Coal is dead in Ontario. Next target needs to be natural gas. I understand that the energy mix in Ontario, Canada for 2013 was: Nuclear energy 59.2% Water power 23.4% Natural gas 11.1% Wind power 3.4% Coal 2.1% Other 0.8% Presumably, for 2014 the mix will have coal drop to almost 0% (not quite since it was completely phased out on April 9th, so it may be down to 0.5% or so for the year); wind will gain a little; and natural gas will gain most of the 1.6% reduction in coal and advance to about 12.5%. Thus, I estimate that the numbers for 2014 could look something like: Nuclear energy 59.2% Water power 23.4% Natural gas 12.5% Wind power 3.6% Coal 0.5% Other 0.8% From a climate change point of view, the worst component by far is the natural gas component. I am convinced that the most-bang-for-the-buck would be to immediately shift the anti-coal resources over completely to anti-natural gas. Since the baseload is primarily nuclear, and huge dollars are planned to upgrade and slightly expand the reactors I really think that it will be a lost cause to go after nuclear. Also, from a climate change standpoint going after nuclear does not help. In addition, all the nuclear expansion is occurring at existing plant sites and the marginal increase in that expansion does not carry a large marginal risk. The other main reason to immediately attack natural gas, apart from the climate change aspect, is to squash fracking in Ontario before it builds up steam. As you know, fracking is a huge problem in terms of contaminating ground water as well as in causing earthquakes, not to mention the roads that would have to be built through forests to reach the fracking well sites. Also, each well site only produces for 1 to 1.5 years before it generally depleted and another well site is drilled to replace it. Also, the natural gas (which is >90% methane) that escapes from natural gas lines and fracking sites and urban gas meters is much larger than the industry acknowledges. Methane has a huge GWP (global warming potential) compared to that of CO2. Most people recall a GWP or somewhere in the range of 20 to 25x for methane but that is at a 100 year time scale. The methane GWP is more like 84x over 20 years, and even >150x on a timescale of a few years. Thus, it is vital that the natural gas component of Ontario’s power mix be reduced to zero as quickly as possible. It is not that I am in favor of nuclear, since I am not. I just think that the natural gas component is much worse for climate change, and opens up Ontario to the great risk of fracking in the near term.
Posted on: Sat, 10 May 2014 05:29:00 +0000
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