Those things are on my mind as I contemplate a switch from heating oil to natural gas at my home. It does not seem to make financial sense, but it makes more sense when I consider those things. That said, until technology that allows solar to be economically used for everything is available (e.g. amazingly cheap, high density, long lasting batteries), we are going to need natural gas to replace other fossil fuels in places where solar cannot be used.
http://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/gasflaringreduction
"Billions of cubic meters of natural gas is flared annually at oil production sites around the globe. Flaring gas wastes a valuable energy resource that could be used to support economic growth and progress. It also contributes to climate change by releasing millions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere."
Burning natural gas produces only half as much carbon dioxide as burning coal.
Can be produced from forestry waste:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_natural_gas
It would not be wrong to call it solar power. :)
Another interesting factor to consider is the residency time of the different gases. Methane breaks down fairly quickly, while CO2 needs to be sequestered, which is currently done quite slowly via biological processes. Methane is extremely bad in the short term, but measured over a long period (100 years) does in fact trap less heat.
However, we're not on a timeline where we can worry about 100 year effects. Our current warming trajectory will almost entirely destroy coral reefs in about 30 years, and estimates vary on the threshold for runaway effects (Methane calthrates, reduced primary production due to ocean acidification, etc) but the large majority of them are well below the 100 year threshold.
Tl;DR: Natural gas might cause less warming over a long period, but it causes more in the near term, and we're screwed if we don't fix things in the near term.
I bring up hydraulic fracking because it's the primary driver behind the renewed push for natural gas. The United States has suddenly become one of the most competitive producers of natural gas, so strong domestic forces are now lobbying for it.
The one application where natural gas does have a decent advantage is base-load grid energy generation. Renewables like wind and solar are variable, and we need controlled inputs with rapid responses to help integrate them into the grid. Gas turbines are the most responsive fossil fuel systems by a wide margin, so they serve a decent purpose there. This should only be viewed as a stop-gap until we develop grid-scale storage through EV networks and such though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_natural_gas
That being said, you can think natural gas is great without thinking about CO2 at all. Switching to natural gas would eliminate dependence on oil from the Middle East, which ought to be a good thing.
His full slides are linked at [1]. His second lecture in the series [2] suggests upstream emissions from a well are about 1.3%. That's not enough to justify significant investment in capture for production increases, but it's enough to do enormous damage to the environment. The first set of slides explains that damage reasonably well, but the TL;DR is that Methane screws us far more in the short term, and all the timelines that matter at this point are short term.
I don't have any information on biofuel production. I think it's an open question whether it's useful for grid-scale energy production -- again, gas turbines are wonderful base load generators -- but I'd be extremely hesitant to support it's use in transportation.
Oversea shipping is a challenging problem that may be served well by gas as a stop-gap, but long term it should move to compact nuclear reactors which use non-weaponizable fuel elements or new energy dense storage methods like lithium air batteries.
For ground transportation, it's really hard to justify anything other than direct electric vehicles at this point. The energy density of natural gas isn't that great relative to current Li-Ion packs when you consider tank weight, and any pure ICE vehicle has to deal with large braking losses, which EVs can recover trivially. The various flavors of hybrids are a decent solution, but I'm a huge proponent of the pure EV model with parked EVs doubling as a grid-scale storage solution.
[1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1ocJG5BVzw0TmRmSUs4TjJRdVk... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1ocJG5BVzw0aUVUQ2tEcXNwTVU...
I consider eliminating demand for oil to reduce funding of terrorist attacks to be a higher priority than eliminating carbon based transportation. If you do not, then there is always production of natural gas from biomass, which makes natural gas carbon neutral:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_natural_gas
For what it is worth, natural gas has a higher energy density per unit mass than gasoline, diesel and kerosene. Switching to it in transportation actually reduces energy requirements such that reductions in carbon dioxide output would be higher than the theoretical numbers:
It might be worthwhile to check the assumption that halting warming will be possible while maintaining all of the transportation infrastructure we've grown accustomed to over the last 102 years. What sounds better to you, a working ecosystem or cheap airfare?
You can see your goals achieved with natural gas thanks to biomass conversion methods, but do not expect everyone to be as enthusiastic about eliminating CO2 emissions as you are. The most you will get is willingness to make things renewable for security or financial reasons.
Natural gas can both reduce the cost of air travel, which definitely can get people on-board and improve security by cutting demand for oil, which ought to matter to my fellow New Yorkers.
Let's hope technology pulls of a miracle before this flavor of myopic insanity destroys the planet. You do realize you just said that you'd rather be able to affordably fly than have a working biosphere, right? What were you planning on eating for the mid-flight snack? An arm rest?
The projections that claim temperature rises do not consider the inevitability of renewable energy. Renewable prices will drop over time while fossil fuel prices will increase over time. Eventually, fossil fuels will be more expensive and renewables will take over.
Even if the most severe predictions on the internet are true, there is no need to eliminate he use of carbon based fuels. Speeding up the transition to renewable carbon based fuel production would be more than sufficient.
There might be some projections that don't take this into account (though I'm not aware of any). However, many consider "commitment", or the long term effects of what has already been done (for example, the CO₂ that's already been produced). I found the following article "What would happen to the climate if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today?"[0] from 2014 useful in describing the situation with links to additional resources:
[0]: https://theconversation.com/what-would-happen-to-the-climate...
For two examples of projections taking the effects of differences in CO₂ emissions (which serve as an effective proxy for fossil fuel usage), here are two from resources linked from that article:
Charts showing different projections of relative CO₂ concentrations based on varying changes in CO₂ emissions[1]
[1]: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-10-3...
