Though natural gas extracted from shale is the fastest growing energy source for power plants in the U.S., shale gas is now facing fresh challenges, with the release of a new study suggesting the fuel’s carbon intensity is as high as or higher than coal’s.
Given the rapid growth of natural gas, the findings could upend a consensus view that it’s a greener alternative to coal. The natural gas industry maintains that the fuel emits only about half the CO2 of coal, and therefore has promise as a “bridge” from today’s carbon-intensive fuel mix to future low-carbon options. The new findings suggest that, if natural gas emissions are undercounted, there’s greater urgency to develop CCS for natural gas plants, alongside coal.
Already, the low cost of natural gas—along with its low emissions of conventional air pollutants—has led many utilities to shutter older, dirtier coal plants and replace them with gas turbines. Earlier this week, for instance, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) agreed to a landmark deal with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to shutter 11 of its most polluting coal plants, replacing some with natural gas.
Yet if shale gas is as carbon intensive as coal, the results of swapouts like these could cause greenhouse gas emissions to actually rise.
“Compared to coal, the footprint of shale gas is at least 20 percent greater and perhaps more than twice as great on the 20-year horizon and is comparable when compared over 100 years,” Robert Howarth, a Cornell ecologist writes in a pre-publication version of the paper, originally obtained by The Hill newspaper, and which can be viewed here.
The gist of Howarth’s findings has been made public in the past and are already being fiercely debated. The issue has been re-energized since the study is being published in a peer reviewed scientific journal, Climate Science, boosting their credibility.
It’s important to emphasize Howarth’s findings are based on natural gas extracted from shale reserves, rather than natural gas from conventional reserves.
That said, prior analysis, including one by the EPA, have put to the test claims that natural gas emits 50% less green house gases than coal, as is often claimed. Earlier this year, as detailed by ProPublica, the EPA issued analysis (see the report here) that methane leakage during transmission and processing may cut in half the advantage that is frequently attributed to natural gas.
Howarth and his colleagues—Anthony Ingraffea and Renee Santoro, also at Cornell—contend the process of hydraulic fracturing releases far more methane than conventional drilling. When fluids, which are pumped into the well to crack open shale and release the gas, resurface to be reused, they release large volumes of methane, according to the study. Howarth is quoted by the New York Times, saying:
“…we came up with two things that surprised me. First, I expected the indirect CO2 emissions from trucks moving frac water, the compressors, the drills, etc., to be greater than we found. They are actually pretty small, when you add up all the numbers. And second, the influence of methane is greater than I expected…”
Howarth’s finding could fuel critics of shale gas, especially in Northeast US states, where public anxiety is rising that fracking threatens underground sources of fresh water.
Monthly Archives: April 2011
Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (in Pictures) | OnEarth
Writer Susan Freinkel began wondering how much plastic passed through her life. So she conducted a one-day experiment, recording each plastic-containing item she came in contact with. The tally: 196.
They ranged from the obvious to the unnoticed, from the dashboard in her car to the dime-sized stickers she had to peel off her apples. The next day, she reversed the experiment, tracking everything she touched that wasn’t made of plastic. Total: 102.
Freinkel’s world, she realized, was more plastic than not. Yours probably is, too.The experiment started Freinkel on a plastic odyssey, learning all she could about its imprint on our economy, lives and health.
The resulting book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, appears at a time of rising anxiety over plastic’s impact. In mid-April, Congress renewed efforts to modernize a 35-year old law addressing chemical safety that’s widely regarded as toothless and ineffective.
Freinkel traces the reversal of plastic’s reputation from “better than nature” to a chronic health concern. She reminds us of plastic’s very real achievements while exploring our options to reduce the health and environmental toll of living in a plasticized world. These images help tell that story…
Originally published as a slideshow at onearth.org.
PepsiCo’s Water-Saving Mission Flows Beyond Its Factories | GreenBiz
When it comes to water issues, PepsiCo‘s fizzy drinks tend to get all the attention. But the company is also a huge manufacturer of snack foods. Its food operations, PepsiCo is finding, offer huge potential to save water — including going “off the water grid.”
