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Natural gas is attractive from a capital, operations, and expense perspective because we wave away most of the real cost as something we don't need to care abou
by idiotsecant 4y ago
Natural gas is attractive from a capital, operations, and expense perspective because we wave away most of the real cost as something we don't need to care about. Pesky externalities like carbon emissions are someone else's problem. If we accounted for them in the same way we account for the costs of storing spent nuclear fuel natural gas generation would be extraordinarily expensive. We basically let natural gas plants dispose of their waste product by venting it into our communities and then claim that natural gas is less expensive.
Well, duh. Of course it's less expensive if you only have to care about the lifecycle of half of your process.
- WalterBright 4y agoNatural gas emits half the CO2 than coal for the same amount of energy.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoIt evens out a little if you include GHG effects of methane leaked during extraction. Recent work suggests we might have been undercounting that. Gas still leads coal and is cleaner burning so less polluting in othet ways but its not quite the GHG slam dunk it is if you just compare CO2 from combustion. Renewables and nuclear are way ahead of both.
- idiotsecant 4y agoNatural gas is better than coal. That's a low bar.
- cryptonector 4y agoIt's better than any other carbon fuel that we could use, and not by a little but by a lot because emissions of mercury and other very bad things are much much lower with natural gas than with other carbon fuels. It's not just a bit better than coal.
- idiotsecant 4y agoI'm not sure why people are replying to this thread to talk about coal, other than GP post the entire discussion is about nuke and natural gas. Yes. Coal is very bad. Natural gas is less bad. Literally nobody is arguing against this point. Both are very bad.
- WalterBright 4y ago50% less CO2 emissions is a big deal.
- panick21_ 4y agoIn terms of the plant yes, but of course coal is horrible so yeah. However, leakage in both new and existing gas wells, plus leakage all across the gas distribution infrastructure make this worse. However you are right, and its kind of funny. The US despite not signing the Kyoto protocol actually achieved those goals because of gas while most other nations failed. France of course was already green by the time the conference happened.
- marcosdumay 4y agoWell, gas leakage in coal mines isn't irrelevant either. I don't think anybody knows which of the fossil fuels leaks more methane. They all leak lots of it, but the people with access to measure the leaks won't.