by James A. Bacon
The Sierra Club has attacked the idea of natural gas as a “clean fuel” in a new broadside against the proposed construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) and the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) through Virginia. When viewed over the “natural gas fuel cycle” — including production, transportation and combustion — natural gas would be a bigger contributor to climate change than the existing electric generating fleet, including coal-fired plants, the environmental organization charged late last week.
“Natural gas only seems like a cheap and easy fix for climate change,” said Glen Besa, director of the Sierra Club Virginia Chapter, in a statement accompanying the white paper. “In reality, methane pollution is a serious problem that makes natural gas a dead-end solution. We have to stop kidding ourselves. Virginia should be investing in wind and solar and energy efficiency, not expanding infrastructure for more fossil fuel burning.”
The Sierra Club issued the report as the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality makes important decisions about how the state should implement the federally imposed Clean Power Plan, which calls for a massive reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions from Virginia power plants by 2030. The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have called for the most aggressive options, which would require more solar and wind and less natural gas than proposed by Dominion Virginia Power. Backers of the ACP and MVP pipelines have justified the projects on the grounds that they will supply gas-fired power plants in Virginia and North Carolina with cheap shale gas from West Virginia and Ohio.
“The overwhelming consensus of state and federal policymakers – which the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club ignores – is the increased use of natural gas for electric generation is essential to meeting the Clean Power Plan,” responded Jim Norvelle, director-media relations for Dominion Energy, the managing partner of the ACP.
“This is the view of President Obama and elected officials from states across the country,” he said. “It is also the clear guidance of the [Environmental Protection Agency], which identified increased use of natural gas generation as one of three key building blocks for meeting the goals of the Clean Power Plan.”
Because the combustion of natural gas releases less CO2 per unit of heat than the combustion of coal, it is commonly argued that a switch to gas, while less helpful than a shift to solar and wind in reducing CO2, does make a significant contribution as a “bridge” fuel in the fight against global warming. But the Sierra Club argues that such a combustion-only analysis excludes the impact of the release of gas during fracking operations and pipeline leaks. Summarizes the Sierra Club statement:
In addition to emitting large amounts of CO2 when burned, natural gas is a major contributor to climate change in the extraction and transmission stages, where significant amounts of methane escape from wells and pipeline leaks. Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, and these “fugitive emissions” of methane have emerged as an area of serious concern that undercuts the case for natural gas as a cleaner substitute for coal. …
Greenhouse gas emissions for Atlantic Coast Pipeline would be more than five times the annual emissions from Dominion’s Chesterfield Power Station, the largest coal fired plant in Virginia, and equal to more than 80% of the total carbon pollution from all 177 stationary sources in the EPA’s 2014 inventory of GHG emissions in Virginia, states the Sierra Club. The impact of the Mountain Valley Pipeline would be even greater.
Critics of renewable fuels counter that solar and wind farms produce electricity only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, not when there is a demand for electricity. Natural gas generation can be dialed up and down quickly as electricity demand changes. That flexibility is particularly critical if electric utilities are to adopt “demand-response” rate structures that encourage users to conserve energy during periods of peak demand. Gas advocates also note that the gas infrastructure has less impact on the landscape. Solar and wind requires far more land to generate comparable amounts of electricity; wind turbines and vast expanses of solar panels also are more visually intrusive than buried pipelines.
