IS NATURAL GAS GOOD OR BAD FOR GLOBAL WARMING

From Worldometer (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):

        DAY   USA   WORLD   Brazil     India  South Africa

June     9    1093     4732         1185       246       82

July    22     1205     7128         1293      1120     572

Aug    12     1504     6556        1242        835     130

Sept     9     1208      6222       1136       1168       82

Oct     21     1225      6849         571        703       85

Nov    25      2304    12025        620        518     118

Dec    30      3880    14748       1224       299     465

Jan     14       4142     15512        1151         189     712              

Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107     398

          25       2414    10578         1582        119     144

Mar     2        1989    9490         1726        110     194

          31         1115   12301          3950       458      58

April   6         906   11787           4211         631      37

May    4         853   13667          3025      3786     59 

         26         607    12348         2399      3842    101 

June    1         287    10637         2346      3205     95

Summary:

• Looks like a world-wide decline.
• The USA has dropped to #5 in new cases/day:
• India  133,228
• Brazil  77,898
• Argentina  35,355
• Colombia  25,966
• U.S.  12,976
• Iran  10,687

From the New York Times this morning:

Also from the NYT:

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, announced the new mask recommendations at 2:17 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, May 13. Almost immediately, the number of visits to vaccines.gov — a website where people can research their local vaccination options — spiked, CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen has reported.

Traffic to the website rose even higher later that afternoon, after President Biden celebrated the change and encouraged Americans to get vaccinated so they could remove their masks. In the days that followed, traffic to vaccines.gov remained higher than it had been before the announcement.

More important, the vaccination trends also changed after Walensky’s announcement. For the previous month, the number of daily shots in the U.S. had been falling, as the country began to run out of adults who were eager to be vaccinated. With a few days of the mask announcement, the decline leveled off.

The question is why did loosening the mask requirements stop the decline of vaccinations?  One, 12-15 years olds became eligible that week.  But, it could also be because some of those who were on the borderline of getting a shot or not decided why not get inoculated so I can enjoy life as much as those who did.

Just one bit of politics.  If Democrats were getting anxious about Republicans making a recovery in the 2022 mid-term election, relax, Melanie Stansbury (left), a Democrat, easily won a House seat left by Congresswoman Deb Haaland, who became the first Native American Secretary of Interior.  While the party out of power almost always does well in the mid-term, my sense is that Democrats will keep control of both the House and Senate because Donald Trump will again screw something up.  

As, for example, making sure those Republican incumbents who were not totally with him lose to newie Republican candidates, who would be more vulnerable to Democratic opponents.  About the Senate, there will be 14 Democratic and 20 Republican seats up for re-election in 2022.  All the Democrats plan to run again, while at least 5 Republicans probably will not.

On Monday I posted on Memorial Day, and how war has shifted from a nuclear winter to The Venus Syndrome.  The cause of this end of humanity fallout is methane.

Today, I address the role of natural gas as the bridge to a sustainable environment with no global warming.  However, the natural gas you use at home is from 85% to 95% methane

In the 1970s I worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  They invented the energy spaghetti graph.  If confused, this is a three-minute video on how to read this chart, and a longer one to become an expert:

Here is the latest:

The energy efficiency for the U.S. was 50.5% in 1970, and dropped to 31.8% in 2017.   The reason is that electrical production using fossil fuels is very inefficient, with the added burden of carbon dioxide emissions, and so is the increase of gasoline usage in vehicles and other transport modes, causing global warming.  

Comparing the change in sources of energy in quads:

Source             1970   2020

Petroleum        29.5     32.2

Natural Gas     26.7     31.5

Coal                 15.8       9.2

Nuclear               .24     8.3

Renewable           .9     11.6

You would think that with all those energy crises in the 70's, petroleum use would have declined.  But no, it increased.  You would further have thought that, with all those air pollution restrictions and global warming, coal use would have dropped.  Yup, a nice fall.  Natural gas use increased and nuclear power shot  up.   The reason why nuclear increased is that this option only began to be introduced to the world in the late 60's, and note that with all the problems this technology has had, capacity has resumed increasing:

Renewable energy made an excellent entry, now more relevant than coal and fission (Atomic Bomb) energy.  Fusion (Hydrogen Bomb) power seems always to be 30 years away from commercialization.

Much of our energy use goes towards electricity production:

Primary use      1970   2017

Electricity         14.7    36.6

Res/Com           16.1    20.2

Industrial           19.9    25.3

Transport           16.3    28.3

These numbers represent quads, and one quad equals one quadrillion BTUs.  One quad, for example, is 8 billion gallons of gasoline.  The U.S. last year used 15.4 quads of gasoline.

One more thing of import.  When government agencies and knowledgeable specialists talk about attaining energy self-sufficiency in 2030, or even 2050, they are almost always limiting their sphere of consideration to electricity production.  What about the other 65% or so going to fuel airplanes, or ground transport, plus whatever else?  Electric cars have a severe limitation, which is the lithium battery, the final battery.  Very little research is ongoing on fuel cell cars using hydrogen or biomethanol, and almost none of next generation aviation.

Today, I focus on natural gas.  In 1970 18% went to electricity generation.  This percentage rose up to 38% in 2020.  To select from the April 2021 issue of Scientific American.

