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The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

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Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#21

Post by taneq »

37r6r6u3u3u wrote: post #19
imglorp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas is also laden with hidden costs. In particular, bad things happen when drilling shale and then more bad things building and running pipeline transports such as Dakota, Keystone, and Mariner. These things are all getting rammed through legislatures in a manner that bypasses all of the normal democratic process. For example, Mariner East somehow got declared a public utility which gives Sunoco rights to eminent dom…

What gas doesn't suffer from though is expensiveness (environmentalism sounds great until you realize you're largely advocating economically regressive policies that disproportionately impact the most vulnerable) and scalability. EU countries might be able to run their industrial sectors on renewables but call me when Russia, India, China, Indonesia, Brazil or even the US are able to do it without costs going up.

> environmentalism sounds great until you realize you're largely advocating economically regressive policies that disproportionately impact the most vulnerable

Global warming is going to 'disproportionately impact the most vulnerable' even more. (Is there anything at all that won't? People with fewer resources have fewer options in dealing with new challenges, this seems like a fundamental fact.)

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#22

Post by acidburnNSA »

bradbot wrote: post #16
asdfadsfgfdda wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas is not slightly better, it's significantly better than coal for climate. Emissions are about half as much as coal per kWh. Switching from coal to natural gas has probably reduced America's CO2 footprint more than all new renewable generation combined. In the short term and without cheap storage, renewables just cannot scale compared to natural gas.

Does this take into account the amount of methane released from burn off and leaks?

No. When you consider those it's about as bad as coal. Even at half coal, 490 gCO2-eq/kWh is tremendously incompatible with a climate solution. All the gas companies are trying to greenwash and say they're the perfect partner for renewables but they're terrible high-carbon fossil emitting beasts.

Still way better than coal on the deaths-from-air-pollution metric.

But not a reasonable or good option. We need to stop celebrating the transition from coal to fracked gas and get on with actual low carbon energy like solar, hydro, nuclear, wind.

Nuclear being the best of those :)

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#23

Post by acidburnNSA »

sunstone wrote: post #18
asdfadsfgfdda wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural gas is not slightly better, it's significantly better than coal for climate. Emissions are about half as much as coal per kWh. Switching from coal to natural gas has probably reduced America's CO2 footprint more than all new renewable generation combined. In the short term and without cheap storage, renewables just cannot scale compared to natural gas.

Actually renewables can scale very well by covering much more area and thereby averaging out the wind and solar fluctuations across the country. The technology for achieving this is High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) a technology that has also been rapidly getting cheaper along with renewable technologies because its costs are driven by semiconductor technologies getting cheaper every year.

Permitting transmission lines will get much, much harder with scale needed to do what you're saying.

With nuclear you don't need to build vast new storage and transmission, or cover the landscape with energy harvesters.

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#24

Post by toast0 »

packetlost wrote: post #17
loeg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is also low land footprint (energy dense) and low physical waste.

I'm generally in favor of nuclear power, but you can't argue that the (relatively) small amount of waste isn't super nasty. Last I heard we still don't have a good way of dealing with it.

Letting it sit in place isn't actually that bad.

Burning it would probably put less radiation into the atmosphere than coal, and allow it to disperse. Breeder reactor designs could reduce the amount of dangerous waste, but a fair amount of waste has piled up over the decades while it was implausible to build new reactors. As it is, with one new reactor online in 2016, and two still under construction, we're likely to see a large drop in power and waste generated by nuclear plants over the next few decades.

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#25

Post by tonyedgecombe »

37r6r6u3u3u wrote: post #19
imglorp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas is also laden with hidden costs. In particular, bad things happen when drilling shale and then more bad things building and running pipeline transports such as Dakota, Keystone, and Mariner. These things are all getting rammed through legislatures in a manner that bypasses all of the normal democratic process. For example, Mariner East somehow got declared a public utility which gives Sunoco rights to eminent dom…

What gas doesn't suffer from though is expensiveness (environmentalism sounds great until you realize you're largely advocating economically regressive policies that disproportionately impact the most vulnerable) and scalability. EU countries might be able to run their industrial sectors on renewables but call me when Russia, India, China, Indonesia, Brazil or even the US are able to do it without costs going up.

