Editor’s note: This commentary is by Crea Lintilhac, who is a director of the Lintilhac Foundation, a Vermont family foundation providing funding for clean water, renewable energy and land use management. She is a member of the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust, VTDigger’s parent organization.
[T]he drafters of the ESSEX Plan must address the concern about methane emissions. Currently, the plan addresses carbon dioxide emissions, which is only a fraction of the greater emission picture that should be addressed.
The problem is this: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that methane emissions over a 20-year time period are 100-fold greater than carbon dioxide emissions in their greenhouse gas effect. This makes shale gas development — and its associated emissions from flaring, venting and leakage — worse than oil and coal for home heating, or for electric generation.
IPCC notes that reducing emissions of CO2 “will do little if anything to slow the rate of global warming” over a 20-year period, and explains that reducing emissions of methane has an immediate effect of slowing the rate of global warming. For these reasons, comparing the global warming consequences of methane and carbon dioxide over this relatively short time period is critical.
A primary focus on CO2 emissions has the potential to create a major policy loophole for natural gas companies who want to promote natural gas to consumers as an alternative to oil when picking home heating fuel/furnaces, and this could falsely educate and incentivize the public to pick natural gas thinking it’s more environmentally friendly than oil.
Natural gas is widely promoted as a bridge fuel — a source of energy that allows society to continue to use fossil fuels while reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next two decades or so — until renewable energy sources and heat pumps can more fully come on line.
The Canadian-owned utility, Vermont Gas Systems, increasingly pumps gas derived from shale gas development through its pipelines. Shale gas development in the U.S. has increased rapidly, a trend that both the Energy Information Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy and the industry expect to continue.
Robert W. Howarth, of the Department of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell University, is the principal researcher on methane emissions, and summarizes in “Methane emissions and climatic warming risk from hydraulic fracturing and shale gas development: implications for policy,” that “One of the most cost effective ways to reduce our dependence on natural gas (including shale gas), is to replace in-building use of natural gas for domestic space and water heating with high efficiency heat pumps. Even if the electricity that drives these heat pumps comes from coal, the greenhouse gas emissions are far less than from the direct use of natural gas. Heating is the major use of natural gas in the USA making this change of use imperative.”
And as Howarth reminds us, “Natural gas-shale gas in particular — is not a bridge fuel when methane emissions are considered over an appropriate timescale.”
For this reason, I think the ESSEX Plan should be amended to explicitly include methane released during extraction, transmission and/or distribution in order to support a more accurate, long-term solution for greenhouse gas mitigation.
