THE big energy propaganda campaign will have you believe exporting natural gas will help fight carbon pollution and climate change. Nothing could be farther from the truth and this is why there is such an intense energy industry propaganda campaign about Cove Point. We must dedicate ourselves to development of clean, renewable energy, conservation, and improving our energy grid. Please read the article from Politico by Bill McKibben of 350.org and Mike Tidwell of Chesapeake Climate Action Network then submit your comments against approval of dominion resources' Cove Point project....
President Obama isn’t just not fixing climate change—he’s making it worse.
If you want to know just how bad an idea it is for America to
ship “fracked” natural gas to overseas markets, travel the 65 miles from
the White House to a place called Cove Point in southern Maryland.
There, right on the Chesapeake Bay, the Obama administration
wants to give fast-track approval to a $3.8 billion facility (12 times
the cost of the NFL Ravens stadium) to liquefy gas from all across
Appalachia. The new plant, proposed by Virginia-based Dominion
Resources, would somehow be built right between a coveted state park and
a stretch of sleepy beach communities, with a smattering of Little
League baseball fields just down the road. Along the Chesapeake itself,
endangered tiger beetles cling to the shore while Maryland “watermen”
hunt crabs and oysters in age-old fashion.
Right here, Dominion
wants build a utility-scale power plant (130 megawatts) just to power
the enormous “liquefaction” process for the fracked gas. The company
will then build an industrial-scale compressor, a massive refrigeration
system and an adjacent, surreal six-story-tall “sound wall” to protect
humans and wildlife from the thunderous noise. The facility as a whole
would chill the gas—extracted from fracking wells as far away as New
York—to 260 degrees below zero so it can be poured onto huge tankers
(with Coast Guard escort due to terrorism risks) and then shipped more
than 6,000 miles to India and Japan.
Sound good yet? There’s more: The Cove Point plant in Maryland
is just one of more than 20 such “liquefaction” plants now proposed—but
not yet built—for coastal areas nationwide. They are intended, as an
emerging facet of U.S. energy policy, to double down on the highly
controversial hydraulic fracturing drilling boom across the country. But
like the Keystone XL pipeline for tar sands oil and the proposed export
of dirty-burning coal through new terminals in the Pacific Northwest,
this liquefied gas plan is bad in almost every way.
Simply put,
this gas needs to stay in the ground. If it’s dug up and exported, it
will directly harm just about everyone in the U.S. economy while
simultaneously making global warming worse. How much worse? Imagine
adding the equivalent of more than 100 coal plants to U.S. pollution
output or putting 78 million more cars on our roads. Yes, supporters
say, but this gas would be replacing a lot of coal use overseas. And
they’d be right. The only problem is we’d be replacing that coal with
aggregate “life-cycle” emissions from gas that are almost certainly
worse than coal, creating new net damage for the global atmosphere (more on this later).
Ironically, a recent sea-level rise
report
commissioned by Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, reportedly a
presidential hopeful, shows that climate change could soon wipe out the
peninsula of Cove Point itself. The very point of land next to
Dominion’s proposed facility—the whitewashed lighthouse, the country
roads and homes and forests—would all drown if the world continues to
combust oil, coal and natural gas at current rates, according to the
Maryland report.
The “inconvenient truths” on liquefied gas also
come—in different forms—from the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere. On the economic side, a
study commissioned
by the DOE last spring found that exporting U.S. gas would raise the
fuel’s price here at home. It’s basic supply and demand. More buyers
overseas will drive up our domestic price by as much as 27 percent,
according to the DOE. And that increase will reduce incomes for
virtually every sector of the U.S. economy, from agriculture to
manufacturing to services to transportation. No wonder manufacturers
like Dow and Alcoa are resisting this emerging U.S. export policy for
gas, forming a coalition called “America’s Energy Advantage” to push
back.
The DOE found that only one economic sector wins from gas
exports. You guessed it: the gas industry! This one special interest
wins so big—hundreds of billions in profits—that the DOE now basically
argues that it offsets the pain for everyone else, creating a perverse
and tiny net bump in the nation’s GDP. If you’re a farmer or
wage-earner, too bad. Dominion’s profits at Cove Point are more
important than the financial lives of already-struggling average
Americans.
The gas export calculations grow even more insane when
you factor in climate change. The industry bombards the public with ads
saying natural gas is 50 percent cleaner than coal. But the claim is
totally false. Gas is cleaner only at the point of combustion. If you
calculate the greenhouse gas pollution emitted at every stage of the
production process— drilling, piping, compression—it’s essentially just
coal by another name. Indeed, the methane (the key ingredient in natural
gas) that constantly and inevitably leaks from wells and pipelines is
84 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2 over a
20-year period, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change.
The gas that doesn’t leak would be
piped to export facilities like Cove Point in Maryland, where the damage
continues. The liquefaction process at this one Maryland facility would
be so energy intensive that the resulting pollution would make Cove
Point the fourth-largest source of carbon dioxide in the state, ahead of
four coal-fired power plants in Maryland, according to the EPA and
Dominion’s own numbers. And this is just for
processing the “clean” natural gas.
