The Garden Club of America
National Affairs and legislation Committee
May 2015
The Changing Face of US Energy

By Barbara Geltosky, Vice Chairman Energy Sources
 

When I first started writing about Energy as a Zone Rep, under Derry MacBride and Claire Caudill, fracking was just coming to the fore, no one had heard about the Keystone Pipeline, power plants ran primarily on coal, and the EPA was under fire.

Cap and Trade was our last best hope Energy legislation, the US imported much of its petroleum and LNG, and the Pope was largely silent on matters of climate change. Nuclear, hydropower, wind, biofuel and solar were our sources of alterative energy, there weren’t many earthquakes in Oklahoma, and exploding oil trains were not in the news.

There have been many aspects of energy that I have attempted to cover over the last four years. As a newly minted Zone rep, I stood in the turbine room of the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River and learned firsthand how our energy was generated for the grid, and what the grid encompassed.  It is something we don’t think much about but without it, we would not enjoy the convenience of life with electric power that we do today. Climate change and extreme weather, greenhouse gases, fracking, EPA Power Plant Rules, The Cloud, and The Fukushima Disaster have all had played a part; in the past few years, the face of energy has undergone quite a few changes in the United States and across the globe.

Fossil Fuels:

The energy boom emerged with the advent of hydrofracking for both gas and oil. This was primarily from the Bakken Shale formation in Canada, Montana and North Dakota and the Marcellus Shale deposits in my home state of Pennsylvania. With turmoil in the middle -east and instability of import sources, the time was right for further fossil fuel development through fracking of oil and gas. More power plants were fired with natural gas; this was seen as cleaner than coal.  Due to the huge surge in production, US imports of crude oil soon fell to the lowest point in 18 years. Only ten percent of our oil came from the Mideast in September of 2014, putting America on track to be the world’s largest oil producer.[i] However, in November 2014,when OPEC released more storage oil, further adding to the surplus, this caused a precipitous drop in the price of crude oil, and some drilling rigs were idled when the price per barrel made the oil less profitable to bring to market. But gas production has continued apace, pipeline construction is growing and LNG export terminal projects are being developed.

How the energy gets to market is an evolving part of the big picture. Coal and oil trains have been carrying fuel to market- coal comes from the Powder River Basin through the sensitive areas of the Columbia River Gorge to western ports. Due to lack of pipeline capacity, flammable crude from Bakken shale is carried on freight trains; one such train derailed, exploded and leveled the town of Lac Megantic, Canada, killing forty two people. Just yesterday, while sitting in a café along the Schuylkill River, I saw such a train moving across the river; there has already been a derailment on this same bridge, but luckily it resulted in no leaks or explosions. The US and Canada have just rolled out a new plan for stricter regulations of the oil cars with a fairly long timeline for implementation. The president vetoed the bill to fast track federal approval of the Keystone Pipeline; there were not enough votes to override the veto, but other pipelines with less public profiles continue to be built. FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) has issued permits to allow expansion of the Cove Point, MD, LNG plant to allow for export; this would trigger more greenhouse gases than any single source of pollution in Maryland, and risk catastrophic explosions in a highly populated area.

This energy renaissance has significant downsides. The increased production of fossil fuel adds greenhouse gas to the atmosphere, including CO2 and methane. To help combat this growing problem, the President rolled out a Clean Power Plan, with proposed EPA Power Plant Rules to rein in greenhouse gases. The EPA’s rules apply to new construction, existing plants, and the third most recently proposed rule, to methane produced by the extraction of fossil fuels. Methane causes about 10% of all US greenhouse gas emissions. Pound for pound, the comparative impact of methane on climate change is 20 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20 year period. Unfortunately, the EPA is still underfunded by an intransigent Congress; continued rounds of layoffs and budget cuts will make enforcement even more problematic.

Our air quality isn’t the only thing is affected by the extraction of fossil fuels. Our waterways and oceans have also been polluted by the largest oil spill to date, the Deep Water Horizon Spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and our drinking water sources by events such as the coal ash spill in the Dan River. In May, a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found a clear chain of events where fracking chemicals ended up in a homeowner’s water supply.[ii] Earthquake activity in Oklahoma increased seventy percent after 2008, correlating with the injection of wastewater from fracking into disposal wells. [iii]

Alternative Energy Sources:

Hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, solar and biofuels continue to be a fluctuating part of our energy mix. But not everything has proved practical or had the environmental advantages first thought. The EIA (US Energy Information Administration) projects that total renewables used for electricity and heat generation will grow by 3.4% in 2015. For 2016 they are predicting a decrease in hydropower generation but a rise in non -hydropower renewables. [iv]Part of this can be attributed to the extreme drought in the American West. Lake Mead, at the Hoover Dam, is at its lowest levels since 1956, and due to low water levels, power generation at the Glenn Canyon Dam may cease; previously hydropower accounted for twenty percent of California’s total energy generation, it is currently about 10%.[v]

While solar power continues to grow, its still only a fraction of a percent of the US power generation; half of the increased capacity will be in California. There’s an incentive to get projects online quickly: projects coming online in 2017 will see an investment tax credit of only 10% versus 30% in past years. Increase in wind capacity

continues to grow at twice the rate of solar, while biofuel production has dropped. Biofuels, particularly ethanol, were initially heralded as a renewable resource that would cut carbon pollution, but the switch from food crops to those grown for corn ethanol has had unintended consequences. During a record drought in the Midwest, feed corn prices rose, and subsequently so did the cost of the food we eat. Renewable Fuel Standard Rules set by the EPA were changed in 2013,which slowed investment and made compliance problematic.[vi]  And now there is controversy with scientists saying that lower carbon emissions from biomass actually cancel out as the trees used would have absorbed carbon dioxide; the use of biomass may actually accelerate climate change.[vii] Four years after the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant, one result is that the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) is making renewed efforts to guarantee the safety of our aging nuclear fleet. The San Onofre plant near San Diego has been closed down, and just this weekend, there was an explosion at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant with an oil spill in the Hudson River. The NRC has issued one permit to build two new units at a Georgia site, with possible completion in 2017.

In the “what goes around comes around” category, at this year’s NAL meeting, we heard from several legislators who thought that Cap and Trade’s time had finally come. And in a surprising development, several also emphasized that the Pope’s visit in September would be a game changer for the environment. Pope Francis has been an outspoken advocate for climate action, and his influence should not be discounted. In the past few years I have learned a lot working on these reports, and I hope my readers have found them of value. When you consider all the issues, it becomes so obvious that as gardeners, parents and grandparents, we owe it to our grandchildren and the future of our planet, to advocate for the causes of clean air and clean water.

                                                                                    
[i] Zhou Moming, Bloomberg October 17, 2014
[ii] St.Fleur, Nicholas, “Fracking Chemicals Detected in Pennsylvania Drinking Water” New York Times, May 4, 2015.)
[iii] AP, Los Angeles Times, April 21,2015
[iv] EIA Short-Term Energy and Summer Fuels Outlook, April, 2015
[v] Capeheart, Mary Ann ,”Drought Diminishes Hydropower Capacity in the Western US”    University of Arizona.
[vi] Biofuels, Advanced Ethanol Council
[vii] Stecker, Tiffany, “Mass. Senators urge EPA to reject biomass as fossil fuel alternative”
e and e news, May 8, 2015