By Sandy Field, Chair, Climate Reality Project: Susquehanna Valley PA chapter; Member, Otzinachson Group of the Sierra Club
According to the Yale Program for Climate Change Communication, 71% of Pennsylvanians believe global warming is happening, and a majority think our representatives should do more to address this issue. The major source of harmful greenhouse gas pollution in our state is the burning of fossil fuels for transportation, electricity, and industrial uses. Therefore, to slow global warming, we need to shift away from our use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Fortunately, we have renewable, economical, and clean alternatives ready to go in the form of wind and solar energy.
Unfortunately, instead of adapting their business to a changing market, oil and gas companies are rebranding their climate-warming products to make them sound “clean” and “green.” For example, a $6 billion plant being proposed in Nanticoke, PA, on former coal mine land is being touted as a job creator that will use natural gas to make gasoline and “cut the carbon footprint of the transportation sector in half.” This doesn’t make sense. Natural gas is a fossil fuel, and its production leaks methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from well-source to pipeline to power plant. Burning natural gas creates carbon dioxide and the resulting gasoline from this plant will also generate carbon dioxide when it is burned in cars. This will not reduce our carbon footprint. Why make gasoline from natural gas in the first place? Why not just build a solar-powered electricity plant on that mine-scarred site to fuel electric cars and provide electricity to homes with no carbon dioxide emissions and no methane emissions from fracking natural gas? $6 billion dollars buys a lot of solar panels,could be used to save our future and create clean energy jobs instead of maintaining the status quo with a false solution.
Similarly, the coal and gas companies are touting the climate benefits of a technology called “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS. CCS has recently been proposed as a way to capture carbon dioxide emissions from coal or natural gas-fired power plants and move it through pipelines to a place where it can be stored underground. Unfortunately, although a number of these incredibly expensive systems have been brought online in recent years, none of these projects have met their carbon dioxide sequestration goals. For example, Chevron’s multi-billion-dollar Gorgon CCS plant in Australia has been beset by cost overruns, technical problems, and delays and recently committed to purchasing 5 million tons of carbon offsets and investing $40 million in lower carbon projects as a penalty for failing to meet capture and storage targets. When asked about the plant, one energy economics expert, Bruce Robertson of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told the Financial Times, “The biggest threat to CCS was cost given that those of wind, solar, and batteries were tumbling. Energy is no longer a commodity, it is fast turning into a technology.” Clearly, the market for fossil fuels is drying up, even without climate change.
In Texas, the CCS system for the Petra Nova coal-fired power plant required so much energy that they had to build a gas-fired power plant to power it! The emissions for this second plant were not captured by the CCS system, and the plant was shut down in February 2021 because the company was not making enough money from the captured carbon dioxide to run the CCS system. This highlights another problem of CCS for the environment– 81% of the carbon dioxide that has been captured by CCS systems to date has been used to make more money by getting more oil out of the ground in a process called enhanced oil recovery, furthering the generation of fossil fuel pollution and going in the wrong direction for climate change.
There is also a lot of hype about hydrogen. Hydrogen is great because it burns cleanly and is a concentrated form of energy that can be stored, avoiding the potential intermittency problems associated with solar and wind energy. Green hydrogen made by electrolysis of water using power generated from renewable energy is a good energy source that is of value for some industrial uses. However, the fossil fuel industry is proposing another colorful array of false solutions when it comes to hydrogen fuel. These come in the form of blue hydrogen, using natural gas with a CCS system, gray hydrogen using natural gas without CCS, and brown hydrogen using coal to make hydrogen. All of these involve burning fossil fuels to make a clean energy source and do not solve the problems associated with burning fossil fuels. Why not just use green hydrogen made from renewable energy for the purposes that require it?
The picture is clear. These false solutions have been created by the oil and gas industry to convince us that we need to continue to burn fossil fuels in order to fight the climate crisis but they couldn’t be more wrong. We need to stop new production of these fuels immediately and move to renewable forms of energy. Wasting time funding and discussing these false solutions designed to keep the oil and gas industry in business is not the path forward. Let’s invest instead in figuring out the best ways to store abundant, renewable energy and to transition our communities to this cleaner, less expensive, more sustainable future.
This blog was included as part of the January 2022 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!