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Tag: natural gas

Understanding Colorado’s Environmental Waste Reality

Colorado’s renewable energy frenzy has been met with an array of positive news. It’s viewed as clean, modern, and the best alternative to break America’s addiction to fossil fuels. But as facts about recycling the first generation of solar and wind-farm materials emerge, the long-held perception of renewables as a panacea becomes unsustainable.

READ: Understanding ESG & Colorado’s Energy Transformation

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) projects that “large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s” as the solar boom progresses. According to IRENA, the amount of solar panel waste could total 78 million tons annually by 2050.

A similar concern exists in the wind industry. Thousands of tons of windmill blades and giant wind towers, rising as high as 500 feet, are currently disposed of in landfills, largely due to a lack of consistent state regulations governing the retirement and disposal of wind farms. The thousands of colossal concrete pads that serve as the base for each wind tower are also simply left in place in perpetuity. The turbine blades are built with a planned life of 20 to 25 years and contain chemicals that can become hazardous after burial in a landfill, yet the government has not caught on. While technologies exist to recycle the blades, the wind industry has been slow to adopt them due to the high cost.

Solar panels also possess a similarly limited life cycle, and, like lithium-ion and other batteries, contain chemicals and metals, such as lead, that create environmental hazards as they degrade. Like the wind industry, the panels can be recycled, but the high cost has prevented large-scale adoption, despite heavy subsidization by the federal and state governments. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that less than 10% of the country’s decommissioned panels are recycled, mainly due to cost. The price to recycle a single panel is about $15 to $45 for a silicon PV module in the US, compared to only $1 to $5 to dump it in a landfill.

Should Coloradans worry? As primarily a headwater state, meaning most of our water begins here and flows out to the Rocky Mountains, toxic leakage into our rivers is particularly concerning. It was only seven years ago when three million gallons of contaminated water turned the Animas River orange.

READ: Water Pipeline Back in Play? — The Future of Colorado’s Water Distribution

Environmental and safety concerns are not new in the energy landscape. For example, determining the appropriate distance between oil and gas operations, often referred to as setbacks, used to be a major contention in Colorado. And it doesn’t stop there. The impact on water, air, wildlife and the landscape have all been debated and are now all highly regulated here. But it took years of contentious community discussions, public hearings, legislative compromise and collaboration. Today, operators seem to have struck the right balance of production and protection.

Despite the known hazardous magnitude, the federal and many state governments in the U.S. have not enacted consistent regulations governing the disposal of the massive waste created by these new industries. If the Biden administration’s envisioned energy transition is to progress as planned, a resolution to this toxic issue is mandatory. While most support the expansion of new energy sources, it makes little sense to do it at such a cost to the environment it is supposed to improve.

READ: Biden is Right About One Thing — Oil and Natural Gas Aren’t Going Anywhere

It comes down to fairness. Why should some industries like oil, gas, coal or nuclear be held to one standard while others like solar and wind are held to another?

There’s no doubt that an energy transformation is underway. After all, energy is the foundation of everything, and finding ways to produce it more efficiently and responsibly is a no-brainer. Everything evolves and energy is no different. But all sources have benefits and drawbacks. Perfect energy does not exist, and the pitfalls must be addressed and remedied. As an environmental leader, this is Colorado’s opportunity to shine. The next step is to proceed responsibly, fairly and transparently.

Biden is Right About One Thing — Oil and Natural Gas Aren’t Going Anywhere

A funny thing happened when President Biden went off script during his recent State of the Union speech and began jousting with a raucous group of Republican lawmakers.

He told the truth.

Now, that’s not to say the rest of what he said was lies, but in this unscripted moment, which began just as he was talking about climate change, he injected a moment of reality into his speech.

“We’re still going to need oil and gas for a while,” he said, probably to the chagrin of his speech writers.

READ — Understanding ESG & Colorado’s Energy Transformation

He then quickly added, in another off-the-cuff remark, that we’re going to need oil for “at least a decade.” It drew laughs from Republicans because, as conservative Jonah Goldberg tweeted, that’s like saying we’ll need water and oxygen for “at least a decade.”

Even though President Biden has continuously vilified this industry and made it harder to develop our natural resources, beginning with campaign pledges to shut down all drilling to his first few days in office when he shut down the Keystone pipeline and froze federal leasing, his unscripted moment brought a much-needed dose of reality to our national conversation on energy.

We need oil and natural gas to survive. And will, for years to come. Not just a decade.

The federal government, through its Energy Information Administration, projects that by 2050, we will need more oil and natural gas than today, not less. (To be fair, they also expect an even greater share of renewables in our energy mix.)

The global population is growing, and access to efficient, reliable and affordable energy is a human right. We will need all forms of energy to thrive, and attacking domestic production, shutting down infrastructure and making it harder to develop here only means we’ll rely on foreign countries for our energy, which is not an environmental solution and makes our country less secure.

READ — Do Hispanics Bear the Brunt of the Energy Crisis?

Today, oil and natural gas are the primary sources of energy for the global economy, supplying roughly 70 percent of the total global energy demand. In 2021, 81 percent of our primary energy in the United States came from fossil fuels. We will continue to need oil and natural gas for decades to come for many reasons. It is our challenge to produce it cleaner, better and safer here than anywhere on the globe.

But we need realistic conversations about where our energy comes from, and the trade-offs and benefits of all energy sources.

In Colorado, the governor recently renewed his pledge to move our state to 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. But just a few days prior, for nearly three days when the temperature hovered around 0, renewables provided almost no power to our electrical grid as the wind wasn’t blowing and the sun wasn’t shining. Natural gas and coal were the workforces that kept us safe and warm during that cold snap.

Knowing that we need these resources, we need to do a better job of sharing the positive environmental changes we’ve seen in recent years: The new technologies, the lowering of emissions and the promise of innovation and ingenuity.  Our elected leaders need to embrace that as well.

If you’re concerned about climate change, it’s important to note that today we’re powering our electric grid with more natural gas, wind, and solar energy than ever before. The environmental benefits have been, and will continue to be, profound because natural gas, as an energy source, has a low carbon dioxide emissions profile.

But that’s just part of the story. Numerous emissions reductions beyond CO2 have occurred as a result of this trend, with sulfur dioxide down 88 percent and ground-level ozone down 22 percent. The six most common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO and Pb) are collectively down 73 percent. That’s a tremendous success story for our environment and our air quality.

In Colorado, we also can be proud that methane emissions from oil and natural gas production are decreasing, and our industry’s volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions have dropped nearly 60 percent since 2011. Technology improvements and regulations that reduce the chance for methane and VOCs to escape into our atmosphere are working.

Our industry continues to make tremendous progress in both the efficiency of energy consumption and in reducing greenhouse gases. However, more work must be done.

We can have the economy we desire and the environment we need, but we need to have realistic conversations about climate, where our energy comes from and what’s feasible. We also need to support policies and infrastructure that allows for continued domestic production, especially here in Colorado where we’re producing some of the cleanest molecules of energy on the planet.

Clean, affordable energy is the key to our world’s future, and oil and natural gas have an important role to play.

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Dan Haley is president and CEO of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association.

 

Should Colorado adopt California’s energy policies?

Natural gas, once seen as a bridge fuel to a new energy future, is now the target of attacks by anti-industrial activists.  

Armed with significant financial assets, environmental groups have spent the past year targeting the natural gas industry and its consumers through local bans on new natural gas hookups. Most of the local bans are located in California and the Northeast, but proposals to restrict new natural gas hookups continue to spring up across the country, including in Colorado.  

 The fact is these bans are a bad deal for consumers. Natural gas is currently used by both residential and commercial building owners for a variety of purposes, with water heating, space heating, and cooking making up the primary preferred applications.

The popularity of natural gas is due to its price and the comparative savings consumers are afforded by using natural gas when compared to electricity. 

As Jonathan Lesser explained in a 2019 Wall Street Journal article:  

“Consider California, the state at the forefront of natural-gas-hookup bans. Last year, the average price of natural gas in California was about $12.30 per million British thermal units (a measure of the heat content of the fuel), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. For a homeowner with a new, 95% efficiency natural gas furnace or water heater, that translates into a cost of just under $13 per million BTUs.

Compare that with the cost of electricity, which averaged 18.84 cents a kilowatt-hour in California in 2018, about 50% higher than the national average. That works out to $55 per million BTUs, more than four times the cost of natural gas. Even heat pumps for space and water heating can’t bridge that gap.”

 By adopting these local bans, Colorado would be moving in a similar direction to California where policymakers have been doing everything in their power to undermine access to affordable and reliable energy. If Colorado chooses to go down that same path, Colorado’s energy consumers should expect the same problems that currently plague California.  

Today, California’s residential electricity prices are the fifth highest in the country. Last year, the average cost of residential electricity in California was 23.4 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to the national average residential electricity price of 14 cents. On December 3, the California Public Utilities Commission approved an 8.1 percent electricity rate increase for PG&E, which will cost the average residential customer in that service territory an additional $13.44 per month.  

 It’s also clear that bans on natural gas are exacerbating California’s poverty problem. As others have noted, many cities adopting these bans are some of the wealthiest parts of America. In California in particular, the municipalities that are restricting the use of natural gas are far wealthier than the state or national averages, meaning that by raising energy prices these localities are erecting further barriers to entry. These higher energy bills are of particular concern because they have more of an impact on low-income households. 

 California’s bans on natural gas are occurring while California’s electricity prices are increasing, and that the state’s electricity grid has been shown to be unreliable. State residents’ electricity demand has been affected by rolling blackouts during heat waves and power cutoffs to prevent fires caused by old equipment. In fact, blackouts are so common that thousands of Californians have bought small generators powered by fossil fuels to ensure reliable power.  

In states like California where the confluence of renewable energy mandates and aggressive zero emissions targets have contributed to rendering the electric grid unreliable, bans on new natural gas hookups push more demand onto the grid, further taxing the system. The quest to electrify everything creates relative reliability risks on the electric grid, making conservation orders and failures of the grid an even more harmful event than it otherwise would be. 

California’s approach to energy policy should be a warning to Colorado’s energy consumers. Policies that restrict the use of natural gas will raise energy prices and concentrate risks on the grid. Outside of the impacts on energy consumers, the long-run effects of California’s energy policies are beginning to show themselves as companies are currently fleeing the state due in part to expensive and unreliable energy. 

 One final point that should be made about these natural gas bans is that they undermine consumer preferences. Natural gas has certain properties that consumers prefer based on usability. The most prominent example is the gas range stove, which both commercial and home chefs tend to prefer for preparing and serving food. By eliminating new natural gas hookups, new restaurants will not have the option to use the types of stoves chefs tend to prefer. This is why the California Restaurant Association is pushing back on these bans.  

Natural gas bans undermine energy consumers who simply desire access to affordable and reliable energy. In order to promote competition and to preserve consumer sovereignty in energy markets, states like Colorado should continue to push back on these local bans on new natural gas hookups.   

Ier Headshot Alex 03  Alex Stevens is a policy analyst at the Institute for Energy Research and the host of the Plugged In Podcast. He is a frequent commentator on the relationship between business and government in the energy industry as well as the effects of regulation and subsidies on energy markets.