Moving from coal and oil for power to cleaner-burning natural gas to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and slow down climate change is not likely to be a successful strategy in the long term, a new study suggests.
Over the long run, researchers say, a world-wide abundance of cheap natural gas provided by new technologies including fracking would compete not just with higher-emitting coal and oil but also lower-emission energy technologies including nuclear, solar and wind.
An ongoing supply of inexpensive natural gas also would push burgeoning economic growth and would expand overall global energy use, negating any emission gains from natural gas, the study published in the journal Nature said.
"When we looked at it, abundant gas is not going to solve the climate change problem on its own without accompanying climate policies," said study lead author Haewon McJeon of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
"Global deployment of advanced natural gas production technology could double or triple the global natural gas production by 2050, but greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow in the absence of climate policies that promote lower-carbon energy sources," McJeon said.
To gauge the long-term global effect of the present boom in natural gas, scientists from the U.S., Germany, Austria, Italy and Australia modeled what our world might be like in 2050 with and without that boom.
While simply substituting natural gas for coal in a simple model would see decreases in greenhouse gas emissions -- a predictable result -- the performance of the entire global economy and how people create and use energy from all sources had a more significant effect on emissions, they researchers found.
"We still get some reduction in (greenhouse gas) emissions, but one more effect is the first rule economics: If things are cheap, people will consume more," McJeon said.
So although abundant and cheap natural gas may bring some benefits, including economic growth, reduction of local air pollution and energy security, any possible benefit of putting the brakes on climate change may be illusory, they researchers said.
It's a case of economic effects overshadowing technology, they said.
"The high hopes that natural gas will help reduce global warming because of technical superiority to coal turn out to be misguided because market effects are dominating," says study co-author Nico Bauer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