Two global coupled climate models show that even if the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had been stabilized in the year 2000, we are already committed to further global warming of about another half degree and an additional 320% sea level rise caused by thermal expansion by the end of the 21st century.[2]
[2]: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/307/5716/1769
Speeding up the transition to renewable carbon based fuel production would be more than sufficient.
Do you have references which support this claim? I'd be interested in reading about them if you do. Statements like this seem to sometimes be based on the assumption that market forces will be able to fix climate change issues, though I don't know whether you hold this position. The relationship between market forces and effects on climate change are not tightly coupled. The rate at which renewable energy sources replace fossil fuels is not directly proportional (inversely or otherwise) to atmospheric CO₂ concentration or global albedo or temperature or sea level.
From what we understand of human psychology, we don't intuitively grasp concepts on such a grossly non-human scale (both in time and space) such as climate change, just as quantum mechanics or relativistic physics can throw us for a loop. I should think it's much more difficult for the market as a whole to be efficient in reacting to effects on this scale as they are so much further removed from human intuition.
Natural gas is not a sustainable energy source. Fracking, which is what makes it cheaper, has tons of environmental problems. Sure, it's better than worse fuels, so go ahead and upgrade. But please don't hijack threads about a sustainable planet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_natural_gas
Aviation, shipping and even low end automobiles will need it.
That is a misleading mischaracterization. The article refers exclusively to biogas, not fracked natural gas which is the basis of your claim of "cheaper, more plentiful and cleaner than gasoline".
And it's not even sustainable if we were to purposefully scale its production (it still emits CO2), which is why the article prefers the lesser term "renewable".
Land isn't going to be a constraint in most countries. Solar resources, while distributed unevenly, are significantly more evenly distributed than fossil or nuclear fuels, or even wind resources. See for example this map of insolation in the US: http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/solar/national_photovoltaic_2...
In the continental US the very best solar resources are maybe ~7 kWh/m^2/day and there's hardly anything below 3.5. Or to put it in terms of cities, Seattle gets 58% as much annual insolation as sun-drenched Phoenix: http://www.i4at.org/lib2/solarrad.htm
So it took many historical performance:price doublings before unsubsidized solar electricity got within shouting distance of fossil electricity in even the sunniest places in the US, and then just one more to reach that threshold across most of the country.
The technical and economic performance of wind/PV has already improved enough, and has enough assured near-future improvements already in the pipeline, that I'd say it would be destined to "eat the world" for electricity if storage were a solved problem. But storage isn't a solved problem.
Most discoveries that get hyped as "battery breakthrough" by university press offices aren't really breakthroughs, but there's so much research that there's an abundance of riches even after you throw away the ~95% that looks bad on slightly closer examination. Common problems with battery "breakthroughs" that justify quick rejection: dependence on rare elements (lithium is reasonably abundant; I mean things like tellurium, germanium, rhenium...), low cycle life, effects demonstrated only at interfaces or in nanostructures without any obvious path to bulk scaling. Among the remaining ~5% that looks interesting, assuming the publications aren't fraudulent, I have little idea which ones will end up industrially significant. Chemistry is a lot easier to model than market success. There are also partial substitutions for electricity storage that could displace and/or complement it: supergrids, demand response, thermal buffering...
But if the price of solar panels keep plummeting like this, it seems sensible to first cover all roofs with them and see how far we can get.
The tech is simple. Dig a hole in your backyard, put a large steel tank in it with an air compressor and a small turbine generator.
Putting the tank underground vastly improves the safety of the system and hides it. You can also derive heat from this process.
I don't know who's going to win. All of the above approaches are technically viable. The winners and losers are going to be shaped by things other than simple technical viability: business plan execution, manufacturing scalability, path dependency... I say that storage is not "solved" because there's no default good-enough solution proven yet. We have to wait for some years after plans leave PowerPoint and inhabit the real world to see what works well in practice.
Btw, their vessels are carbon fiber, not steel. And deriving heat is a problem not a benefit. Every bit of heat that leaves the system is lost efficiency.
http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/lightsail-energy-la...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-storage-startup-lightsail...
Storing air underground absorbs heat, or at least results in less heat loss than storing it above ground.
You can make a very efficient turbine jet that runs at one pressure and one power output at very high expense and ongoing maintenance of moving parts. But it won't run or only run as dismal efficiency at half pressure or quarter pressure.
Meanwhile you can very efficiently move electrical watts around in various formats, cheaply, and scalably, and no moving parts.
As an example of what I'm talking about, liquid fuel has insane amounts of energy stored in it and only recently can we make turbines efficient enough to keep spinning while having fuel poured into them, only at certain constrained power outputs. Meanwhile its very easy with modern technology to run an electric motor from 0.1% to 100% speed using electronic speed control VFDs. You might have trouble cooling it but you won't have trouble making it spin.
I love your idea of using solar to build a store of energy, but you could refine the idea a bit and really do something fun. Having a large quantity of oxygen(liquify it!) could be a boon to the backyard rocket engine enthusiasts :)
Is there sufficient market pressure to drive demand for grid-scale storage? Batteries have been mostly driven by weight constraints (mobile tech, cars) and not by the need for large-scale stationary deployments.
I think that when renewables reach higher levels of grid penetration they will increase the demand for storage with different tradeoffs.
And then in the winter, it's very cold, so the energy cost of heating is very high.