Quote:
Originally Posted by comrade
What about the flaring of sour gas? Surely that's a negative (in that it produces SO2 and burns large quantities of propane).
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There's tonnes of environmental negatives to expanded natural gas development.
Not least of which is GHG emissions. While NG is emits roughly half the amount of emissions per raw unit of energy than from coal, it is still much higher than the scientific imperative to achieve 350-400 ppm of GHGs in the atmosphere.
Less technically, if we fuel switched ever fossil fuel source that was more carbon intensive to natural gas we'd still have emissions much higher than what they'd need to be to avoid 2 degree warming of the planet which is generally considered to be the "safe" threshold.
The bigger problem is the idea of stranded capital and lock in. Natural gas plants are expensive and thus amortized out over at least 30 years. Problem is that we lock our energy-economy into continued fossil fuel dependence over this time frame while we actually need to be reducing emissions by a much higher magnitude. The effect is that we would have to decomission the natural gas generating stock earlier than its useful life meaning much much higher costs that if we switch to renewables now.
The continued reliance on NG or an expanded role for NG in the future essentially means your producing unconventional gas which has some key concerns. The big ones are:
1. Handling, processing and inevitable spillage of waste water and fracking fluid into ground water.
2. Significantly higher terrestrial impact of shale gas - estimated that you would need 100x more wellpads for shale gas than for conventional gas to achieve the same levels of production
A side point, you could have had exactly this conversation in BC 50 years ago when the province went on a massive dam building exercise. Large hydroelectric generation is very capital intensive and has high start up costs, much like wind does now. The argument back then would be exactly the same. Why are we investing so much more of a premium in hydro power when we could be the same capacity using coal for much cheaper?
Thankfully, or not, BC did build the dams and is now producing basically free energy from them with the sites being fully paid off. Over the long term the dams made sense and is actually a competitive economic advantage due to some of the lowest electricity rates in North America.
Building renewables now basically hedges against the rising cost of fossil fuels in the future plus all the other environmental benefits that stem from them.