Electric Cars + Methane Emissions ≠ Zero Emissions, Buddy
A friend recently made a pretty hilarious observation that got me thinking about the world of natural gas. In this specific instance one thought led to another and eventually I’m thinking about natural gas and its relationship to embodied carbon emissions. Naturally, (no pun intended) one has very much to do with the other. So, her observation was this: Elon Musk, the guy who touts the all powerful electric car and getting us off of fossil fuels also owns Space X — a company that needs natural gas in order to fuel its rocket ships. Ironic, right?
Natural gas for those that aren’t aware, is not natural. It’s a petroleum product made primarily of methane and ethanol. It’s pulled from the earth and is a non-renewable resource just like the coal and oil we use for energy. Now, Musk claims the rockets need methane for fuel, and he’s right if he’s not considering viable alternatives. As someone so heavily invested in the electric automobile sector it seems odd he wouldn’t use his available brain power and funding to find an alternate fuel source, one slightly less detrimental than methane. Methane like Co2, is a greenhouse gas. While methane doesn’t linger as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, it is initially far more devastating to the climate because of how effectively it absorbs heat. In fact, the Environmental Defense Fund says that in the first two decades of methane’s release into the atmosphere, it’s 84% more potent than carbon.
Admittedly, I’m not familiar with the particulars of how one might go about finding an alternate fuel source, but I can say that others in similar fields are making huge advances in doing just that. For example, Airbus has developed a plane that runs on hydrogen and is beginning to test its feasibility for passenger aircrafts.
So, if methane is truly the only fuel Musk can use in his dream of abandoning earth for other distant lands, why not use what we have at our disposal? Trapping methane that’s being emitted at our landfills is a technique already being used to produce energy. The EPA states that “using Landfill gas helps to reduce odors and other hazards associated with LFG emissions, and prevents methane from migrating into the atmosphere and contributing to local smog and global climate change.” Again, not a scientist here but this feels like a viable solution.
On that note, I’ll circle back to how this affects embodied carbon and embodied energy. Science Direct describes Embodied energy as “the energy associated with the manufacturing of a product or services. This includes energy used for extracting and processing of raw materials, manufacturing of construction materials, transportation and distribution, and assembly and construction”. Embodied carbon is the carbon emitted during that same process. Example: we mine ore with machines that use fossil fuels (energy), the ore is heated (by a fossil fuel energy source) to make steel, at which point it is transported to a warehouse (using gasoline) or a construction site and eventually demolished and sent to a landfill. The embodied energy is the cradle to grave aspect of that process, the embodied carbon is the amount of carbon the process took in its entirety.
Doesn’t It seem counterintuitive to develop cars that have the best embodied energy counts ever, to then go and drill for gas and build rocket ships that presumably outweigh the good the electric cars are doing for the environment? (For reference, the EU commissioned a study just last year which stated that undoubtedly the life-cycle emissions (embodied carbon) of a hybrid or electric car far outweighs that of a gas powered vehicle despite the fact that producing the batteries for EV’s produces more GHG’s upfront than a combustion engine. ) The material and energy required to build the rockets more than likely has a higher embodied carbon emission count than the gas itself but, when looking at the gas and the production as a whole I can’t imagine the numbers aren’t shocking.
Again, the irony.
