Bobby Magill opines that the U.S. is expected to reach a major carbon emissions milestone this year. For the first time, CO2 emissions from burning natural gas for electricity in the U.S. are set to surpass those from burning coal, the globe chief climate polluter. Emissions from burning natural gas are expected to be 10% greater than those from coal in 2016, as electric companies rely more on power plants that run on natural gas than those that run on coal, according to U.S. DOE data. The EIA expects the U.S. will emit about 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from natural gas in 2016, compared to about 1.4 billion metric tons from coal.
The milestone comes as an ample supply of low-cost U.S. natural gas encourages electric power companies to use more gas than coal. That trend is leading to to a continued decline in coal production. U.S. climate policies, such as the Obama Clean Power Plan, are also encouraging utilities to shift away from coal as a way to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Countries that signed the Paris Climate Agreement are trying to limit emissions to prevent global warming from exceeding 3.6 F above pre-industrial levels. Natural gas emits about half as much climate change-driving CO2 as coal. Perry Lindstrom, a greenhouse gas emissions analyst at the EIA, said the rise of natural gas is reducing the carbon intensity, the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of energy, of the energy the U.S. consumes every day. Burning coal for electricity is about 82% more CO2 intensive than burning natural gas. But there is a downside to the emissions milestone, however. Though natural gas burns cleaner than coal, producing natural gas and piping it to power plants leaks CH4 into the atmosphere. CH4 is a greenhouse gas more than 35 times as potent as CO2 in driving climate change over the span of a century, and global atmospheric concentrations of it have been increasing steadily since 2007. That increase has been tied partly to U.S. natural gas production.
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