President-elect Biden should strike a new bargain in which Washington supports a role for gas in the rapid deployment of renewables in exchange for the industry's commitment to advance toward zero-carbon emissions, a new report by the center-left Progressive Policy Institute asserted Dec. 16.
The recommendation comes as Biden readies to take office on a platform of tackling climate change and accelerating the shift toward lower-emission energy sources."We've gone from the campaign, which is a stage of grand themes and sweeping agendas, to the realities of governing, with a closely divided political system," said Will Marshall, PPI president and founder in an interview. In his view, efforts by those on the environmental left to make Democrats "walk the plank" on fracking bans during the campaign offer a false choice between fossil fuels versus renewables.
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"We're now in the governing phase. We have to think about, with [President] Trump out of the way, is there a way to begin building real legislative majorities around the kind of policies that are going to help this country achieve the goal that the president-elect has for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050," he said.
Methane goalsThe report centers on the position that the US should join with industry to invest in carbon capture and storage to move toward zero-carbon emissions, while also adopting more ambitious goals for dramatically reducing methane emissions from the natural gas life cycle.
"Natural gas can play an indispensable role in managing the risk that a precipitous leap to renewables will make electricity more expensive and potentially less reliable," it states.
In charting the path toward net-zero, it raises concern that a renewables-only approach is cheaper in the near term but becomes "exponentially more expensive in the longer term the closer we get to a 100% renewable grid." The higher renewables penetration scenario involves a need for more battery storage and extensive transmission, raising costs above gas plus CCS gas as a backstop in the long term, based on current electricity sector modeling, according to report author Clayton Munnings.
Renewables should form the backbone of a zero-carbon grid, the report argues, while gas-powered plants with CCS would serve as a backstop to secure lower power prices and ensure reliability. It points to studies suggesting availability of gas with CCS cuts power costs by 10% to 62% compared to scenarios relying exclusively on variable sources and storage.
But to drive down the greenhouse gas profile of continued gas use, the report also calls for more aggressive steps to pare back methane emissions. It posits that none of the voluntary efforts to date have widespread industry participation or set the type of ambitious targets that federal regulations could mandate.
Teeing up optionsOptions for tackling methane emissions that it lays out include setting a price on the social cost of carbon at over $1,100 a ton. It also suggests replicating Colorado's leak detection and repair programs, and potentially setting a nationwide carbon tax adjusted for methane.
It also lists the options of tradable performance standards or financial reporting standards that create an incentive to cut emissions.
Munnings said he is not advocating giving up on a battery storage and transmission buildout in order to put "all our eggs in the CCS-natural gas basket." Rather he advocated for a "rebalancing of our portfolio to lower the risk that we don't achieve our clean electricity goals."
His "take-home point," he said, is that electricity prices matter because environmentalists and Biden are seeking to decarbonize electricity first so the transportation sector and the industrial sector can then be decarbonized via clean electricity. "If the electricity prices are really expensive, you're not going to see massive adoption of electric vehicles. You're not going to see electrification of different industrial processes," he said.
