Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Electricity, Emissions, and Pricing Carbon
u
.
The Electricity Sector
Worldwide, the two largest sources of greenhouse gas
emissions are electricity generation and transportation.
Electricity generation is the topic of this chapter while
transportation is part of the next.
Coal, even today, makes up by far the largest fraction of
fuel used to produce electricity. The United States and
China are the Saudi Arabias of coal, and coal with all its
emissions problems is the fastest expanding fuel for elec-
tricity production worldwide, though not in the United
States because of its shale-gas revolution. Outside the
United States, coal is the lowest in cost because of its
abundance and ease of extraction, and because power
plants can be built relatively quickly. Unless fracking
spreads through the rest of the world leading to low-cost
shale gas, without some sort of emissions charge or other
limitation mechanism coal will remain the lowest-cost
fuel for a long time to come. Finding a substitute for coal
or a way to reduce emissions from coal is critical to the
world effort to reduce greenhouse gas production.
In the United States, coal and natural gas are used to
generate
% of electricity, and, according to the EIA, in
%ofUS
greenhouse gas emissions. The percentages were not very
different from those of other industrialized countries,
were responsible for producing nearly
