the problem with gas
As of January 2020, NSW has committed to inject an additional 70 petajoules of gas supply into the east coast market, potentially increasing gas use in the State by about 60%. (Coincidentally(?), Santos, an Australian energy company self-described as "one of the leading independent oil and gas producers in the Asia-Pacific region" has for some time been seeking the right to extract coal seam gas from a site near Narrabri in NSW which is also slated to produce 70 petajoules a year). In return NSW will get an additional $960 million in federal funding to upgrade its energy grid and invest in emissions reduction initiatives such as methane capture from landfill and land-based carbon farming projects like agriculture or forestry. On 30 September 2020, the States' Independent Planning Commission gave "phased approval" for the project.
For these initiatives the federal government will provide a minimum $450 million in grants with $510 million coming in a mix of grants and loans, to be matched by $1.01 billion from the State Government, to upgrade interstate power transmission capacity. It has not yet been specified how much carbon emissions will be reduced under the plan, which in any event is said to be non-binding. On gas, Morrison says that "gas can help us bridge the gap while our investments in batteries, hydrogen and pumped hydro energy storage bring these technologies to economic parity with traditional energy sources".
However, gas cannot be the answer. As gas moves from the wells to customers, fugitive (unburnt) emissions can exceed 3%, and this contributes significantly to global warming. Conventional and coal seam gas are mostly methane. When they are burnt to make energy they tend to produce around 40 to 50 per cent less carbon dioxide equivalent emissions than coal would to produce the same amount of energy.
The problem is that when it escapes unburnt as so-called fugitive emissions, new research shows that methane is 32 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 100 year period, and around 80 times more potent over a 20 year period. As a result if more than 3 per cent of total natural gas extractions leak into the atmosphere during its extraction, processing and transmission, natural gas becomes as bad or worse for climate change as burning coal.
June 2020, the EU’s fleet of Sentinel-5P satellites detected huge plumes of invisible methane gushing from the Yamal pipeline running from Siberia to Europe. One of the leaks was spewing 93 tonnes of methane every hour: equivalent to the carbon dioxide released by 15,000 cars a year; and in the Permian Basin, where the US extracts 30 per cent of its gas and oil, 3.7 per cent of total production is pluming skyward, according to a recent study; and in February, Nature published a major new study showing methane emissions from fossil fuel production are 25 to 40 per cent higher than previously understood.
As noted above, over a 20-year time frame, a molecule of methane is 86 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than a molecule of carbon. So put simply, if gas leaks at more than a rate of 3 per cent, it’s worse than coal. BP "candidly" reports 3.2 per cent of its gas leaks into the sky.[1]
Whilst burning gas may generally have less emissions overall than coal, it is still a fossil fuel that generates large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, the benefits of gas over coal, once the full lifestyle of emissions are accounted for, are at best marginal. In its recently released Integrated System Plan, The Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) central scenario for the future has renewables capturing 76% of the grid by 2042. With this renewables-dominated grid, the AEMO says gas generation fails. So the reality is that gas is no longer a transition fuel for Australia.
As Bruce Robertson says: “Our power system has leapfrogged gas. Our energy sector is slowly transforming from one dominated by expensive, obsolete coal-fired power to one increasingly reliant on clean, renewable energy. In just 5 years, renewables have almost doubled from 13.5% of power generation to 22.6% today, while gas has fallen by 41%. Gas has seriously lost its base”.
As the fleet of big batteries expands and the technology behind them improves, renewables will continue to eat into the gas market. Investment funds, banks and insurance companies are also declaring policies that would bring their lending and financial practices in line with Paris targets, which is seeing them increasingly questioning and sometimes abandoning gas along with coal, says analyst Tim Buckley at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Two years ago [financial institutions] were looking at coal and tossing it under the bus, hoping that that would satisfy everyone. But this year they are looking at all the fossil fuel industry. They are throwing gas under the bus too.”
In other words, moving from one fossil fuel to another is not a pathway to net-zero emissions and certainly not the panacea it is supposed to be.
[1] See also Nick O'Malley, SMH 25 August 2020 "Gas is not the promised transition energy, research suggests": https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/gas-is-not-transition-energy-we-were-promised-new-research-suggests-20200824-p55ovg.html
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