Climate

The White House on Friday released its much-anticipated methane strategy, outlining steps and a timetable for reducing methane emissions from the oil and natural gas sector and other sources. The timetable runs through the remainder of the Obama administration.

President Obama, in the State of the Union (SOTU) speech Tuesday night before Congress, praised natural gas and oil development in the United States, as well as its importance in fueling energy independence and creating jobs, but said $4 billion in fossil fuel subsidies could be better deployed elsewhere.

In the annual State of the Union address to the nation Tuesday, President Obama praised domestic natural gas production and said if it’s “extracted safely,” gas would be “the ‘bridge fuel’ that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change.”

Winter 2013-2014 is likely to bring above-average temperatures to most of the South and portions of New England, with below-average temperatures expected across the Northern Plains, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in its annual Winter Outlook, which was released Thursday.

The first of 16 methane emissions studies focusing on unconventional natural gas production and organized by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has been published and says that industry efforts to control emissions at well sites are having a significant impact.

With proper regulation, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from shale gas operations should represent only a small part of the total carbon footprint of shale gas and would fall within the nontraded sector of the United Kingdom’s carbon budgets, according to the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC).

As part of President Obama’s climate action plan (see NGI, July 1), the Department of Energy (DOE) last Tuesday announced a draft $8 billion loan guarantee solicitation to develop advanced technologies aimed at avoiding and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuels.

As part of President Obama’s climate action plan, the Department of Energy Tuesday announced a draft $8 billion loan guarantee solicitation for the development of advanced technologies aimed at avoiding and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuels.

The news preceded President Obama’s call last week for more action to address climate change, but executives at NRG Energy Inc. and Tenaska Inc. may have been reading between the lines after announcing over the past two weeks that because of abundant U.S. natural gas, coal is going to play a much smaller role in their generating schemes going forward.