Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Europe about
. Gas is moved by
pipeline as a gas and by ship as lique
$
, and in Asia about
$
ed natural gas
(LNG). The only way to get low-cost US gas to the rest
of the world is to chill it to a liquid, load it on special ships
with refrigeration equipment to keep it cold, and turn it
back into gas at an overseas port and ship it on by pipe-
line.
I
am told this process
costs
about
$
per
million BTU.
Other regions do have the kind of shale that holds the
gas, but do not have the drill rigs and technical knowhow
to extract the gas, nor do they have the local pipelines to
get it to market. Until they do, low-cost gas will remain a
US privilege.
What is needed in regions without low-cost shale gas,
to accelerate the move to more ef
cient generation, is
what the economists recommend: a price on emissions
as discussed in Chapter
, which makes disposal of waste
part of the cost of doing business. As long as the world
s
atmosphere is regarded as a free dump for greenhouse
gases, utilities will continue to build the plants that gen-
erate the lowest-cost electricity. If they had to pay for the
emissions, the situation would change in a
'
ash.
.
Pricing Carbon Emissions: Carbon
Capture and Storage
If there were a way to arrive at an appropriate price for
emissions, a price could be set and the incentives to
produce power plants with low or no emissions would
soar, making the move from a coal-dominated to a
lower-emission electricity sector occur much faster.
There are many ways to set such a price. One is to set it
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