A 20-Year Low in U.S. Carbon Emissions - NYTimes.com

A 20-Year Low in U.S. Carbon Emissions - NYTimes.com

For everyone with those yard signs saying "Stop the war on coal - fire Obama"

The war on coal is being fought by basic economics - cheaper, more efficient natural gas is kicking coal's butt. Obama has nothing to do wiuth it and neither would Romney.

Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in the United States from January through March were the lowest of any recorded for the first quarter of the year since 1992, the federal Energy Information Administration reports.

The agency attributed the decline to a combination of three factors: a mild winter, reduced demand for gasoline and, most significant, a drop in coal-fired electricity generation because of historically low natural gas prices. Whether emissions will continue to drop or begin to rise again, however, remains to be seen, experts said Friday.

“While this is a positive step, we shouldn’t just say, ‘Oh, we’ve got plenty of natural gas, we can just switch to that, problem solved,’ and move on,” said Jay Apt, the director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, who was not involved in compiling the study.

Carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption totaled 1.34 billion metric tons in the first quarter, down nearly 8 percent from a year earlier, the Energy Information Administration said.

Although natural gas is a more efficient fossil fuel than coal, burning it still produces carbon dioxide emissions. One of its strengths is that it produces more kilowatts of power than the equivalent amount of coal and it provides more energy for each carbon dioxide molecule emitted into the atmosphere. This so-called carbon efficiency is a crucial factor that allows scientists to project carbon dioxide emissions, with more efficient energy sources contributing less to climate change than the more inefficient sources.

Coal-fired electric power generation puts out about twice the amount of carbon dioxide — around 2,000 pounds for every megawatt hour generated — than electricity generated by burning natural gas. But that is still about 1,100 pounds per megawatt hour for electricity from natural gas. Scientists suggest the United States needs to reduce emissions to around 350 to 400 pounds per megawatt hour to stabilize atmospheric concentrations.

The extraction of large natural gas deposits in the Marcellus Shale has contributed to the rise of inexpensive natural gas, causing prices to decline in the last four years and making it a far cheaper option than burning coal. In 2005, coal accounted for half of all electricity generated in the country. But the embrace of natural gas, which now accounts for about 30 percent of electricity generation, has caused coal’s share to retreat to 34 percent, a 40-year low.

Additionally...

A November 2010 EIA report on power plant operating costs  — the latest data available — found that a typical coal-fired plant costs $2,800 to $3,200/kilowatt of generation capacity, while a modern natural gas-fired plant costs around $1,000/kilowatt.

Combine significantly cheaper fuel costs and leaner operating costs, and electricity from a convention coal fired plant costs 9.5 cents/per kilowatt hour to produce, compared with 6.6 cents at a conventional modern gas plant, according to EIA's Energy Outlook 2011.

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Of the nation's 600 coal-fired power plants — roughly 44 percent of U.S. power generation capacity — most are in the Midwest, with Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Illinois home to half of them. Some of those states also happen to be home to the Marcellus shale formation.

The attraction of natural gas comes at a time many coal-fired plants have reached the end of their life span.

According to DB Climate Advisors and the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry lab and think tank, nearly 60gw of coal-fired generation assets are antiquated, some of it up to 80 years old.

"They should have been put out of their misery long ago," says DB's Fulton.

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