Energy security is the need and should be the metric
Posted April 16, 2012 at 7:09 am 
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Electrification, Energy Security, National Security, Natural Gas Strange editorial in today’s WaPo on natural gas and global warming. The Post poses the question: ”Will natural gas hinder the fight against global warming?”
The clear answer is yes, unless leakage rates from natural gas production are significantly higher than current estimates. The WaPo gets a few things right:
America’s abundant supplies of unconventional gas have the potential to be a rich economic and environmental blessing. New extraction techniques — hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” — make the country’s vast reserves accessible at low cost. The fact that burning natural gas produces about half the carbon emissions as coal means the fuel could be an attractive, affordable alternative, giving lower-carbon energy options more time to become less expensive.
And it then raises the current issue in the radical enviro community:
But extracting and transporting all that natural gas, which is mostly methane, also results in fuel leaks. When methane leaks, it has a shorter-lived but much stronger global warming effect as the carbon dioxide released when the same amount of methane is burned. Particularly on relatively short time frames of 10 or 20 years, too much methane leakage can make the fuel less attractive than even dirty old coal, some critics warn.
True enough, but the facts show there’s little to worry about, as the Post acknowledges:
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates when using natural gas results in sustained climate benefits — and when it doesn’t. Assuming the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate of the industry’s methane leakage rate — 2.4 percent — is accurate, choosing to build a new gas power plant instead of a new coal plant produces immediate greenhouse emissions benefits, and that would be the case even if the leakage rate were nearly a point higher. Replacing old, inefficient coal plants with new natural gas facilities would presumably produce larger benefits.
Then the WaPo takes a detour in order to bash natural gas for transportation:
But using natural gas to run cars wouldn’t reduce net climate impacts for 80 years. Fueling heavy-duty trucks with natural gas wouldn’t result in greenhouse emissions benefits for 300 years.
OK, but the reason to run cars on natural gas — or better yet, electrify them so they run on a wide variety of domestic fuels — isn’t just to combat climate change. It’s to break the stranglehold that oil has on our economy. Energy security with a side benefit of climate change mitigation is reason enough to get off oil. The WaPo misses the mark here.
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