NATURAL GAS HAS BEEN a resounding environmental success story for Massachusetts that has delivered every benefit environmentalists predicted it would back in the 1990s. Continued access to reliable supplies of natural gas will be critical to fulfilling Massachusetts’ renewable energy revolution in the 2020s and well beyond.
Those are two realities we believe far too few residents of Massachusetts fully appreciate. Amid resistance to pipeline expansion—and to upgrades of almost any energy infrastructure—what’s overlooked are the reasons why safe, robust, and expanded access to natural gas will remain critical to sustaining all the environmental benefits Massachusetts has won already, and to the “green energy” transformation to come. How can that be? Because only gas can deliver the full-scale reliability we need to backstop our growing reliance on wind and solar power to produce electricity.
Let’s look at the past and future of gas in Massachusetts.
The past: Back in the 1990s, environmentalists aggressively pushed the state to embrace greater use of natural gas for generating electricity, as a cleaner-burning alternative to coal and bunker oil. Investors poured billions of dollars into new power plants that produce half the global warming emissions and virtually none of the smog-causing pollutants and mercury.
According to the most recent data from the US Energy Information Administration, in 2014 Massachusetts generated nearly 60 percent of its electricity with natural gas, up from just 15 percent in 1990. That swing has driven into retirement coal-burning power plants at Salem Harbor and Mount Tom in Holyoke. Brayton Point in Somerset, the state’s last coal-fired plant, will close in June 2017. And burning of heavy oil has plunged. Oil used to produce 38 percent of the Bay State’s electricity in 1990; in 2014 it produced barely 3 percent.
The payoff in reduced emissions has been nothing short of spectacular. Even as Massachusetts’ consumption of electricity grew by 21 percent from 1990 to 2014, federal data show, emissions from electric generation plummeted:
- 63 percent less carbon dioxide,
- 78 percent fewer nitrogen oxides,
- 97 percent less sulfur dioxide.
“No energy advocate in New England in the last half century has ever dreamed of achieving anything like this,” a leading Massachusetts environmentalist said in 1998 as the gas revolution was taking off.
Beyond electricity, natural gas has also transformed home heating in Massachusetts. Since 1990, nearly 31 percent more homes are heated by natural gas instead of more expensive, carbon-intensive, and polluting heating oil. More than half of Bay State homeowners, close to 1.5 million in all, now heat with gas. Thousands more want to convert.
The future: Massachusetts’ transition to natural gas has been so successful that the Commonwealth now faces serious risks of electricity shortages on cold winter days, because so much electric generation—as environmentalists advocated–now depends on gas. Late in September, the head of New England’s power grid warned that ensuring reliable delivery of electricity during deep-winter cold snaps is now “precarious” and will become “unsustainable” once the Pilgrim nuclear plant shuts down in 2019.
Without expanded pipelines and liquefied natural gas supplies, Massachusetts can’t meet home heating demand, guarantee reliable electric supply, and lift moratoriums now blocking homeowners in several parts of the state who want to switch from oil to gas.
Looking ahead, Massachusetts’ dependence on natural gas isn’t going away. Only gas-fired generation can provide the safe, reliable, dependable backstop for a future electricity grid powered by wind, solar, and hydro. Gas is the sole lower-carbon source of power that can cycle up as quickly as the wind dies down or the sun goes behind a cloud. We hear of new developments in electrical energy storage, but that promising technology can’t yet affordably deliver the required reliability at mass scale, and it likely won’t for years or decades to come.
Long after the Commonwealth has approved gigawatts of wind off Martha’s Vineyard and covered acres of rooftops and fields with solar panels, natural gas-fired power plants will be critically needed as the source of on-demand backup electricity.
The time has come for Bay State leaders and clean-energy advocates to acknowledge the truth about natural gas. It doesn’t merely deserve credit for delivering massive environmental benefits that were hardly imaginable just 20 years ago. Natural gas will also remain a pillar of the region’s energy supply for the foreseeable future. Access to this critical resource must be assured as Massachusetts works to comply with our Global Warming Solutions Act emissions reductions, and to drive our transition to a greener energy economy.
Thomas M. Kiley is president and CEO of the Northeast Gas Association, a regional trade association.
