U.S. heat waves prompt surge in use of natural gas, a fossil fuel ... - The Washington Post

U.S. heat waves prompt surge in use of natural gas, a fossil fuel - The Washington Post

America’s historic heat wave is producing a big winner: fossil fuels.

The trends illustrate how extreme heat is complicating efforts by the United States and other countries to phase down use of fossil fuels, despite how these fuels contribute to climate change and more intense heat waves. While the build-out of renewable energy is increasing, the world’s power grids are so reliant on gas and coal that burning more of them — and thus producing more planet-warming emissions — is often the only way to cool buildings and protect people from often life-threatening conditions.

“The projection for how much energy you need is higher and higher because the cooling needs to go up,” said Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “There are these tragic ironies all over the climate space.”

The problem is global and set to intensify. The International Energy Agency last week said that only a tenth of the 2.8 billion people who live in the hottest parts of the world already have air conditioning, foreshadowing what is likely to become “a vicious cycle.” Use of air conditioning is expected to increase in the years to come, further driving fast-rising energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions in the developing world, the Paris-based watchdog said.

Last year, nearly a fifth of the world’s increase in carbon dioxide emissions came from increased energy demand during extreme weather, the IEA said in March. Its report on global carbon dioxide concluded that summer heat waves were the primary reason the United States and China, the world’s two largest emitters, did not reduce their emissions for the year. In the United States, gas consumption was the culprit, rising to cool buildings as electricity demand peaked, the IEA said.

Burning coal is the world’s biggest source of carbon dioxide, and the IEA said Thursday that that too is on the rise. Global coal demand in the first half of 2023 outpaced record demand from last year by 1.5 percent. The agency said that is likely to recede through year’s end, but whether it does or demand sets a record will depend primarily on the weather.

Some climate researchers say extreme heat is only a short-term conundrum, especially with development of zero-emissions wind and solar power worldwide. Andrew Dessler, a scientist at Texas A&M University who has studied these dynamics in Texas, said that renewables are helping to solve the problem and that factors like population growth and affluence are bigger drivers of emissions than natural gas.

“It’s not a huge impact,” he said. “Yes, it’s pushing us in the wrong direction, but other factors are increasing demand a lot more.”

Several countries are mirroring the U.S. trend this summer. That includes China, where the recent heat has been partly behind a sharp rise in demand for coal-fired power in several of the country’s most populous coastal regions, according to data compiled by Goldman Sachs analysts.

“If we don’t speed up how much clean energy we’re building, this will continue to happen and will get worse in the future,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of energy policy design at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. “Fossil fuels aren’t the way out.”

In the United States, dependence on natural gas has become central to policy debates over climate change and energy. Conservatives and some centrists favor gas because the United States has plentiful reserves and it burns with about half the emissions than the coal it often replaces. But more aggressive climate activists warn that the country is nearing the limit to the benefits that system can produce and that it needs to stop long-term investments in gas that could start preventing the country from reducing emissions further.

The country’s reliance on gas has unfolded over the last 15 years or so. Once a fuel primarily for home heating, its use expanded rapidly as new technology — fracking— slashed the costs of domestic production, and state and federal regulators cracked down on toxic emissions from coal plants.

As a result, U.S. annual gas consumption rose nearly 50 percent from 2006 through last year, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Over roughly that same period, the country’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen more than 14 percent, according to Environmental Protection Agency data.

The country has also made vast strides in adding emissions-free energy, such as wind and solar. And further investment through last year’s giant climate-spending legislation, called the Inflation Reduction Act, is widely expected to accelerate that development and ultimately lower consumption of natural gas. But there is widespread disagreement over when that could happen, with some expecting years of strong gas demand first.

“The system doesn’t change that fast. No big system changes that fast,” said Christi Tezak, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, an independent research firm. “I have no doubt in my mind we are going to be using gas for quite some time. And almost certainly longer than most environmental groups expect.”

In the meantime, U.S. gas and coal demand — and emissions — are becoming even more strongly tied to the weather. Grid operators tend to use renewable power first, whenever they are available, because wind and sunshine are free. As demand rises, they call upon more gas- and coal-fired plants.

“Almost anywhere in the United States, any incremental increase in electricity demand is met with a fossil resource,” said Glenn McGrath, who leads the electricity supply team at the EIA.

The last two years illustrate this spike. Last summer and this July produced the 21 top days when U.S. power plants had their highest consumption of natural gas, according to S&P.

Parts of the South, the hottest parts of the country, use six times as much energy to cool commercial buildings as the coolest parts of the country, according to data the EIA put out Thursday. Because the heat is so intense, those regions are not just cooling more buildings more often, but also cooling more of the surface area of every building to cope, creating more intense demand at higher temperatures.

Many environmental groups argue that this intense demand shows the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels entirely. But some groups have concluded that these trends show that it is impossible to eliminate fossil fuels quickly enough to address climate change. They advocate for attaching systems that capture carbon dioxide to existing fossil-fuel-burning plants as a way to reduce emissions.

The Biden administration has proposed requirements that could lead many gas- and coal-burning power plants, starting in the 2030s, to install carbon capture. The Clean Air Task Force, an environmental organization, says the country must mandate those changes alongside a more rapid build-out of renewable power — in part because of how extreme weather affects the energy system.

“The extremes absolutely make the challenges harder,” said Ben Longstreth, who leads carbon-capture advocacy for the group. “We need all of these tools.”