Category: Fossil Fuels & Carbon Capture

Getting Off Gas, Block by Block

Electrifying homes and businesses one at a time can be hard, and leave people behind. What if we could instead liberate entire neighborhoods from reliance on natural gas? A few utilities are taking baby steps to do just that, helping customers go all-electric en masse so it can start dismantling their gas grids.

Since 2018 San Francisco-based PG&E has been finding spots where it can make a buck by capping dodgy gas pipes rather than replacing them. After nipping pipes around the edges of its gas grid, removing pipes that serve just a handful of customers each, PG&E is now preparing to lop off some sizeable branches. The first large test moving forward targets 32,000 feet of gas pipes at a California State University campus, perched atop coastal dunes at a former army base north of Monterey. PG&E will ditch the pipes by equipping 600 student housing units with electric heat pumps, stoves and water heaters.

Such ‘strategic decommissioning’ of gas grids is not just a way to accelerate decarbonization. It’s simultaneously combating energy injustice. Without immediate reductions in spending on gas infrastructure, disadvantaged customers will be left paying for oversized gas grids as more affluent households go all-electric and quit the system. As Building Decarbonization Coalition executive director Panama Bartholomy told me: “Every time we put a new natural gas pipe in the ground, we’re knowingly putting a financial time bomb in the ground.”

Read my feature for Sierra Magazine, Getting Off Gas: Block By Block

A paired Sierra news piece profiles the pioneering geothermal network that Boston-based Eversource Energy and Massachusetts climate action group HEET started up this summer. Water pipes running under streets in Framingham, MA serve as the system’s circulatory system, democratizing access to 90 geothermal bore holes. Since August a fire hall, school, gas station, cabinet shop, city-run housing units for the elderly and disabled, and 22 single-family homes and duplexes have been heating and cooling by exchanging heat with the clay and rock 600 to 700 feet below the city. The super high efficiency of such thermal energy networks should reduce peak summer and winter electricity demand, slashing the need for new transmission lines by 33 percent according to a 2023 US national labs study. They also offer gas utilities and workers a post-combustion raison d’etre, potentially turning energy transition obstacles into a driving force for building decarbonization.

Read my Sierra news piece, Geothermal Helps Communities Get Off Fossil Gas

The Sierra articles are the 2nd and 3rd instalments in Tapping Off, a reporting project supported by the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Fund for Environmental Journalism. Part 1, published by The Tyee, profiled Washington state utility Puget Sound Energy’s use of customer electrification to put the brakes on gas expansion.

Read Part 1 online @The Tyee

by pfairley

The Atlantic: Who Killed the Supergrid?

On August 14, 2018, Joshua Novacheck, a 30-year-old research engineer for the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was presenting the most important study of his nascent career. He couldn’t have known it yet, but things were about to go very wrong.

At a gathering of experts and policy makers in Lawrence, Kansas, Novacheck was sharing the results of the Interconnections Seam Study, better known as Seams. The Seams study demonstrated that stronger connections between the U.S. power system’s massive eastern and western power grids would accelerate the growth of wind and solar energy—hugely reducing American reliance on coal, the fuel contributing the most to climate change, and saving consumers billions. It was an elegant solution to a complicated problem.

Democrats in Congress have recently cited NREL’s work to argue for billions in grid upgrades and sweeping policy changes. But a study like Seams was politically dangerous territory for a federally funded lab while coal-industry advocates—and climate-change deniers—reign in the White House. The Trump administration has a long history of protecting coal companies, and unfortunately for Novacheck, a representative was sitting in the audience…

This investigative feature, a co-production for The Atlantic and Seattle-based nonprofit journalism studio InvestigateWest, has been over 18 months in the making. I had the story at the outset, but I needed documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act to back-up — and protect — my sources. 

by pfairley

Micro-Satellite Spies on Carbon Polluters

Attention greenhouse gas emitters: There’s a new eye in the sky that will soon be photographing your carbon footprint and selling the images to any and all. It’s a micro-satellite dubbed “Claire” (clear, bright, and clean in French) by its Montreal-based developer, GHGSat. This microwave-oven-sized pollution paparazzo rocketed to a 512-kilometer-high orbit in mid-June care of the Indian Space Agency, with a mission to remotely measure the plumes of carbon dioxide and methane wafting up from myriad sources on Earth’s surface. Claire’s targets include power plants, natural gas fracking fields, rice paddies, and much more—just about any emissions source that someone with a checkbook (corporations, regulators, activists) wants tracked, according to GHGSat president Stéphane Germain. Continue reading “Micro-Satellite Spies on Carbon Polluters”

by pfairley

Understanding the IPCC’s Devotion to Carbon Capture

I’ve delivered several dispatches on carbon capture and storage (CCS) recently, including a pictorial ‘how-it-works’ feature on the world’s first commercial CCS power for Technology Review. Two aspects of CCS technology and its potential applications bear further elaboration than was possible in that short text. Most critical is a longer-term view on how capturing carbon dioxide pollution from power plants (and other industrial CO2 sources) can serve to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is looking for CCS to do much more than just zero out emission from fossil fuel-fired power plants. Continue reading “Understanding the IPCC’s Devotion to Carbon Capture”

by pfairley

Can China Turn Carbon Capture into a Water Feature?

In an intriguing footnote to their historic climate deal this month, Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama called for demonstration of a hitherto obscure tweak to carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology — one that could simultaneously store more carbon and reduce water consumption. Such an upgrade to CCS holds obvious attraction for China, which is the world’s top carbon polluter and also faces severe water deficits, especially in the coal-rich north and west. Obama and Xi pledged joint funding for a project that would inject 1 million tons of captured carbon dioxide deep underground, annually, and simultaneously yield approximately 1.4 million cubic meters of water. Continue reading “Can China Turn Carbon Capture into a Water Feature?”

by pfairley

NASA Launches its First Carbon-Tracking Satellite

It’s been a rough birthing process for NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) satellite program, which promises global tracking of carbon dioxide entering and leaving the atmosphere at ground level. Five years ago the first OCO fell into the Antarctic Ocean and sank, trapped inside the nose cone of a Taurus XL launch vehicle that failed to separate during launch. The angst deepened yesterday when NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scrubbed a first attempt to launch a twin of the lost $280-million satellite, OCO-2, after sensors spotted trouble with the launch pad’s water-flood vibration-damping system less than a minute before ignition.

Continue reading “NASA Launches its First Carbon-Tracking Satellite”

by pfairley

Capturing Carbon is One Thing. Keeping It Down is Another.

The IPCC recently stated that failure to deploy technology to capture carbon emissions from coal would double the cost of stopping climate change. Two coal-fired power plants nearing completion in Saskatchewan and Mississippi will be the first in the world to actually prove the technology, capturing their CO2 emissions and store that bolus of greenhouse gases underground. You can learn how they will do it in my latest for Technology Review. However, one point dropped from that story bears stressing. Part of what makes the extra cost of carbon capture feasible for these plants is that they have buyers for their CO2: oilfield operators who will use the stuff as a solvent to loosen up petroleum stuck in aging oil wells. That means the CO2 may not be permanently trapped underground warns Sarah Forbes, a carbon capture expert at the Washington-based World Resources Institute. In Canada ensuring CO2 stays underground is urgent, according to Robert Watson, CEO of SaskPower, the utility completing the coal-fired power plant in Saskatchewan. Watson told me that the oilfield operator taking his plant’s CO2 must ensure that any CO2 that comes back to the surface with produced oil is recycled back underground: “They’re going to have to assure the government that they can account for all of the CO2 they use all of the time.”

by pfairley