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This article cast natural gas in an overly positive light and would push the expansion of natural gas via construction of pipelines to bring fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania. The reported cost of doing so runs into the billions of dollars and would lock in huge amounts of capital for decades to obtain what may only currently be the least expensive option. While I have previously been enthusiastic about gas due to the high efficiency of the combined cycle gas turbine technology, the SOx-NOx cleanliness he sites and its lower carbon footprint as ways to reduce climate change, new information indicates otherwise. Leakage rates have been called into question as being significantly more than originally thought as well as other multiplier effects and questions on the wisdom of hydraulic fracturing on several counts. So, this has personally become a conflict and question that, as economist John Maynard Keynes once put it, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” And this is a major question we ought to ponder even in the face of more pipelines being looked upon as a done deals. In fact, let me be so audacious as to suggest a moratorium on pipeline construction ought to be implemented until such time as there are ironclad assurances that its entire cradle-to-grave life-cycle, including actual extraction in Pennsylvania and New York, are not net GHG drivers instead of being a part of the solution.
The recent book Reason in a Dark Time by Dale Jamieson is on climate change and it goes deeply into philosophical discussion of who become the drivers for errant climate behavior and to what extent any of us are or are not personally responsible (guilty) for our actions. In this case, our demand for more gas is more of a collective action but we cannot escape the end result if we are wrong in our assumptions or they are overly colored by political considerations or fixed in energy policy.
This also brings up another question concerning the actual supply of shale gas and how economically stable is the financial situation of the shale gas market? There are allegations from several quarters that the supplies may not be what were originally touted as providing decades of plentiful, cheap fuel and that some of the wells may be prematurely be petering out. Others fear the irrational jubilance may only foresage a “shale gas bubble” comparable to the dot-com and housing bubbles the latter of which gave us our carbon-reducing Great Recession. I do not think that is the way we want to get there and urge the state regulators to thoroughly investigate these allegations as well. Any protest of it “not being in my department” would break Dr. Commoner’s 1st Law of connectivity of all things things being connected to everything as well as being a breach of public trust.
Gas expansion raises many other question including ones of energy security of how much do we wish to increase our dependence on this one form of energy coming through only a very few, vulnerable pipelines? A casual review of the usage of natural gas for electric production reveals that on any given day in ISO-NE region we use it for meeting ~~40% to ~72% of our electric load. So the question is how much more do we want to increase that figure to? 65% to 85%? More? Does it really make any economic or energy security sense to expand past that point–or even maintain it at that level? Putting on a “security lens” we must ask “How much do we really want to increase that figure when terrorist could physically blow up a few strategic points in the gas line/compressors in the middle of the next major blizzard or ice storm or hack into their control systems (ICS) during similar events?” (Look at Ukraine’s electric system experience if you don’t believe me.) These are also questions that must asked if we are to approach this in a holistic, all-hazards approach.
As an alternative, I also suggest first investigate using funds that might otherwise go to pipeline construction into further actions with energy efficiency and local, clean distributed generation resources might we provide a surer supply of power under all circumstances while keeping money in local economies.
State and regional legislation obligates ISO-NE to accept increasing levels of wind and solar penetrations on the grid. That’s what Gordon Van Welie warned us about a few days ago. This forced obligation is forcing the early retirement of coal and nuclear off the grid because variable and intermittent wind and solar power can only be balanced with increasing penetrations of natural gas. We were warned that the overdependence on natural gas jeopardizes grid stability, a code word for blackouts.
Yes, the combined cycle gas turbine is a huge improvement on coal fired power plants. But, the planned penetration of wind and solar to 50% or more, will require single cycle gas turbines which run with half efficiency and whose pollution is not much better than coal and as a replacement of both coal and nuclear, emissions are likely to increase.
Beacon Hill and the rest of New England’s legislators have us on path to skyrocketing rates, continued GHG emissions, and an unstable grid full of blackouts and brownouts.
It’s time to scream STOP!
Mr Kiley says that natural gas is the only good “backstop” for a future grid power by renewables (dismissing the potential of storage out of hand). If that’s in fact the case, it still isn’t an argument for an expansion of the gas infrastructure. Nationwide, gas demand has fallen in every sector except power generation. If he concedes that the future grid will be powered by renewables, where’s the need for yet more pipelines?