Keeping our lights on by burning fossil fuels is forcing us to build massive dykes along coastlines or abandon them, and resulting in insurers leaving wildfire and flood zone regions entirely. Historically, there might have been a moral case for fossil fuels, but as we have alternatives, it’s time to usher them into retirement as quickly as possible.
About a quarter of the USA’s greenhouse gas emissions are from generating electricity per the EPA. Globally, it’s a little lower than that because the developed world is more electrified than the developing world.
Coal, gas and oil generation plants are dotted around the country side. Coal plants are the worst from a climate change, environmental and human health perspective, of course. The average coal plant in the USA kills almost 80 people a year with its air pollution, and burning coal results in from 0.8 to 1.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity. The acid rain treaties of the early 1990s were aimed at coal plants because the sulfur they emitted was killing lakes and forests.
There’s an interesting case study of what shutting down coal plants does, that of Ontario in Canada. In the early 2000’s, Toronto and surrounding area were having 55 unhealthy air days a year and coal generation was emitting 34 million tons of CO2 annually. The provincial government made the decision to shut down coal generation plants and buy renewable electricity and a bit more natural gas to supplement its hydro and nuclear plants. It’s been described as the single most successful climate action in the world.
But the range of emissions for coal mentioned earlier is important. Not all coal generation is equal. Some is much worse. It burns much lower quality coal in old and inefficient plants. While we do need to keep the lights on, it’s pretty easy to create a sensible order in which we eliminate coal generation. The USA has been doing that, more than not, shutting down about two-thirds of all of its coal plants.
It’s worth noting that coal plants are being used a lot less. Coal plants in the USA ran about two-thirds of the time in 2010 and got down to 40% of the time during COVID, rebounding to about half of the time as COVID dwindled. China might be building more coal plants, many of which are lower-emissions ones which are replacing higher-emissions ones, but they are also not using them as much. Their coal plants are being used only about half the time, on average, and new ones will be used only when needed during peak demand.
Every coal plant we shut down saves lives today and in the future. And every MWh generated by low-carbon generation like wind and solar reduces the amount of time we have to spend burning coal.
But there’s a missing factor in this. Those 0.8 to 1.4 tons of CO2 miss part of the greenhouse gases that result from burning coal. When we disturb coal beds by mining them, a bunch of coal gas gets released. It’s mostly methane, which is a much more potent if less persistent greenhouse gas than CO2. Coal mining releases about 40 million tons of methane a year and with the multiplying effect, that’s like one to three billion tons of CO2 or 2% to 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The simplest way to reduce the CO2 and methane emissions from using coal for electricity is to stop using coal for electricity.
Natural gas generation is a big climate problem too. The amount of CO2 it emits doesn’t vary as much, but natural gas is just fossil methane with lucky branding. And upstream emissions of methane from extracting, processing, refining and distributing natural gas are a major climate problem these days. Fracking especially results in major releases of methane at well sites, but the end-to-end system is full of components that intentionally vent methane or just leak.
Northern Europe is a world leader in avoiding those emissions. The USA, not so much, seeing an average of 3% of total methane leaking before it gets to electrical plants or other end uses. Much of the rest of the world is even worse. Because methane is so potent, it creates a lot of global warming when it leaks. The USA’s average leakage adds 0.3 tons of CO2 equivalent to every MWh of electricity, so it’s up at 0.7 tons per MWh. That’s not much better than the best coal.
Natural gas isn’t quite as unhealthy for everything and everybody as coal is, but it’s far from a healthy substance. Burning it for electrical generation is a leading contributor of smog that is making our kids asthmatic and killing people prematurely from air pollution.
Natural gas is only a reasonable choice for generating electricity where the only alternatives are burning coal or oil, and we have…
Read More: Aggressively Shutting Down Coal & Gas Generation On Climate Short List