"LNG is the darling fossil fuel with 40% less carbon dioxide emissions than coal (a low bar), and 125 years of global supply in current reserves."
Once the methane emissions of fossil gas extraction, purification, transmission, refrigeration and compression, transportation, distribution and consumer appliances are factored in to the GHG equation, and using a ten or twenty year time horizon for emissions, it's clear that burning fossil gas to produce electricity and heat is typically worse than burning coal to produce electricity. The ten and twenty year time horizons are appropriate considerations for fossil gas extraction because climate and ecological tipping points have already been tipped to the best of our scientific knowledge (ice melt, coral reefs for e.g.) and other tipping points are proximate and uncertain (Amazon basin tipping to savanna, & many others) and could quite possibly be tipped in the next 10-20 years,
Bob Howarath co-authored a series of papers starting in about 2008 highlighting the fact that conventional GHG accounting using GWP₁₀₀ time horizons obscures and diminishes the impacts of methane emissions, effectively discounting it when comparing it to coal burning.
James Hansen points to the co-emission of short lived cooling aerosols in coal plants and in diesel engines (think shipping) that produce a "masking" effect for planetary heating, potentially he estimates to 1 ºC of masking. Another reason why replacing coal fired power and diesel engines with LNG/fossil gas is a fools errand.
"LNG is the darling fossil fuel with 40% less carbon dioxide emissions than coal (a low bar), and 125 years of global supply in current reserves."
Once the methane emissions of fossil gas extraction, purification, transmission, refrigeration and compression, transportation, distribution and consumer appliances are factored in to the GHG equation, and using a ten or twenty year time horizon for emissions, it's clear that burning fossil gas to produce electricity and heat is typically worse than burning coal to produce electricity. The ten and twenty year time horizons are appropriate considerations for fossil gas extraction because climate and ecological tipping points have already been tipped to the best of our scientific knowledge (ice melt, coral reefs for e.g.) and other tipping points are proximate and uncertain (Amazon basin tipping to savanna, & many others) and could quite possibly be tipped in the next 10-20 years,
Bob Howarath co-authored a series of papers starting in about 2008 highlighting the fact that conventional GHG accounting using GWP₁₀₀ time horizons obscures and diminishes the impacts of methane emissions, effectively discounting it when comparing it to coal burning.
James Hansen points to the co-emission of short lived cooling aerosols in coal plants and in diesel engines (think shipping) that produce a "masking" effect for planetary heating, potentially he estimates to 1 ºC of masking. Another reason why replacing coal fired power and diesel engines with LNG/fossil gas is a fools errand.