Uncertain Climate Predictions and Certain Energy Progress – Part 8

Can natural gas and nuclear power reduce global emissions and also maintain and improve humanity’s standard of living?

In the last essay we examined how wind and solar power would use far too much land and resources to warrant their replacing other forms of energy.  In this essay we’ll look at the prospects for natural gas and nuclear power for providing for humanity’s energy needs while also reducing global warming emissions.

The revolution in technology allowing the turning of shale rock into oil and gas has led to vastly increased U.S. crude oil production and U.S. self-sufficiency in energy production, a huge drop in America’s net petroleum imports, and an increased use of now-much-cheaper fossil fuels compared to renewable forms of energy.

As a result, in 2017, the U.S. led the world in reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

In his book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, Steven Koonin writes:

the fact that the total [CO2 reductions] in 2018 was about what it was in 1990 could be construed as progress toward reducing emissions, given that the country’s population grew 31 percent during that time and its real GDP doubled. Total US energy-related emissions fell 16 percent from their peak in 2005, mostly because of changes in electricity generation led by natural gas replacing coal … [C]oal used to generate electricity has been displaced by the inexpensive natural gas produced by fracking … Natural gas will be a fuel of the future because it fits the [following] criteria ..: It is relatively low cost and low carbon and it can be produced from a relatively small footprint. Better yet, it is abundant, and new deposits of the fuel are being discovered and produced in staggering quantities in countries all over the world. Over the past two decades, huge gas fields have been found onshore in the United States, offshore in Israel, and offshore in Africa. In fact, despite surging global consumption of natural gas, proved reserves keep growing. Between 1997 and 2017, proved global gas reserves increased by more than 50 percent. It appears counterintuitive, but the more natural gas we find, the more we find. Global gas reserves now stand at some 193 trillion cubic meters (6.8 quadrillion cubic feet). That’s enough to last for fifty-two years at current rates of production. The shale revolution has made the United States into the dominant player in the global natural-gas business. Thanks to this revolution — which has been fueled by the use of horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and other technologies — the United States has enjoyed “the fastest and biggest addition to world energy supply that has ever occurred in history.” The result of that massive addition to world energy supplies can easily be seen in the growth of the US liquefied natural gas business. Before going further, allow me to explain how the business works. Freezing natural gas to a temperature of about − 162 degrees Celsius (− 260 degrees Fahrenheit) turns it into a liquid. Liquefying the fuel reduces the volume of the gas by a factor of six hundred and allows it to be profitably loaded and shipped on large oceangoing vessels. Countries with big natural gas resources such as Nigeria, Qatar, and Russia, and more recently the United States, convert their natural gas into LNG [liquefied natural gas] so they can ship it to overseas customers … Between 2007 and 2019, US gas production soared, going from fifty billion cubic feet per day to about ninety billion cubic feet per day. That’s an increase of 80 percent in just twelve years. Unable to use all of that natural gas domestically, US producers began looking overseas, and by the end of 2018, the United States was exporting about four billion cubic feet of LNG per day. In mid-2020, the Energy Information Administration expects those exports will hit 10.6 billion cubic feet per day … The staggering growth in global natural- gas production (which has jumped by more than 50 percent since 2000) and the corresponding growth in the global LNG trade are forcing a realignment of expectations for energy producers and consumers around the world. It is also helping decarbonize the US electricity grid. That decarbonization is occurring because low-cost gas is increasingly displacing coal as the fuel of choice for US utilities … Natural gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide during combustion as coal. It’s also cleaner than coal when looking at traditional air pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide.