At a UK factory that makes Walkers potato chips — or “crisps,” as the locals prefer — PepsiCo is exploring the possibility that the potatoes themselves could yield enough water to operate the factory.
Potatoes offer a unique opportunity to turn off the taps, PepsiCo’s plant managers have recognized. When raw spuds arrive at the loading dock, they’re about 80 percent water by volume.
Indeed, the biggest challenge in making chips crispy is extracting all that water. As the thinly sliced spuds pass through the deep fryer, a thick fog of steam rises from the oil’s surface, as the water steams off.
Instead of letting it escape through a chimney, PepsiCo is exploring the possibility of capturing the vapor, condensing it to reuse and maybe recapturing the heat energy at the same time. It’s a move the company estimates could save the plant in Leicester, England, $1 million per year.
PepsiCo’s UK and Ireland arm has become a leader in setting ambitious environmental and operating goals. These also include being fossil fuel free by 2023 and achieving zero landfill across its supply chain by 2018 (click here to see more on the UK and Ireland goals).
Thinking like this is helping PepsiCo push ahead with ambitious goals globally, to cut water use across the beverage-and-snack conglomerate’s worldwide operations, says Dan Bena, PepsiCo’s director of sustainable development.
I caught up with Dan last week to hear how things were going since Pepsi published its inaugural water reportlast September (click here to download a PDF).
The report followed PepsiCo’s move in 2009 to publicly endorse water as a human right, just in advance of a similar declaration by the UN general assembly.
PepsiCo’s approach combines internal efforts at its plants with collaborative programs to conserve supplies of and improve access to clean water globally.
As part of a broader set of corporate sustainability goals, PepsiCo is specifically aiming to:
- Improve water use efficiency by 20 percent per unit of production by 2015 compared with 2006;
- Strive for positive water balance in operations in water-distressed areas; and
- Provide access to safe water to 3 million people in developing countries by the end of 2015.
Efforts to cut water are ahead of schedule to beat the 20-by-2015 goal, says Bena. To drive this process within its factories, the company is turning to ReCon — short for “resource conservation” — a homemade analytic tool that maps out the use of energy and water in manufacturing plants. Deployed at hundreds of sites, and used in collaboration with supply-chain partners, the tool has saved many millions of dollars in water and energy costs.
“There’s a myth that water is cheap in many areas,” says Bena. “Even in places where it is inexpensive to buy, once you start measuring, you see the costs of treating water, using it, filtering it, and discharging it piling up.
“In some cases, we’re seeing a tenfold increase in the fully measured cost of water from when it enters a facility to when the process is complete. When business people see water costs real money, there’s no better way to get their attention.”
Bena explained that the second of PepsiCo’s three water goals, above, amounts to a kind of “one-for-one” rule. For every liter of water the company uses, PepsiCo hopes to restore, replenish or prevent the waste of as much or more water.
By this measure, Bena says that PepsiCo has already exceeded this goal in India thanks to its role developing a direct-seeding technology for rice. The method drastically reduces the period during which the rice stalks must be submerged in 6 to 12 inches of water.
“We patented a piece of equipment that saves about 30 percent of the water compared with traditional methods,” says Bena.
PepsiCo’s R&D team developed the specialized tractor over about four years, and has given Indian farmers free access to the equipment, along with technical guidance to learn new growing methods.
According to a World Business Council case study of the effort, PepsiCo’s initiative also cut farmers’ costs by 3,500 rupees (about $80) per hectare compared with traditional methods. Extended to 2,630 hectares (approx. 6,500 acres) in 2009, the system conserved an estimated 5.5 billion liters of water.
In addition, the Indian Government estimates that reduced water use lowers the paddy’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 70 percent, cutting down the volume of rotting vegetative mass, which gives off methane, in the standing water.
To push towards its third goal, providing safe water to 3 million people by 2015, PepsiCo has been focusing on developing public water kiosks in Ghana, India and Kenya. “There’s a misconception that people can’t or shouldn’t pay for water,” says Bena. “The reality is that in many poor countries, they already do, and they pay a high price for low quality water.”
