Dr. Conca reports that a fatal accident occurred in Oklahoma recently when natural gas exploded at an oil and gas well outside of Quinton, killing five workers. The accident is the deadliest U.S. drilling mishap since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers. The explosion is the latest in a series of fatal accidents at American oil and gas fields. Accidents during oil and gas drilling claim about 100 lives a year in the United States. You’d think this would be big news. If any other energy source, like wind or solar, killed that many people, it would be front page. And if five people died at a nuclear plant, there’d be calls to close all nuclear plants immediately, accompanied by mobs with pitchforks and placards. So now would be a good time to review the actual deathprint of each of our energy sources.
Most people have heard of something called externalities, in this case, costs not factored into the price. The most famous is the carbon footprint of different energy sources, since it is now driving policy, tax credits and some actual costs. The largest carbon footprint belongs to coal with about 1,000 grams of CO2 released for every kWh generated, and the smallest belongs to nuclear, hydro and wind, all under 30 gCO2/kWh.
The physical footprint, or the amount of land required to produce a kWh, is also an important issue but only for renewables which are about a hundred thousand times the other sources. But an energy’s deathprint, as it is called, is a rarely-discussed externality. The deathprint is the number of people killed per kWh produced. There is debate on the absolute numbers, but no one debates on the relative ranking from most dangerous to least. Like the carbon footprint, coal has the largest deathprint while nuclear has the smallest, even including the worst-case Chernobyl numbers [although Chernobyl should not be included because the Soviet Union was forced cut all sorts of technical corners during the "Cold War" with the U.S. and Europe]. Natural Gas has the highest accident-related deaths.
Dr. Conca includes a table that presents estimates on the mortality rate for each energy source as deaths per trillion kWhs generated over the last 40 years, plus an estimate of that source’s contribution to global energy use [i.e., from the IEA]. The numbers are a combination of direct deaths and epidemiological estimates, the latter being tricky at best, and are an amalgam of many sources:
Energy Source* Mortality Rate (deaths/trillion kWh)
Coal 100,000 (41% global electricity)
Coal – China 170,000 (75% China’s electricity)
Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity)
Oil 36,000 (33% of energy, 4% of electricity)
Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity)
Biofuel/Biomass 24,000 (21% global energy/2% electricity)
Solar 440 (< 1% global electricity)
Wind 150 (2% global electricity)
Hydro 1,400 (16% global electricity)
Hydro – U.S. 5 (6% U.S. electricity)
Nuclear 90 (11% global electricity)
Nuclear – U.S 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)
*global average unless otherwise noted
It is important to note that Dr. Conca stresses that in using nuclear, hydro-electric (Dams) and renewables in place of coal and natural gas, their use actually saves lives under current conditions today. These avoided deaths are in the millions for nuclear and hydro since they have generated trillions of kWhs of electricity over 60 years that would have been generated from coal and gas. Avoided deaths are in the thousands for renewables since they have yet to produce that much energy, [but their numbers will likely creep up as the O&M operations begin to impact their safety records].
In the above table, the deathprint in the United States is given for coal, hydro and nuclear, three sources for which separate country data is available. Note the extreme difference between the U.S. deathprints and the global deathprints for each of these three sources. Why are the global deathprints so much higher than the ones in the United States? Answer: Strong regulations.
Read complete article. This summary was a small part of the published article.
Original URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/01/25/natural-gas-and-the-new-deathprint-for-energy/#ad385e15e197
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