Then
the liquid gas is put on tankers (more CO2), then re-vaporized in India
and Japan (more CO2), then piped across Asia (more methane leakage) and
finally lit on fire in New Delhi and Tokyo (more CO2). When you add it
all up, using numbers from the EPA, the International Energy Agency and
the U.S. gas industry itself, the final climate impact of
fracked-and-liquified-and-exported Appalachian gas is basically as bad
as burning coal in Asia. And that’s using really conservative pollution
estimates. More realistic projections (i.e. assuming India’s pipeline
leakage rate is higher than the United States’) would make our gas worse
than coal. Worse! And Europe’s not much better. If we shipped our gas
to France, for example, where the leakage rate of gas pipelines is
confirmed at 3 percent, then our gas would—from day one—be worse than if
the French just burned coal.
Why in the world, then, would we
frack our mountains, lay disruptive pipelines across America, build
gigantic, spewing liquefaction plants like Cove Point and inflict
economic pain on U.S. consumers, farmers, and manufacturers—all for
something tantamount to coal? The plan is radical and absurd on its
face, benefits no one in the long run but the super-rich fossil-fuel
industry and does real harm to an already ailing global climate.
And
like the Keystone pipeline, real alternatives exist. Marylanders have
organized a statewide “Crossroads” campaign to say no to Cove Point and
say yes to a doubling of the state’s wind and solar power consumption
over the next 10 years. A state policy committing to more clean energy
will create many more jobs than fracking and liquefaction while
virtually de-carbonizing the Maryland electricity grid by the year 2025.
Tragically,
thanks to relentless advertising and pressure from the gas industry,
President Obama has come to view fracked gas as the “good” fossil fuel
and the export of it as a logical help to the struggling U.S. economy.
Inconveniently, it’s all untrue. Obama should publicly oppose Cove Point
and instead tour the country encouraging states to double and triple
their wind and solar mandates without the need for approval from a
Congress that has shown itself to be a tool of the oil and gas industry.
Then,
one day soon, the short drive from the White House to the Chesapeake
Bay will lead to a view of solar arrays in every community and offshore
wind farms in the distant Atlantic. Not the dystopian vision of
pipelines, power plants, compressor stations, liquid gas, tanker ships
and—inevitably—more warming for everyone and economic pain for all but
the richest gas tycoons.
Speak out against Dominion's Cove Point fracked gas export terminal
Submit a public comment:
If approved, Dominion's Cove Point fracked gas export terminal
would increase toxic fracking throughout Appalachia and trigger massive
quantities of planet-warming pollution. Submit a public comment opposing
the project.
Dominion has a plan to draw huge quantities of natural gas from toxic
fracking fields across Appalachia, feed it through a vast, snaking
network of explosion-prone pipelines and polluting compressors to a
massive new facility on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay that would
liquefy the gas, load it onto tankers and ship it to Asia.
1 2
It's called Cove Point and, if completed, this fracked gas export
terminal will give the fracking industry access to huge new foreign
markets, increasing domestic gas prices and encouraging even more toxic
drilling in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia, while
putting increased pressure on Maryland and New York to lift their
moratoriums on fracking.
Cove Point would trigger more planet-warming pollution than Maryland's entire fleet of seven coal plants put together.
Maryland Governor O'Malley and the state Public Service Commission must
sign off on key permits, and so far they haven't taken a public stance
on Cove Point. Governor O'Malley has unambiguous 2016 presidential
ambitions, and is positioning himself as a progressive and environmental
champion, so if we speak out loudly enough we may be able to pressure
him to act.
The Public Service Commission is currently accepting public comments on
the facility, giving us an important opportunity to demonstrate massive
opposition to Cove Point throughout the region.
Tell Governor O'Malley and the Maryland Public Service Commission: Block Dominion's Cove Point fracked gas export terminal. Please submit a public comment.
The federal government has already granted Cove Point a license to
export fracked gas overseas to countries like China and India. Worse,
the Obama administration gave Cove Point a free pass by opting for a
less stringent environmental review that will speed approval of the
project.
Every step in the process of extracting, transporting and burning
fracked gas endangers public health and safety and exacerbates climate
change. The entire process is so dirty and energy-intensive that
exporting gas is about as bad or worse than burning coal.
And with about 20 similar fracked gas export facilities pending
approval across the country, approving Cove Point would add momentum to
the fracking industry's push to turn the United States into a global hub
for gas exports.
The facilities required to supercool and liquefy fracked gas are so
energy-intensive that Dominion will need to build a brand new
130-megawatt power plant just to power them.
Cove Point's
liquefaction facility alone would produce more carbon pollution than all
but three of the state's coal-fired power plants. And to ship gas
from fracking operations across the region to Cove Point will require
building a massive network of explosion-prone pipelines and polluting
compressor stations.
It's clear that only the fracking industry will gain if the Cove Point
export terminal is approved. But we won't be able to stop Cove Point
unless thousands of us speak out. Will you submit a public comment
today?
Tell Governor O'Malley and the Maryland Public Service Commission: Block Dominion's Cove Point fracked gas export terminal. Please submit a public comment.
Thanks for fighting fracking.
Zack Malitz, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets
