Thursday, August 13, 2009

LNG is just another dirty fossil fuel

It is a great concern to Redhanded that the general public are being totally mislead about LNG being a clean fuel. Liquefied Natural Gas, LNG is just another dirty fossil fuel. It is produced by compressing and cooling natural gas to very low temperatures of about -160°C (-260°F). Natural gas is a combustible gas consisting mainly of methane (over 80% in volume) with varying quantities of ethane, propane, butane, nitrogen, and helium. Methane is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect, second only to carbon dioxide, and is about 21 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. LNG has 35% higher lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than coal .

Its principal uses are for fuel and for the production of chemical products such as fertilizers and plastics. In liquid state, natural gas occupies a volume about 600 times smaller than in gas state. Liquefying it makes it possible to transport it across great distances by ship or truck, allowing it to be extracted from countries that have natural gas resources and sold in countries that need it for their consumption. All of these steps leads to indirect environmental impacts, such as carbon dioxide emissions from changing from gas to liquid and then back again.

It is a major environmental concern over the LNG proliferation is that the billions of dollars now being invested into the LNG importation schemes will continue to delay - for decades - the necessary development of safe sustainable renewable energy sources.

2 comments:

  1. Totaly agree that LNG is another fossil fuel, but you need to be careful on your facts. LNG is about half the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of coal - see LNG Vs Coal Greenhouse Lifecycle Emissions

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  2. Does this include the discharge of CO2 when the natural gas is exracted from the ground. Browse Basin Gas and NW Shelf gas is VERY high in CO2. As a recent article about the gorgon project stated, "The proposal is to sequester some three million tonnes of CO2 per year - that represents around 130 million tonnes over the life of the project." Are we sure that this CO2 will remain below ground? Apparently the Browse gas will not have it's CO2 sequestered because the ground is too fractured to hold the gas! Some also say that the ground where Gorgon CO2 is going to be sequestered (pumped below ground) is also too fractured to hold the CO2.
    Maybe it would be just safer for the planet to concentrate on renewable energy!

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