Leaks Can Make Natural Gas as Bad for the Climate as Coal, a Study Says

[NickB79]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/climate/natural-gas-leaks-coal-climate-change.html

Natural gas, long seen as a cleaner alternative to coal and an important tool in the fight to slow global warming, can be just as harmful to the climate, a new study has concluded, unless companies can all but eliminate the leaks that plague its use.

It takes as little as 0.2 percent of gas to leak to make natural gas as big a driver of climate change as coal, the study found. That’s a tiny margin of error for a gas that is notorious for leaking from drill sites, processing plants and the pipes that transport it into power stations or homes and kitchens.

The bottom line: If gas leaks, even a little, “it’s as bad as coal,” said Deborah Gordon, the lead researcher and an environmental policy expert at Brown University and at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit research organization focused on clean energy. “It can’t be considered a good bridge, or substitute.”

The peer-reviewed study, which also involved researchers from Harvard and Duke Universities and NASA and is set to be published next week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, adds to a substantial body of research that has poked holes in the idea that natural gas is a suitable transitional fuel to a future powered entirely by renewables, like solar and wind.

This is really bad, as we've invested heavily in the use of natural gas to back up solar and wind. Most studies I've seen put leakage rates around 2%, or 10X the cutoff point found in this study, and many suspect those are still undercounts. And the piece I find most interesting is that they took into consideration the solar dimming effect of burning coal, wherein the sulfur emissions from coal smoke actually offset some of the heating by reflecting incoming solar radiation. I haven't seen any other studies incorporate this before.

I've actually been worrying lately that the massive heat spikes we've seen this year are in part because, as coal plants have been shut down and the remaining ones cleaned up, the atmosphere has lost enough sulfur to let the greenhouse gases, especially methane, really show their true warming potential. This concerns me greatly.

Without backups provided by natural gas, the only other real option we have to keep the grid stable and not cook the atmosphere is to construct nuclear reactors. Likely hundreds of them globally, especially the smaller, next-generation modular reactors currently being trialed out by several companies now. That, or accept a global de-growth strategy that means those of us in the developed nations accept a serious cut in our standard of living.

[madville]

1. How does that compare

How does that compare to what naturally seeps from the ocean floor and bubbles to the surface? Probably pretty hard to actually measure natural seeps since there are so many and so spread out, just seen rough estimates.

[NickB79]

2. The natural seeps are the background noise. They've always been there

So how much naturally escapes is immaterial to the study. It's kind of like climate deniers pointing to volcanoes to say CO2 emissions from cars aren't a big deal, when volcanic activity has always been happening.

There's also no evidence there's been a large change in natural methane emissions in recent years. The closest we're seeing is the methane escaping as the Arctic thaws, and that's due to humans pumping carbon into the atmosphere and starting a positive feedback loop, so it doesn't really count as a natural phenomenon.

[Think. Again.]

3. I agree...

Nuclear power plants will be needed to play an important role in the transition away from fossil fuels.

But we must remember that the goal IS to reduce and eliminate the CO2 emissions that are the main driver of climate change.

I don't think that looking at coal emissions as a way to geo-engineer the atmosphere is a good solution to anything.

Continuing to quickly reduce fossil fuels (including the leaking natural gas) by displacing them with all of our non-CO2 emitting options should be our main effort.