As Michael Shellenberger writes in his book “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All”:

For nearly a decade, climate activists led by Bill McKibben of 350.org have claimed that natural gas is worse for the climate than coal. And yet, on virtually every metric, natural gas is cleaner than coal. Natural gas emits 17 to 40 times less sulfur dioxide, a fraction of the nitrous oxide that coal emits, and almost no mercury. Natural gas is one-eighth as deadly as coal, counting both accidents and air pollution. And burning gas rather than coal for electricity requires 25 to 50 times less water. The technological revolution allowing for firms to extract far more natural gas from shale and the ocean floor is the main reason that U.S. carbon emissions from energy declined 13 percent between 2005 and 2018, and a big part of the reason why global temperatures are unlikely to rise more than 3 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels … Happily, the war on fracking failed. When it came to fracking shale for natural gas, the United States interfered less than other countries and benefited enormously as a result. The United States allows property owners the mining and drilling rights to the Earth beneath them. In most other nations, those rights belong to the government, which is a major reason why fracking hasn’t taken off in other countries.

The reason burning natural gas reduces warming emissions is because natural gas contains relatively less carbon.  As Shellenberger explains:

Energy transitions have occurred … from more energy-dilute and carbon-dense fuels toward more energy-dense and hydrogen-dense ones. Just as coal is twice as energy-dense as wood, petroleum is more energy-dense than coal, as is natural gas, when converted to liquid form. The chemistry is simple to understand. Coal is comprised of roughly one carbon atom for every hydrogen atom. Petroleum is comprised of one carbon atom for every two hydrogen atoms. And natural gas, or rather, its main component, methane, has four hydrogen atoms to one carbon atom, hence its molecular expression as CH4. As a consequence of these energy transitions, the carbon-intensity of energy has declined for more than 150 years. Between 1860 and the mid-1990s, the carbon intensity of primary global energy declined about 0.3 percent per year.

And what of the potential for nuclear energy?  As Robert Bryce writes in his book “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations”:

Indian Point [a nuclear energy facility in New York] equals or surpasses any of the great dams built in America. But unlike the sprawling reservoirs that are impounded by those dams, Indian Point represents the apogee of densification. 5 The twin reactors perfectly illustrate what may be nuclear energy’s single greatest virtue: its unsurpassed power density, which, in turn, allows us to spare land for nature. To illustrate that point, let’s compare the footprint of Indian Point with the footprint needed to accommodate renewables. Indian Point covers less than 0.4 square miles (1 square kilometer). From that small footprint, Indian Point reliably pumps out about 16.4 terawatt- hours of zero-carbon electricity per year. To put Indian Point’s footprint into context, think of it this way: you could fit three Indian Points inside New York City’s Central Park. Now, let’s compare Indian Point’s footprint and output with what would be required to replace it with electricity produced by wind turbines. Based on projected output from offshore wind projects, producing that same amount of electricity — 16.4 terawatt- hours per year — would require installing about 4,005 megawatts of wind turbines. That much capacity will require hundreds of turbines spread over some 515 square miles (1,335 square kilometers) of territory. Thus, from a land-use, or ocean-use, perspective, wind energy requires about 1,300 times as much territory to produce the same amount of electricity as is now being produced by Indian Point. Those numbers are almost too big to imagine. Therefore, let’s look again at Central Park. Recall that three Indian Points could fit inside the confines of the famed park in Manhattan. That means that replacing the energy production from Indian Point would require paving a land area equal to four hundred Central Parks with nothing but forests of wind turbines.

Sounds promising.  But as Bryce continues:

