A gas fire can keep you from freezing when a power failure disables your furnace.
Northwest Natural, the gas company, is telling customers in Albany and elsewhere that it will be able to supply us with life-saving energy even as the state government is determined to essentially end the use of fossil fuels by 2050. Good luck with that.
Oregon’s Climate Protection Program aims to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases from about 28 million tons this year to 3 million tons in 2050. Even though the burning of natural gas by residential and commercial customers accounts for only 6 percent of these emissions, the state includes natural gas among the energy sources that must be reduced.
Northwest Natural, in a flier included with monthly bills, has told customers it is going along with this visionary program. The flier is tiled “Vision 2050: Destination Zero.”
The company says it can get there by a combination of greater energy efficiency and other measures, including substituting “renewable gas” for the natural stuff that comes out of the ground.
This renewable gas, the company says, would be generated from organic materials such as food waste, sewage, and landfills. (Coffin Butte in Benton County already produces gas, but that is collected to generate electricity and is not piped to people’s homes as an end product.)
Also, NW Natural sees hydrogen as a potential component of renewable gas. But to get hydrogen out of water molecules, you need electricity. (My uncle, a scientific guy, showed me how when I was about 11. You need a bottle of water, two electrodes, wires and a battery.)
If most of your electricity eventually comes from solar or wind, or maybe ocean waves, my question would be whether it’s more efficient to use electricity for heating directly or to use it to produce hydrogen first that you can then burn.
In any case, the gas company sounds hopeful that it can keep supplying us with burnable gas despite the new restrictions. It doesn’t say anything about what this will cost.
There’s another alternative: In a few years the Climate Protection Program starts to bite but has, as I expect, failed to slow down climate change. Oregon voters then may force our government to drop the whole thing. (hh)
Biogas is a well-proven alternative used in many countries and in a few states. I fully support this use of natural gas from Coffin Butte. You can create a biogas digester in your back yard if you are so inclined. Good for them.
ha HA! yeah it takes $$ Quick estimate search $700 to 2K
Big $$ cost to start up. Until then…
In a world of Putins and Trumps, be a Zelensky!
Around $1K for small home kit. https://www.homebiogas.com/shop/
The big winners are feedlots. All that manure from cattle is now in bidding wars from gas companies and other entrepreneurs. Those big mega dairies proposed in Eastern Oregon ? Bet NW Natural is involved somewhere.
Sorry Hasso…but your very last sentence seems way off the mark. There is no going back on this issue.
Will there be a cost? We are already paying a cost. If nothing is done, as you appear to suggest:
“ There’s another alternative: In a few years the Climate Protection Program starts to bite but has, as I expect, failed to slow down climate change. Oregon voters then may force our government to drop the whole thing. (hh)”
If we do nothing, or reverse attempts at reducing climate change, the price you seem to fear will grow immeasurably, and the threat more severe. Dropping the whole thing, as you suggest, is head-in-the-sand thinking…not what the planet needs right now.
The newly released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report about the immediacy of global warning says:
1. Everywhere is affected, with no inhabited region escaping dire impacts from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather.
2. About half the global population – between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people – live in areas “highly vulnerable” to climate change.
3. Millions of people face food and water shortages owing to climate change, even at current levels of heating.
4. Mass die-offs of species, from trees to corals, are already under way.
5. 1.5C above pre-industrial levels constitutes a “critical level” beyond which the impacts of the climate crisis accelerate strongly and some become irreversible.
Coastal areas around the globe, and small, low-lying islands, face inundation at temperature rises of more than 1.5C.
6. Key ecosystems are losing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide, turning them from carbon sinks to carbon sources.
7. Some countries have agreed to conserve 30% of the Earth’s land, but conserving half may be necessary to restore the ability of natural ecosystems to cope with the damage wreaked on them.
Given the horrendous outcomes predicted by this report – outcomes already upon us, it seems that Hering’s call for the State of Oregon to simply “drop the whole thing” is a recipe for the continuance of a growing disaster.
Being roughly the same age as Hering, I can see why he might not care about the future of the planet as his, and my time, on the face of the earth is limited by our biology. That said, Hering’s cynicism fails to take into regard the billions of folks who will still be upright on the planet’s surface, fighting for their lives against massive disaster caused by our own hand. Hering’s short-sightedness is sad at best and vicious at worst.
I would point out that Oregon is carbon neutral right now and hydropower is the finest source of renewable energy in the world. Of course Oregon’s wonderful leaders are proposing demolishing 4 dams in the Klamath region to supposedly rescue salmon runs although the rivers without dams aren’t doing so good in salmon runs. If they are, how come so many of these rivers use hatchery fish?
Sorry to burst your bubble but Oregon is not carbon neutral. In fact, the state is responsible for 38.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year.
House Bill 2021 passed last year aims to largely eliminate Oregon’s carbon emissions by 2040. Then if Oregon also adopts recommendations from its Global Warming Commission to increase carbon capture and sequestration on Natural and Working Lands the state could net zero by the early to mid-2030’s, and carbon-negative thereafter. Forests in the Pacific Northwest have enormous carbon storage potential yet public lands are often overlooked as an answer. Researchers at OSU see the solution through the protection of 30% of the state’s land and water by banning logging, mining and grazing indefinitely.
If both were done then Oregon would be carbon neutral. That is capturing and retaining as much carbon and other greenhouse gases every year than it would be responsible for emitting.
If you think logging has any affect on global warming in Oregon, you are living in dreamland as the forest fires we have every year from not logging or not having logging equipment available to fight fires and actually using cats, mechanized equipment, etc in fire fighting rather than men with a hoe is laughable. Logging ceased in the 80’s and virtually every sawmill and plywood plant has been shut down.
Since your are an expert, tell me how many tons of carbon are removed by trees in Oregon each year and how much carbon is produced by cars. I read a report that stated planting 1 trillion trees would eliminate the carbon problem and liberals don’t like that idea because they wouldn’t get any taxr evenue from that solution.
Best part of the day – Be A Zelensky! A positive perk!
Is this issue what in the “old daze” was called blowing smoke up our derriere?! Thanks for the update H.H. BUT, we are surrounded by forests so I guess it’s back to the ‘ole fireplace…..
To correct this nonsense…
Vote in people who have an “actively thinking brain and some common sense”.
Problem solved. ;-)
I don’t think we have enough of those types of people (“actively thinking brains and some common sense”). Look at the type they continually vote into office.
Visited a mega dairy that milked 300 per hour 3x per day
All of the manure went to an anaerobic bioreactor that produced methane which ran the power plant for the site. FYI, rhe electric meter rarely moved.
Having said that, I’m aware of an industrial facility that built a bark-burning boiler about 1960. Tried to use it to incinerate various organic wastes.
The fuel source used for design disappeared long ago. The organic wastes required MUCH nat gas to support combustion.
Oh, the design fuel was based on old-growth bark and fairly-wide kerf saws that produced chippish stuff rather than dust.
Current logs have skinny bark and require narrow-kerf blades to be economical.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report seems quite convincing. Only one problem — it is based on false premises. The tell? Just point out data (readily available ) that contradicts the story line. You get called a “Climate Change Denier” and canceled. You may even lose your job (George Taylor a few years ago). “Settled Science”, is not science — it’s politics or religion. True science invites challenge and robust debate. Intellectual integrity is valued. In the seventies we were going to freeze. Now we are going to fry. And the current models have demonstrated very little accuracy in predicting the future. I’m with Hasso — I hope we soon wake up and drop the whole thing.
Bill has it perfectly stated. The covid experience is a shorter version of science deniers
perping on society. Same principle—create the hype so people will comply. Perhaps we can drop the whole thing