Party-list group Alyansa ng mga grupong haligi ng Agham at Teknolohiya para sa Mamamayan (Agham) on Monday warned the public against the dangers of gas peaking plants.
The group said its study discovered that fueling gas peaker plants with natural gas affects the climate twice. Agham President Angelo B. Palmones said these recent findings on gas peaking plants reinforce their previous statements explaining that liquefied natural gas (LNG) is not clean, and not a bridge to cleaner energy.
“As we continued our studies into the topic, it was discovered that fueling gas peaker plants with natural gas affects our climate twice. Most obviously, by the carbon pollution that rises from the smokestack at the plant,” he said in a statement.
“But as [American environmentalist] Bill McKibben writes, any methane that escapes unburned into the atmosphere on the way to the power plant warms the planet very effectively that if you leak more than 2 or 3 percent, it’s worse for climate change than coal. Gas is not 100 percent green, as some companies want the public to believe, and it is not exactly ‘good’ power,” he added.
Last month, Agham said that the Philippines should not invest too much on natural gas because, unknown to many, this is also harmful to the environment and not true clean energy as some corporations would have consumers believe.
In the Philippines, Palmones said the biggest thing the people can do to reduce methane emissions is to reduce the use of natural gas.
“It’s complicated, but basically the leak rate is a percentage of total consumption, so leaks increase [or decrease] when natural-gas consumption goes up [or down],” he said.
“Until industry acts to stop the leaks, more natural-gas consumption means more methane in our atmosphere, and an acceleration of global warming. We have to put a stop to adding more gas power plants immediately, as this is hazardous to our environment,” he added.
Palmones also said his group was “greatly worried” about the results and findings in Southeast America, where it was detailed in cleanenergy.org how gas peaking plants resulted in huge costs that are passed directly to customers.
“The fuel expenses at the 14 plants listed in the article increased from an average of $357 million per year to $567 million in 2016, despite fuel prices dropping from $65 to $42 per MWh. So the answer to this mystery is literally a $210-million question,” he said, citing cleanenergy.org.
Citing the online research, Agham noted that carbon emissions are also up. Carbon-dioxide emissions from gas peakers increased from an average of 9.4 to 16.7 million tons in 2016.
“For comparison, total carbon emissions in 2016 from Southeastern utilities were 428 million tons. The 2016 carbon total was the lowest of the modern era [carbon-dioxide emissions in 2010 were 530 million tons], but if natural gas combined cycle plants had been used instead of peakers, roughly 2 million tons of carbon emissions could have been avoided,” the group said.
Agham referred to methane as CO2 on steroids, as it spends roughly 12 years trapping atmospheric heat 87 times more effectively than CO2, then it becomes CO2 itself.