Natural gas is a fuel of the future
austinvernon.site
austinvernon.site
> The COP might be four at 50F, but it could be less than one at 0F, which is why many heat pump systems have emergency resistive heating elements.
There are no heat pumps that I've ever seen that will even operate if the COP would fall below 1. Moreover, even basic, 'American' (e.g. Goodman) heat pumps from a decade ago are around a COP of 2 at 0F. The more modern 'Asian' heat pump/mini split systems tend to do much better than that.
Most heat pump setups that rely on electric resistance heat backup is done deliberately to avoid massively oversizing the system. The strips work in parallel with the heat pump, to provide the little extra 'kick' needed on those cold nights. The result is a COP that still averages above 1, again, only for the coldest of the cold periods.
Furnaces can last 15 years or much more in some cases, so it makes sense to think about this at the time of construction/replacement. None of the carbon-capture/scrubbing technologies mentioned apply to a residential furnace spewing carbon or the aging, often-leaky residential natural gas infrastructure.
I thought his general point made sense: that gas distribution systems are more readily (and cheaply) able to meet "peaky" demand for heating than electric ones.
It seems like the point he's trying to make is that meeting unpredictable and dynamic energy demand is a tougher problem to solve at scale with electricity than with gas.
As other folks here have pointed out, he largely ignores the actual practical reality of distributing gas, though, which undermines a lot of this whole point anyway.
Carbon emissions are bad, but new carbon capture tech will solve the problem!
Reliance on unproven tech is bad enough, but the author is expecting us to believe that there will be any willingness to adopt these technologies let alone for the world’s governments to enforce their adoption.
I realize it’s not black and white here, but when you factor in the cost of even modest failure it just doesn’t make sense.
Spoken by madmen and men ad infinitum . . .
I do agree with him on natural gas power plants. And I'd add that we don't even need any carbon sequestration, or to come up with synthetic gas. It's just fine to use the current power plants that we have.
It's actually surprisingly easy to get to net zero emissions by 2050 (at least for the US, which I'm more familiar with). The last few years have seen the vast majority of the new power plants be solar and wind. Each year more than the previous one. If we keep this trajectory, we'll produce all the energy we'll need (not just electricity generation, all energy, including transportation, iron and cement manufacturing, etc) by 2050 from solar, wind and the current nuclear and hydro.
We don't need any breakthrough in batteries, or hydrogen generation, or anything else. The current batteries are good to store electricity from day to night. They will never be cheap enough to economically store energy from summer to winter. But we won't need them to. We will not even need to switch to a hydrogen (or ammonia) economy.
We just need to maintain the current gas power plants. Let them generate electricity when there's not enough sun or wind.
The trees will take care of the carbon sequestration.
How is that possible, you ask? It's simple my dear Watson. Right now the electricity generation is responsible for about 26% of the greenhouse emissions in the US, and about 45% of those come from natural gas. About 55% come from coal; coal produces much less electricity than gas in the US, but it's much dirtier. So, all in all, gas power plants produce about 12% of the US's emissions. And the trees absorb each year about 13% of the (gross) US emission. More than gas power plants emit.
So, if we keep all our plants as they are, and use them only when there's not enough electricity produced by renewables, we'll end up being ok, much more than ok.
You should ask yourself, where do trees put this "absorbed" emissions?
The answer is in themselves when they grow.
A forest at equilibrium is carbon neutral, not carbon negative. Your comment suggests that US trees are growing significantly year over year. However all evidence would point to the contrary.
We would need to plant (and keep alive) a significant amount of new trees every year in addition to not removing any existing ones.
That just isn't doable long-term.
We have been cutting down forests and killing the soil for 200 years.
So there is a lot of natural (re)sequestration available to us
Europe is re-foresting simply due to demography and urbanization. The amazon. Etc.
Unfortunately, these future trees are double booked. Airlines, shipping, cement, steel - they are all hoping to use tree / bio-fuels instead of more expensive solutions.
So yes. Lots of PV/wind. Keep gas for backup. But it is a temporary crutch!
In any case, if we use natural gas power plants only for smoothing out the peak demand, then their emissions will be much less than the current 12%. Maybe 4 or 5%. Enough room for airlines and shipping.
As for steel and cement, we need to switch them to new technologies that makes them not emit CO2, such as [1], or emit much less, such as [2]. The thing is, once electricity is cheap (because solar and wind are cheap), hydrogen will be cheap, and switching steel production from using coke to hydrogen will be not only environmentally responsible, but also economically optimal. The same for fertilizers and plastics. Cement will be a bit trickier to get to fully carbon neutral, but we'll be able to easily cut emissions in half.
All in all, there are no real blockers to get to net zero. We only need to keep the pace with solar and wind, and there are no signs that we won't be able to.
Great fact. Got a source?
Land Use and Forestry (13% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions) – Land areas can act as a sink (absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere) or a source of greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, since 1990, managed forests and other lands are a net sink, i.e., they have absorbed more CO2 from the atmosphere than they emit.
This is incorrect with the type of hydrogen we would use and store for energy. Elemental hydrogen or hydrogen ions (H+) is an unstable state of hydrogen that exists in a very limited window after a chemical reaction who’s byproduct is a free hydrogen ion. H2 (two hydrogen atoms stuck together) is an electrochemically stable compound that naturally occurs and is specifically what we talk about in the context of gaseous hydrogen. We have containment vessels that do not leak it because it’s way bigger than a single hydrogen ion and it’s even larger than helium. H2 does not eat away at what contains it, either.
I appreciated this article for its cogency, but also because he clearly is aware of the climate-related impacts of burning natural gas, and attempts to address them pragmatically. (e.g. the sections about carbon taxes, and carbon capture.)
> Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8 percent of GDP, and are expected to rise to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025. Just 8 percent of the 2020 subsidy reflects undercharging for supply costs (explicit subsidies) and 92 percent for undercharging for environmental costs and foregone consumption taxes (implicit subsidies).
Here’s the full report: https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...
Granted, escaped methane is a huge issue. But much better than the other huge issues out there.