Working with Water.org — which is the culmination of the July 2009 merger between Water Partners International and Matt Damon’s H20 Africa Foundation — PepsiCo is trying to supplant high-priced, private water distributors to build community taps.
There’s another benefit, too. “By brining water into a community, you eliminate the time children — often hours, and usually girls — typically spend fetching fresh water,” says Bena.
Back in the factories where it makes fizzy drinks, PepsiCo continues to drive down the volume of water use. “On average, it takes about 2.5 liters of water to produce one liter of beverage.”
“It’s really variable though,” Bena says. “Some newer, advanced plants are running at half that ratio. Some older ones are probably double that. That’s the opportunity that we face.”
Image courtesy of PepsiCo.
Check out the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2011/04/19/pepsicos-water-saving-mission-flows-beyond-its-factories?page=full
US Senator Bingaman aims to jump-start CCS with a bill addressing liability | Global CCS Institute
All but lost in the din in the effort to pass a federal budget, a bi-partisan senate bill has re-surfaced that breathes fresh hope for U.S. federal support for carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS.
Introduced on March 31, and authored by Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the bill addresses the central question of liability facing new CCS projects.
While carbon dioxide has been used for decades for enhanced recovery in oil bearing rock formations, less is known about how the gas will behave in salt and other geological formations being considered for CCS.
“The liability question is one of the main impediments for the technology to penetrate more widely,” said Salo Zalemyer, an attorney at Bracewell & Giuliani Environmental Strategies Group in Washington who I spoke with about the bill’s prospects.
“And ultimately that technology hasn’t been adequately tested out yet.” Without some liability shield in place, at least for early movers, progress will be slowed, he said.
Senate bill S.699 authorizes the Energy Dept to set up agreements, providing technical and financial support, for up to ten large-scale CCS projects. Qualified projects would inject at least 1 million tons of carbon dioxide from industrial sources.
David Wagner, a lawyer at Environmental Law Review points out, that besides laying out liability terms, the bill also outlines procedures for long-term management of CCS sites:
To pave the way, proposed bill offers liability protection and federal indemnification for the CCS demonstration projects. Under the bill, DOE is authorized to indemnify projects up to $10 billion for personal, property and environmental damages that might be above what is covered by insurance or other financial assurance measures. Upon receiving the closure certificate for the injection site, the site may be turned over to the federal government for long-term site management and ownership. The proposed bill also outlines criteria for site closure certification and includes provisions for siting the demonstration projects on public land. In addition, it would establish and fund a CCS training program for state regulators.
The bill enjoys bi-partisan support from other Senators from big energy states. In addition to Bingaman, DemocratJay Rockefeller (West Virginia) signed on. The Republican co-sponsors are John Barasso (Wyoming) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska).
Prospects for passage are typically murky at this early stage.
This is Bingaman’s second try with CCS: The proposed law is similar to a bill he sponsored in 2009. With bipartisan co-sponsors S. 1013 made it out of committee to the Senate floor, but didn’t make the cut with a broader energy legislative package later that year.
Bingaman’s 2011 do-over version has been referred to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and if it proceeds would next face a public hearing at an uncertain date in the future.
Officially, S.699 is titled: “A bill to authorize the Secretary of Energy to carry out a program to demonstrate the commercial application of integrated systems for long-term geological storage of carbon dioxide, and for other purposes.”
Check out the full text here, S.699.IS.
Capturing carbon with sawdust | Global CCS Institute
Dead plants may work as well as living plants in mopping up carbon dioxide from admissions, a duo of Spanish scientists has found.
Reporting for the Royal Society of Chemistry on Mar 18, Yaundi Li writes that sawdust is showing promise as a porous solid, able to absorb carbon dioxide in its pores. Other solids, such as zeolites, are already used in this way, but most are hard to fabricate and can absorb only about 3 mmol of carbon dioxide per gram (3mmol CO2/g).
A research group at Spain’s National Institute of Carbon in Oviedo have been able to convert sawdust into a lower cost material that absorbs up to 50% more of the greenhouse gas per volume—potentially the largest ever carbon uptake at room temperature, in fact.
