lemonde.fr]

          Unlike the USA, the French are open about what is going on. May have to to with them not having caused completely unnecessary nuclear mass-murder of civilians not once, but twice.

          Incidentally, I am not German. But you would not understand, your world-view is far too primitive.

          • No. I'm not clicking on any bullshit from a German simp who prefers dead children over living. And the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan saved millions of lives.

  • There is no point in even thinking about this new gas vs coal nonsense, because all it is about is trying to find more reasons to ban gas, now that they have succeeded in banning coal. There's a hundred different ways to compare, and a hundred different good vs evil weighting functions, so I am quite sure there is some combination of ways to count and weighting coefficients that will give the desired answer, no matter what it is.

  • MIT study a years back already nailed this (Score:3)

    by rbrander ( 73222 ) on Sunday August 06, 2023 @01:10PM (#63744588) Homepage

    MIT researchers did a model in 2016 that showed using methane for energy did as much global warming damage as using coal, if the total leakage were 4%:
    https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co... [wiley.com] ...the model assumes a certain time-horizon and how much time the CH4 spends in troposphere vs stratosphere, but in that model, 4% is your break-point.

    The industry promptly claimed 0.25%, of course, but studies like this one have come in closer to 2.5%:
    https://nymag.com/intelligence [nymag.com]... ...so, that's less than 4%, but let's assume the effect is linear: with 0% leakage, only half as bad as coal, only half the CO2. With 4% leakage, we go from 50%-as-bad to 100%-as-bad. So 2.5% leakage would be 80% as bad as coal.

    A more-digestible take on the article came from NY Mag: https://nymag.com/intelligence... [nymag.com]

    Other studies have indicated the number 2.5% for leakage. 7.5 sounds pretty high! But even at 2.5%, then use of Nat. Gas is 80% as bad as coal.

  • A huge amount of what's presented as "science" these days is actually politics, pretending to be science. You have "researchers" (usually funded by grants from big governments) doing studies which are not general inquiries into some unknown thing, but rather agenda-driven studies designed to produce reports of value to the governments that fund them - the results ALWAYS calling for "fixes" that require higher taxes, more regulations, and more government power.

    This has been useful for several decades, but th

  • Drive to a part of the country with oil rigs pumping. You'll notice many of them have constantly burning flames on the premises. It's called Gas Flaring and its natural gas -- a by product of oil pumping, that requires an infrastructure to be collected and sent elsewhere (mostly unfeasible in many locations), just being burned as it comes out of the Earth. Countless cubic feet of natural gas just being burned up.

    But yeah, come after me for my gas stove, because my frozen pizza is harming the Earth and

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