More than 68% of New European Electricity Capacity Came From Wind and Solar in 2011

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. You need to look at the entire system, including production

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/coal-seam-gas-clean-claims-under-attack-20111103-1mxy4.html

[font face=Times,Times New Roman,Serif][font size=5]Coal seam gas 'clean' claims under attack[/font]

Ben Cubby
November 4, 2011

[font size=3]A REPORT commissioned by the coal seam gas industry into its own greenhouse gas emissions, and held as commercial-in-confidence for months, shows that Australian gas exported to China is likely to be little better for the environment than coal.

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Gas would release less CO2 when burned in a Chinese power plant, but most of the difference would be eaten up by the extra emissions from extracting and processing the gas in Australia.

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The report calculated a range of scenarios, the majority of which showed gas would perform slightly better than coal. It excluded the possibility of major or ongoing serious methane leaks from coal seam gas wells, and relied on data from the American Petroleum Institute.

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''It shows that they are actually relying on out-of-date data from the American Petroleum Institute to come up with their emissions scenarios,'' Mr Wright said.

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http://www.nature.com/news/air-sampling-reveals-high-emissions-from-gas-field-1.9982

[font face=Times,Times New Roman,Serif][font size=5]Air sampling reveals high emissions from gas field[/font]

[font size=4]Methane leaks during production may offset climate benefits of natural gas.[/font]

07 February 2012

[font size=3]When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog — but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning fossil fuel might not be much better than coal when it comes to climate change.

Led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado, Boulder, the study estimates that natural-gas producers in an area known as the Denver-Julesburg Basin are losing about 4% of their gas to the atmosphere — not including additional losses in the pipeline and distribution system. This is more than double the official inventory, but roughly in line with estimates made in 2011 that have been challenged by industry. And because methane is some 25 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, releases of that magnitude could effectively offset the environmental edge that natural gas is said to enjoy over other fossil fuels.

“If we want natural gas to be the cleanest fossil fuel source, methane emissions have to be reduced,” says Gabrielle Pétron, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA and at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and first author on the study, currently in press at the Journal of Geophysical Research. Emissions will vary depending on the site, but Pétron sees no reason to think that this particular basin is unique. “I think we seriously need to look at natural-gas operations on the national scale.”

The results come as a natural-gas boom hits the United States, driven by a technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, that can crack open hard shale formations and release the natural gas trapped inside. Environmentalists are worried about effects such as water pollution, but the US government is enthusiastic about fracking. In his State of the Union address last week, US President Barack Obama touted natural gas as the key to boosting domestic energy production.

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