First off, since fracking has gotten an often deservedly bad rap for environmental damage, the case for natural gas must address fracking. Yes, fracking is bad in many places where it’s been done—places of high environmental and geological sensitivity. Fracking needs stricter and more vigilant regulation, and harsher penalties for malfeasance. In particular, the injection of waste fluids into underground wells. But we need natural gas for electricity generation as a bridge to a renewable energy future—not to mention its already widespread use for heating, where it is more efficient than electricity (and you have to think what generates your electricity), far cleaner than oil, and still farther cleaner than coal.
The abundance of natural gas made possible by fracking is vital to a cleaner generation of electricity and providing a cleaner fuel for transportation, both vital to transitioning to renewable energy sources. An absolute ban on fracking would be like closing the Interstate Highway System because of traffic accidents.
The following is a pragmatic argument for the use of natural gas. It is great that renewable energy is taking up an ever greater fraction of our electrical energy generation. Nevertheless, the fraction is still small, and, as with all new growth, the rate of increase will level off in time. This is due both the inherent limitations of the technology, and the expense.
Those of you who champion wind and solar and deplore nuclear for generation of electricity are just the people who should be promoting the use of natural gas. That’s because gas is nearly ideal for coping with the intermittency of those sources, making them feasible in places where you find big swings in output. Unless huge, rapid, and highly improbable strides are made in electrical energy storage, over the next 20 years natural gas backup is what can most affordably and reliably keep the lights on as we rely more and more on wind and solar.
What’s good about gas? (1) it emits only half the amount of carbon dioxide that coal does, per unit of energy produced. (2) it is well suited to the operation of combined cycle power plants, where waste heat from the initial combustion of the fuel is captured to further drive steam turbines in a way that can boost efficiency by some 50%. (3) it can be ramped up quickly to meet demand when renewable sources are weak or down. It can be rapidly ramped down again when the renewables power up. It is called “dispatchable” in the power business. (4) Besides being dispatchable, it is more reliable than wind or solar.
The only source that beats natural gas for carbon emissions, while being both reliable and dispatchable, is hydroelectric. Like hydro, nuclear has zero carbon emissions, and is reliable although not readily dispatchable.
If we are going to oppose nuclear power development, we have few other options. Dams take a long time to build, and there are not many places they can be built without serious environmental consequences, mainly on account of lost or severely altered habitat. (In many places, loss of trees. If you want trees to be soaking up oodles of carbon dioxide, they can’t do it underwater.) I have dealt with the environmental drawbacks to biomass burning in another post.
Distribution of natural gas by pipelines presents other environmental and safety problems for which there are no convenient answers. But there is one factor that overwhelms all others: Anthropogenic Global Warming. Wind and solar capability can only be developed to necessary scale with backup from natural gas (dispatchable) and/or nuclear (reliable) and/or hydro (reliable and dispatchable), to continue through mid-century..
At this point in time I cannot readily provide you with the data that support these arguments in a form that is easy to grasp. It takes a long time to gather them from reliable sources and aggregate them in easily understandable, comprehensive form—graphs and tables. They will be found later on the Energy/Electricity page of this site. But you can start yourself with stats from the U.S. Energy Administration (link following), that shows how small the contribution of solar and wind to the staggering total generation in the U.S. currently is—and, judging by the growth from 2012 to 2015, they have a long way to go to join the same league as coal and natural gas.
While you’re browsing those numbers, keep in mind that the units are thousands of megawatt hours (thousands of millions of watt hours)—that is, gigawatt hours (a billion watt hours—1,000,000,000 watt hours.) Next time you hear of a breakthrough in energy storage, get the units and think of the scale of storage needed to back up any significant fraction of total electricity usage.
Scroll down on this page:
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/
Note that you can download this and other pages from the U.S. EIA. See the “Download” menu on the right above the table.
– Mark
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