Worrying Too Much, Or Not Enough, About Natural Gas?
Posted by Sonja Ebron
Unlike oil, whose production follows a bell curve, natural gas production tends to peak and drop off a cliff. Oil is liquid and therefore easy to import, while natural gas is mostly restricted to pipelines because it’s a gas. You don’t want to carry large volumes of gas over the shipping lanes unless you like fireworks a lot.
Five or ten years ago, something like 90% of all new power plants were being built to use natural gas as a fuel. Lots of industrial processes also switched to use natural gas directly. Over time, those changes lifted demand for natural gas while supply stayed flat, and now it’s expensive. Natural gas production in the lower 48 U.S. states has nearly peaked, so we get a lot from Canada and Mexico. But exporting countries increasingly need more of their own stuff, so we’ve either got to find a way to import from others or to dramatically decrease consumption soon.
Nuclear Power for Environmental Justice? Uh… No!
Posted by Sonja Ebron
The Howard University School of Law hosted the second annual State of Environmental Justice in America Conference in May. Topics on the program included efforts at state and federal agencies, tribal perspectives, potential traps of Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs), technical advances in monitoring hazards, case studies of remediation, and other thought-provoking subjects. The discussion on nuclear options caught my eye.
Organized by my good friends at the African American Environmentalists Association, the workshop highlighted the lack of minority ownership of firms working in the nuclear industry and a number of ways for Blacks to get in. Many industry analysts expect a renaissance in nuclear power because of the focus on climate change and the fact that nukes have no emissions. But I found it strange that this discussion would take place at a conference on environmental justice. Where’s the tie-in? Would a more diverse industry really change the calculations that decide the siting of power plants?
