Tuesday 1 February 2011

Gas plan may trip up on science

Courier Mail
27 January 2011, Page: 11

QUEENSLAND'S multibillion-dollar plunge into the gas industry could be based on a major flaw in the science, with doubts raised in the US this week over its greenhouse gas emissions. Reports from Cornell University and the US Government's Environmental Protection Agency said there had been a dramatic underestimation of emissions and gas could be similar to coal as a greenhouse polluter.

The apparent environmental benefits from gas have been a major selling point for the coal seam gas industry and the $30 billion it is ploughing into the state over the next four years to build export facilities in Gladstone. Gas has long been considered to have about half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal and for that reason it has been thought to be an ideal stop-gap as the world attempts to make renewable energy, such as solar and wind, more viable.

But the EPA said previous estimates of gas emissions had not included a significant number of issues, had left out the effect of methane and that emissions were about double what they were considered in 2006. The Australian gas industry said it stood by a number of reports, including those by the CSIRO and Worley, which backed gas as a low-polluting alternative and said the US EPA report did not relate to the local industry.

In a second report, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at America's Cornell University, David Aktinson, said the combustion emissions were only part of the story and the favourable comparison to coal was "quite misleading".

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

This information needs expert examination as back-up for wind is usually coal-fired and many new base-load plants are being mmooted using gas because of the assumption that gas has fewer emissions. Is this a 'fugitive emissions' issue( whatever they are?)