Are Greenhouse Benefits of Natural Gas Overstated?
Charleston Gazette
25 January 2011
by Ken Ward Jr.
This morning at the Capitol, the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas
Association will be promoting a report that details the economic
impacts of drilling in the Marcellus Shale formation.
But a new report out this morning from Abrahm Lustgarten at ProPublica
may have more important news regarding the natural gas industry in West
Virginia and across the country:
The United States is poised to bet its energy future on natural gas as
a clean, plentiful fuel that can supplant coal and oil. But new
research by the Environmental Protection Agency—and a growing
understanding of the pollution associated with the full “life cycle” of
gas production—is casting doubt on the assumption that gas offers a
quick and easy solution to climate change.
Advocates for natural gas routinely assert that it produces 50 percent
less greenhouse gases than coal and is a significant step toward a
greener energy future. But those assumptions are based on emissions
from the tailpipe or smokestack and don’t account for the methane and
other pollution emitted when gas is extracted and piped to power plants
and other customers.
The EPA’s new analysis doubles its previous estimates for the amount of
methane gas that leaks from loose pipe fittings and is vented from gas
wells, drastically changing the picture of the nation’s emissions that
the agency painted as recently as April.
Calculations for some gas-field emissions jumped by several hundred
percent. Methane levels from the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas were
9,000 times higher than previously reported.
When all these emissions are counted, gas may be as little as 25
percent cleaner than coal, or perhaps even less.
Even accounting for the new analysis, natural gas—which also emits less
toxic and particulate pollution—offers a significant environmental
advantage. But the narrower the margins get, the weaker the political
arguments become and the more power utilities flinch at investing
billions to switch to a fuel that may someday lose the government’s
long-term support.