(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Renewable Tuesday: Peak Gas will Mean Peak Carbon [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-25

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire began when it was at the peak of its power. So it is for carbon. Peak Coal: 2013. Peak Oil: 2023. Peak Gas: Sooner than you think. Whatever you think you know about Global Warming and renewables is out of date. I get this brought home to me again every week when I put one of these Diaries together.

Shall we shoot for Peak Gas in 2033? Followed by the Death of a Million Cuts to power plants, home heating and cooling, and cooking? How about sooner?

Barron’s (paywalled): The Peak for Natural Gas Is Closer Than Everyone Thinks, IEA Says

IEA: World Energy Outlook 2022

The world is in the midst of its first global energy crisis – a shock of unprecedented breadth and complexity. Pressures in markets predated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but Russia’s actions have turned a rapid economic recovery from the pandemic – which strained all manner of global supply chains, including energy – into full-blown energy turmoil. Prices for spot purchases of natural gas have reached levels never seen before, regularly exceeding the equivalent of USD 250 for a barrel of oil. Faced with energy shortfalls and high prices, governments have so far committed well over USD 500 billion, mainly in advanced economies, to shield consumers from the immediate impacts. They have rushed to try and secure alternative fuel supplies and ensure adequate gas storage. Other short-term actions have included increasing oil- and coal-fired electricity generation, extending the lifetimes of some nuclear power plants, and accelerating the flow of new renewables projects. Demand-side measures have generally received less attention, but greater efficiency is an essential part of the short- and longer-term response.

Greater efficiency includes revised building standards, heat pumps, and induction cookers, which together can remove any need for residential and business gas hookups.

Peak gas

Peak gas is the point in time when the maximum global natural gas (fossil gas) production rate will be reached, after which the rate of production will enter its terminal decline.[1] Although demand is peaking in the United States[2] and Europe,[3] it continues to rise globally due to consumers in Asia,[4] especially China.[5][6]

This Wikipedia article is based on the discredited Hubbert model for peak production of oil and gas, which has been repeatedly falsified by improved drilling and recovery technologies.

Hubbert peak theory

No, the peaks come from demand reduction.

Google

Projections of future market growth are of course partly guesswork, but it is good that the guesses today are far above those of just a few years ago, because of numerous countries experiencing stronger incentives, making much more ambitious pledges, passing more ambitious laws, and rolling out vastly larger deployments of renewables and cuts to fossil fuels.

I have been saying that this would happen for years. Google was even further ahead when it first announced its Renewables < Coal project in 2007.

Vox: Why Google halted its research into renewable energy

Google realized its clean-energy project wasn't nearly ambitious enough Back in 2007, Google had a simple idea for addressing global warming — we just need to take existing renewable-energy technologies and keep improving them until they were as cheap as fossil fuels. And, voila! Problem solved. The [Google] engineers calculated what would happen if Google actually achieved its dream of creating a renewable electricity source (say, geothermal or solar) that was cheaper than coal. A major breakthrough. That would be a huge deal for climate. More and more electric utilities would switch over to this cleaner source over time. By 2050, the Google engineers' modeling suggested, US carbon-dioxide emissions would be 55 percent lower than what we're currently on pace for. But they also found that this new technology would still be adopted too slowly to avert significant global warming — in part because the technology wouldn't be cheap enough to displace all the existing coal and gas plants out there that have already been paid for. As a result, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would keep rising sharply.

But now other engineers, along with market forces and public pressure, have brought Renewables ≪ Gas. (≪ is read ‘is much less than’.)

More from the IEA IEA projections have historically lagged reality, in large part because of Republican pressure not to tell the whole truth. That time seems to be over.

By 2030, thanks in large part to the US Inflation Reduction Act, annual solar and wind capacity additions in the United States grow two-and-a-half-times over today’s levels, while electric car sales are seven times larger. New targets continue to spur the massive build-out of clean energy in China, meaning that its coal and oil consumption both peak before the end of this decade. Faster deployment of renewables and efficiency improvements in the European Union bring down EU natural gas and oil demand by 20% this decade, and coal demand by 50%, a push given additional urgency by the need to find new sources of economic and industrial advantage beyond Russian gas. Japan’s Green Transformation (GX) programme provides a major funding boost for technologies including nuclear, low-emissions hydrogen and ammonia, while Korea is also looking to increase the share of nuclear and renewables in its energy mix. India makes further progress towards its domestic renewable capacity target of 500 gigawatts (GW) in 2030, and renewables meet nearly two-thirds of the country’s rapidly rising demand for electricity.

The true natural gas peak will come from radically decreased demand, because renewables are far cheaper for producing electricity, while heat pumps and induction cookers can remove the need for home and business gas hookups. Russia is fighting hardest to prevent this happening, because it holds a quarter of the world’s natural gas reserves, which supply one of Russia’s biggest export commodities. Destroying that market would greatly help Ukraine in its current war with Russia, by crippling Russia’s ability to produce or purchase war materiel.

Nuclear power is an extremely bad investment for these countries, because it costs far too much, and takes far too long to build.

We must note that pluggable natural gas leaks from wells and pipelines turn out to be far worse than industry has ever acknowledged. Data on the sizes and locations of the leaks are at last being produced, and measures to deal with them are finding favor with various governments—other than Russia, of course. China has high demand for gas, in spite of being the world leader in renewable energy deployments, because its market is so huge, and because it lacks an adequate electricity grid to get renewable power from out west, where the best wind and sun are, to its more populous provinces. All in, well, not exactly good time, but sooner than the Doom Criers would have you believe.

Never mind. As I was saying, the true natural gas peak will not come from production running out, but instead from radically decreased demand. This is because renewables with storage are cheaper for producing electricity, while heat pumps and induction cookers can remove the need for home and business gas hookups completely. Russia is fighting hardest to prevent this happening, because it holds a quarter of the world’s natural gas reserves, which supply one of Russia’s biggest export commodities. Destroying that market would greatly help Ukraine in its current war with Russia, by crippling Russia’s ability to produce or purchase war materiel.

Reality

This is one of many available studies making the same point around the world.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/25/2182949/-Renewable-Tuesday-Peak-Gas-will-Mean-Peak-Carbon

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/