• Yes, natural gas (NG) can serve as a bridge, but it cannot be be part of the long-term plan.
• During the past 15 years NG use increased by 32%.
• One advantage of NG is that it produces from 50-60%less carbon dioxide than coal per kilowatt-hour generated.
• A NG-powered vehicle also emits 15-20% less greenhouse gases than gasoline.  But there seems to be no movement in this direction.

• 

  Unfortunately, when you include all the lossage of NG in the extraction and transport phases, these advantages significantly shrink.
• For the record, NG is the product of decomposed organic matter from ancient living matter over the past half a billion years.  Much of this gas came from marine microorganisms.
• Methane itself is the simplest and lightest hydrogen:  one carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms, or CH4.
• 
  Keep in mind that one molecule of methane is 84 times worse in causing global warming than one of carbon dioxide, although this figure drops to 20 in the long term.  However, when first emitted to the atmosphere the effect is more than 100 times worse.

• 
  The fastest growing NG resource is shale gas, produced through fracking.  In the U.S., these deposits are found in locations seen in the right map.
• Most of the NG resource is actually found in the ocean as methane hydrates, said to be 4,000 times more abundant than the annual consumption.  To quote:

There is also a significant risk that rising temperatures from global warming could destabilize methane hydrate deposits, releasing the methane — a potent greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere, and further exacerbating the problem [6].

• The 3 million miles of NG pipelines, with an expected lifetime of from 25 to 80 years, plus pumps/tanks/compressors, provide an easily retrofitted infrastructure for hydrogen.

• 
  An interesting point was advanced by the author, Michael Webber:  there are huge deposits of hydrogen that have not yet been tapped.
• Three hours northwest of the Malian capital, natural hydrogen was extracted from wells just 100 meters deep!  They were found by accident seeking water.
• Along the eastern seaboard, hydrogen seepage has been observed in association with the Carolina Bays.
• Similar releases have been located on the European Craton in Russia.

• 
  Friedemann Freund of NASA's Ames Researcher Center has speculated that  there could well be hydrogen gas fields stretching from Kansas to Canada
• Hydrogen gas has been found in the gold mines of South Africa, Canada and Finland.
• Where does the hydrogen come from?  One possibility is that minerals like magnesium oxide crystals dissociate water into oxygen and hydrogen.  Over millions of years, there could well be large deposits around the world.
• 
  Today, hydrogen is mostly produced from the steam reforming of natural gas.  With carbon capture, this becomes an expensive proposition, but a new process called methane pyrolysis splits the methane directly into hydrogen and solid carbon, which comes out as a fine, black dust.  There is an advantage in this, for the combustion process produces three parts dust instead of nine parts of carbon dioxide.  This by-product can then be used to manufacture graphite, rubber and other commodities.
• 
  Electrolysis can be used to split water, but electricity is expensive.  Some energy farms with vast amounts of solar/wind power can do this in the early morning hours when demand goes down.
• Of course, the second bridge, biomethane (produced from agriculture, land fills and general biomass), can utilize this link.
• In time, as hydrogen becomes more economical to produce, it can be mixed with the methane.

So, in summary, natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and burning it would produce carbon dioxide.  But NG is also mostly methane, the villain in The Venus Syndrome.  So why not find a way to capture and use all that methane escaping from the woodlands, cows, tundra and ocean?  Can't image how to economically do this.

For now, NG only has less than half the carbon dioxide emittance of coal in electricity generation, has a vast infrastructure that can be in time used by biomethane and hydrogen, and is relatively cost effective.  NG contributes to global warming, but is a useful bridge to get us to a future world absent of fossil fuels.

I usually end my posting with something lighthearted, like a song, or dance of  foray into fine cuisine.  Today, a second, but fearful, political entry for those who today are bored with MSNBC and CNN.  Consider this:  WITH JUST 42,921 VOTES IN GEORGIA, ARIZONA AND WISCONSIN, the Biden-Trump 2021 presidential election could have resulted in an Electoral College tie.  That's only 0.03% of all the voters.  You know how small a difference that is?  If you had 3000 voters, 0.03% would be 0.9, or not quite one voter.

Here's the scary part, for if a tie prevailed, the House of Representatives would pick the president.  Ah, no problem, for Democrats, right, as Nancy Pelosi is Speaker?  Wrong.  The delicacy no one talks about is that House members don't have individual votes.  Each state gets one vote, and it depends on the majority of members within each state.  In the previous House, Republicans controlled 54 of the 100 states.  However, it is the new House (the one that got elected for 2021) that does the selection.  

Frankly, I don't have time to determine what would be the breakdown for this year.  I don't want to know.   The thought is frightening.  However, Donald Trump is going around telling his supporters he will be reinstalled as president in August.  Looks like he losing patience of advocates reversing state results, so his latest strategy now is for some kind of military-led coup, headed by General Michael Flynn, who too should be in jail.  The sham of a re-count is irritating, but, at least, using force like he attempted (and failed to get the necessary DOD cooperation) on January 6 as Commander in Chief will not be possible today.  He has nearly zero control of our armed forces.  Hopefully,his fate is that he will soon be nailed by some New York court.

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