As of 2018, renewable energy accounted for 79% of the domestically produced electricity used in Brazil.

Brazil relies on hydroelectricity for 65% of its electricity, and the Brazilian government plans to expand the share of biomass and wind energy (currently 6%) as alternatives.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Brazil

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#26

Post by korantu »

packetlost wrote: post #17
loeg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is also low land footprint (energy dense) and low physical waste.

I'm generally in favor of nuclear power, but you can't argue that the (relatively) small amount of waste isn't super nasty. Last I heard we still don't have a good way of dealing with it.

The reason for nuclear is that it has proven trackrecord of decorbanizing an industrialized economy. [2]

As for the waste, it pays to extend 'relative' - nuclear leaves a coke-can size of waste safely stored on site for a person's lifetime energy needs, including transportation. For comparison, other baseload energy generation methods create tens of tons of waste a lot of which ends up in atmosphere.

Whole waste generated for decades of generating 10-20% of grid power in US, all of it, will fit on a football field ~ 50feet high.

Then, if not for politics, one can follow France, and reprocess the waste into more fuel.

France got waste reprocessing to the extent where decades of electricity provided to Paris only leave several glass slabs of waste behind [1].

[1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nu...

[2] Decarbonization in 10 years: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYp2uVFVcAEWAoW?format=jpg&name=...

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#27

Post by cycomanic »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #23
sunstone wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually renewables can scale very well by covering much more area and thereby averaging out the wind and solar fluctuations across the country. The technology for achieving this is High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) a technology that has also been rapidly getting cheaper along with renewable technologies because its costs are driven by semiconductor technologies getting cheaper every year.

Permitting transmission lines will get much, much harder with scale needed to do what you're saying. With nuclear you don't need to build vast new storage and transmission, or cover the landscape with energy harvesters.

With nuclear you still have to cove rthe landscape with nuclear powerplants, uranium mining pits (people like to forget these because they are not in their backyard) and nuclear storage (which is still an unsolved solution).

Then there is the problem that nuclear is terrible at anything but baseload, so you still need gas turbines for reacting to load. Everytime this is brought up nuclear proponents say research in new nuclear power generation will solve all of it. But they have been saying this for decades while renewable are there and all the solutions for its downsides exist.

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#28

Post by seanmcdirmid »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #5
jeppesen-io wrote: post #4

Will this lead to more coal plants shutdown?

Yes and nuclear. Gas is better than coal for air pollution and slightly better (but still very bad) for climate. Nuclear is low carbon and doesnt have air pollution so it is terribly counterproductive to build gas in its place.

Nuclear has high capital costs and many plants are aging out as they reach 40+ years old. Natural gas is a very strong possibility when replacing these plants unless the government steps in somehow to alleviate multiple financial risks (beyond continue to provide cheap accident indemnification).

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#29

Post by eru »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #28
acidburnNSA wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and nuclear. Gas is better than coal for air pollution and slightly better (but still very bad) for climate. Nuclear is low carbon and doesnt have air pollution so it is terribly counterproductive to build gas in its place.

Nuclear has high capital costs and many plants are aging out as they reach 40+ years old. Natural gas is a very strong possibility when replacing these plants unless the government steps in somehow to alleviate multiple financial risks (beyond continue to provide cheap accident indemnification).

Yes. Though the high capital costs for nuclear are mostly down to policy, less so to technology.

Re: The World Can’t Take Much More Shale Gas

#30

Post by seanmcdirmid »

packetlost wrote: post #17
loeg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is also low land footprint (energy dense) and low physical waste.

I'm generally in favor of nuclear power, but you can't argue that the (relatively) small amount of waste isn't super nasty. Last I heard we still don't have a good way of dealing with it.

Most of it is actually low level waste. The bit of high level waste fits into a few barrels, and is easy to keep track of. What we are really arguing about is keeping track of it for millions of years, which inspires much less confidence in people.

Even then, breeder reactors would solve much of that problem, but the government is afraid of that solution because it is too easy to derive bomb making material from those.

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