Vermont Shouldn't Let the Perfect be the Enemy of the Good

State of Vermont

In my last post I blogged that the world’s CO₂ output is still rising despite various treaty commitments and huge expenditures on renewables. However, the US stands alone in having exceeded the emission reduction it would have been obligated to had we signed the Kyoto treaty. This accomplishment owes something to deployment of renewables but is largely the result of substituting natural gas for coal in our power plants.  Even though natural gas is also a fossil fuel, it emits less than half as much CO₂ per Megawatt-hour of electricity generated than coal.

According to the Federal Energy Information Agency, in 2014 Vermont had the lowest output of CO₂ in the country per electrical Megawatt hour (Mwh) generated: 19lbs/Mwh; the national average is 1123lbs/Mwh. However, at that time, 72 per cent of our electricity was generated at a nuclear power plant which has now shut down. 4.4% of our production was from wind and .2% from solar.

Now we generate less than 35% of the 5.5 million Megawatt-hours we use annually. The rest is carbon-free power from Hydro Quebec and “traditional” power from the New England Grid.  As a whole, New England in 2014 emitted 571lbs/Mwh of generation. Net net we are responsible for a lot more CO₂ emissions than we were when Vermont Yankee was still producing.

Our wind generation rose rapidly a few years ago but has since plateaued. It was 293,000 Megawatt-hours in 2016.

As with the nation, natural gas is a bright spot in Vermont. The electricity we’re now importing from the rest of New England would be far more expensive if the price of the natural gas used to produce it weren’t historically low.

Very close to home Vermont Gas (VGS) and NG Advantage (NGA), a company I am chair of (please note I do have a pony in this race) deliver natural gas to significantly reduce CO₂ emissions. Vermont Gas sells pipeline gas to residential, commercial, and industrial customers in Vermont. NG Advantage (NGA) trucks gas to large users including factories, asphalt plants, and hospitals located beyond the reach of pipelines; NGA buys the majority of its gas from VGS.

All NGA customers once used oil as a fuel. Because natural gas had become much cheaper than oil on a per BTU basis, they were at a disadvantage compared to competitors located on pipelines. They spent millions of their own dollars (no grants available) to upgrade their boilers to natural gas once they knew we could deliver it to them. Some might well have gone out of business without the savings we could help them achieve.

But they save more than dollars. The smoke that comes out of their stacks isn’t black anymore. They no longer emit SO₂ and have virtually eliminated NO_x.. Their neighbors like the change; first responders appreciate that natural gas is safer than oil or propane because it is lighter than air and can’t cause a sea of flame in an accident or pollute ground water. Replacing oil with natural gas reduces CO₂ emissions by 26%, about 5 lbs. per gallon. Last year alone NGA customers reduced CO₂ by at least 160,000,000 lbs.

What does that mean?

It’s the equivalent of taking 15,000 cars off the road.

It also stacks up favorably against CO₂ savings from wind turbines. Let’s assume that the 293,000 of Megawatt-hours (Mwh) of electricity generated by wind in Vermont last year reduced CO₂ by the full amount of the New England average, 571lbs/Mwh; that’s a total savings 168,768,000 lbs. In other words, NGA’s natural gas was responsible for about the same amount of CO₂ reduction as all the wind turbines in Vermont. I’m proud of that. Next year NGA will do better.

Exclusive of sales to NGA, VGS sells almost twice as much gas as NGA. If they weren’t selling that gas, their customers would probably heat with oil or propane as most Vermonters do. If VGS weren’t selling that gas, there’d be another 300 million or so pounds of CO₂ discharged annually in Vermont and their customers would be paying more for burning a dirtier fuel. Last year VGS completed an expansion to Middlebury and took over some service NGA used to provide. That’s a good thing; made gas even cheaper for those people and added residential customers whom our equipment isn’t suited to serve. I hope VGS will expand to Rutland where NGA also provides service. If that happy day comes, NGA will use its trucks to serve institutions somewhere else.

But What about the Negatives?

I wrote about fracking safety here and claims that “fugitive emissions” of natural gas outweigh the CO₂ reductions in net greenhouse effect here. The facts are that drilling for natural gas is much safer than it’s ever been (but, of course, must be done right).  According to an extensive study by Argonne National Laboratory (done during the Obama administration), the environmental benefit of natural gas use far outweighs the environmental cost of leakage and leakage continues to be reduced while extraction increases rapidly. Moreover, according to the UN International Panel on Climate Change, the bible of climate change, atmospheric methane, the main ingredient of natural gas, is stable to declining despite more drilling than ever.

CO₂ levels in the atmosphere, on the other hand, are increasing. That’s one problem natural gas can help with.

And in Conclusion

Renewables alone are not sufficient to reduce atmospheric CO₂ as quickly as many people believe it must be reduced to avoid catastrophically rapid climate change. Nuclear power and natural gas both have an important role to play in that reduction. Unless there is massive permitting reform (or massive subsidies), nuclear is very expensive and very slow to deploy. Even where there are massive deployments of solar and wind, natural gas “peaker” plants are needed to fill in for the times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

Thanks to new technology, America has huge new natural gas supplies economically accessible. We are buying American energy because we have product at the best price. We are becoming a supplier of natural gas to the world rather than a dependent on risky foreign oil.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel. Wherever it displaces coal or oil, there is an enormous environmental benefit. Those who oppose natural gas use, no matter how well-meaning, are delaying the day when we can burn less coal and oil. They are imposing the extra economic and environmental cost of dirtier, more expensive fuels on their neighbors, their communities, and the world. We don’t want to make some theoretical perfect fuel the enemy of all the good that increased natural gas substitution can do.

We want to drill (safely, of course), build pipelines where justified, and truck natural gas where pipelines don’t reach and aren’t economic. We don’t need incentives or mandates for this part of our environmental mission; we only need to make sure that our regulatory and permitting processes are reasonable. Natural gas adoption pays for itself. That’s sustainable!