Despite its tiny footprint, despite its importance to New York City’s electricity supply, despite its zero carbon emissions, Indian Point is headed for premature shutdown … They could continue operating for decades to come. Instead, they are being shuttered for political reasons … The looming closure of Indian Point is part of a rash of nuclear reactor retirements across the United States that is impeding efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, despite nuclear’s essential role in reducing emissions, the US nuclear sector is in the midst of a full-blown crisis. Between 2013 and 2018, American utilities closed or announced the closure of fifteen nuclear plants. The combined output of those nuclear plants is about 133 terawatt-hours per year. That’s about 70 percent more zero-carbon electricity than was produced by all of the solar facilities in the United States in 2017. Not only are US reactors being retired early, but aside from a pair of reactors now being built in Georgia and a small reactor slated to be built in Idaho in the mid-2020s, no new nuclear plants are even being considered by electric utilities in the United States. The result of all these closures is obvious: the United States — which has led the world in the development and deployment of nuclear energy since the days of the Manhattan Project — is rapidly becoming a nuclear laggard. That may please antinuclear activists at Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, but it’s a big loss in the effort to fight climate change … There is simply no way to slash global carbon dioxide emissions without big increases in our use of nuclear energy. That fact has been made clear by numerous scientists. In 2011, James Hansen, one of the world’s most famous climate scientists, wrote that “suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” He went on to say that politicians and environmental groups “pay homage to the Easter Bunny fantasy, because it is the easy thing to do.… They are reluctant to explain what is actually needed to phase out our need for fossil fuels.” In late 2013, Hansen and three other climate scientists wrote an open letter to environmentalists encouraging them to support nuclear. They wrote that “continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change … Renewables like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy, but those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires.” In 2015, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science who was one of the coauthors of the 2013 letter, reiterated his belief that nuclear must be part of any emissions-reduction effort. “The goal is not to make a renewable energy system. The goal is to make the most environmentally advantageous system that we can, while providing us with affordable power,” Caldeira said. “And there’s only one technology I know of that can provide carbon-free power when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing at the scale that modern civilization requires. And that’s nuclear power.”

But is nuclear energy safe?  As Bryce reminds us:

Despite Greenpeace’s efforts to instill “radiophobia” in the minds of consumers, the reality is that nuclear energy remains the safest form of electricity production. The facts show that the accident at Fukushima [Japan] led to exactly two deaths. About three weeks after the tsunami hit the reactor complex, the bodies of two workers were recovered at the plant. They didn’t die of radiation. They drowned. I am not minimizing the seriousness of what happened at Fukushima. Cleaning up the mess there will take decades and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Nevertheless, despite all the hype and fearmongering, exactly zero deaths at Fukushima have been attributed to radiation … In 2013, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation released a report on Fukushima, which found that “no radiation- related deaths have been observed among nearly 25,000 workers involved at the accident site … The UN committee was made up of eighty scientists from eighteen countries.

And what about nuclear waste?  As Bryce writes:

antinuclear campaigners routinely claim that the radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactors cannot be disposed of safely, and therefore no new nuclear plants should be built. Again, that’s simply not true. As Michael Shellenberger, the founder of Environmental Progress and one of the world’s staunchest proponents of nuclear energy, points out, nuclear energy’s waste stream is actually one of its greatest virtues. While sitting in Environmental Progress’s office on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, a few blocks from the University of California’s campus, Shellenberger told me that nuclear energy is “the only way to make electricity production that contains all of its toxic waste. All of it.” He continued, saying that nuclear energy prevents its waste “from going into the environment and yet people think that the waste from nuclear plants is a big problem.” Shellenberger and others have pointed out that the nuclear waste issue is not a technical problem; it’s a political problem. That can be seen by looking, one more time, at Indian Point. During my visit to the plant, two Entergy employees, Jerry Nappi and Brian Vangor, showed me where the company stores the spent fuel from the reactors. On the north side of the facility, on an area that’s maybe the size of two tennis courts, there were about thirty large steel-and-concrete cylinders, known in the industry as dry casks. Each cask stands about 15 feet (4.5 meters) tall and 8 feet (2.4 meters) in diameter and weighs about one hundred tons. As I looked at the row of casks, I was struck by the fact that, throughout the entire operating history of the plant, which began producing electricity in 1962, two years after I was born, the bulk of its spent fuel could fit inside such a small area … The dry casks at Indian Point are part of the nuclear waste that has been created by the US nuclear-energy sector. Since the 1950s, when construction on the New York facility began, the domestic sector has produced about 80,000 tons of high- level waste. That may sound like a lot. But consider this fact: if you collected all of that waste in one place and stacked it about 10 yards (9.1 meters) high, it would cover an area roughly the size of a single soccer pitch.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll look at the bright side of warming.

Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9.