I’ll leave it to Yi to describes the process:
The two step synthesis involves hydrothermal carbonisation of the sawdust, creating a hydrochar, which is then activated using potassium hydroxide. The KOH treatment creates pores in the sawdust structure by oxidation of carbon and carbon gasification from K2CO3 decomposition. These pores are responsible for the material’s uptake capabilities, bestowing it with a capacity as high as 4.8mmol CO2/g. In addition, [the] material has good selectivity for CO2 over N2, fast adsorption rates and can be easily regenerated.
More work must be done in advance of commercialization. But the find is promising given that raw material is plentiful and the fabrication process is “not complex” according to Antonio Fuertes, the lead researcher, as quoted in the article.
Caption: Magnified image of sawdust before (left) and after
(right) being heated and activated showing the pores, via RSC.org.For the serious carbon scientists I know we have here in the GCCSI community, I waited until the end for the serious technical stuff, so as not to scare off too many layfolk. Here’s the abstract for Sevilla and Fuertes’ study. For more, click here to go to the full journal citation at Energy & Environmental Science.
Sustainable porous carbons have been prepared by chemical activation of hydrothermally carbonized polysaccharides (starch and cellulose) and biomass (sawdust). These materials were investigated as sorbents for CO2 capture. The activation process was carried out under severe (KOH/precursor = 4) or mild (KOH/precursor = 2) activation conditions at different temperatures in the 600–800 °C range. Textural characterization of the porous carbons showed that the samples obtained under mild activating conditions exhibit smaller surface areas and pore sizes than those prepared by employing a greater amount of KOH. However, the mildly activated carbons exhibit a good capacity to store CO2, which is mainly due to the presence of a large number of narrow micropores (<1 nm). A very high CO2 uptake of 4.8 mmol·g-1 (212 mg CO2·g-1) was registered at room temperature (25 °C) for a carbon activated at 600 °C using KOH/precursor = 2. To the best of our knowledge, this result constitutes the largest-ever recorded CO2 uptake at room temperature for any activated carbon. Furthermore, we observedthat these porous carbons have fast CO2 adsorption rates, a good selectivity for CO2–N2 separation and they can be easily regenerated.
GE Invests $600M to Build Largest US Solar Plant | GreenBiz
Looking back it’s easy to pinpoint the moment the U.S. wind industry came of age: April 12, 2002, when General Electric won Enron Wind Corp.’s wind assets in a bankruptcy auction.
The conglomerate’s $358 million bid has since mushroomed into a $6 billion dollar business and the fastest-growing electricity generation technology in the U.S.
Now GE is hoping to repeat that trick in solar energy. GE announced yesterday a $600 million investment to start manufacturing solar panels in a new factory slated to be the largest in the U.S.
The move is likely to shake up an industry locked in a near-permanent price war. GE is adapting — and says it has bettered — the same technology as the world’s current high-volume, low-cost manufacturer, FirstSolar, based in Tempe, Ariz.
Rather than produce solar systems based on silicon, a technology which dominates in the panels found on most household and commercial building roofs, GE’s is turning to thin-film materials.
In thin film panels, instead of building the solar cells on silicon wafers, sheets of glass are used to sandwich minuscule layers of active material, including a key ingredient, cadmium telluride (CdTe), which gives the panel their name.
GE says its approach produces the most efficient CdTe panels to date, citing an evaluation by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab. NREL found that GE’s thin film panels convert 12.8 percent of light into electricity, surpassing all previous measurements for CdTe panels.
While only about three-quarters as efficient of conventional silicon panels, the lower manufacturing costs of CdTe thin film panels make them cheaper, measured by per watt of capacity, than any currently viable commercial technology.
Declining to reveal any pricing details, Vic Abate, GE’s vice president of renewable energy, affirmed the company aims to be a price leader.
As part of the announcement, GE completed the acquisition of PrimeStar, Inc., a thin film pioneer that GE first took a minority stake in three years ago. In earlier news, GE has also bid $3.2 billion for Converteam, a maker of advanced electronics used to manage and produce renewable energy…
Continue reading here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2011/04/08/ge-invests-600M-build-largest-US-sola…