Natural gas is complicated stuff.
It comes in varieties and grades, from full-on acid gas (some of the nastiest stuff ever belched out of the innards of the land) to pure sweet gas to the outcome of organic decay on farms and in forests, from icy ocean-bottom calthrates to artificial byproducts of fractionation, from easily tapped wells to fugitive emissions from coal mining.
You don’t want any of these things uncombusted in the air, expecting at many times the negative effects of these volatiles as from CO2 itself.
Life cycle studies are useful and all, but there’s a reason states are responsible for some things.
Each state faces different mixes of different issues, and on coal and natural gas, nuclear (and corn byproducts) and a federal EPA assessment may not apply equally to Colorado in all ways.
My own naive questions involve trade-offs.
If a state had something that emitted a lot of GHGs traditionally, even something like decomposing plant or animal wastes, and managed to find a low cost way to slow that decomposition — like the Dyson suggestion in huxley’s post (http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/23/inconvenient-truths-about-energy-policy/#comment-57358) above, then why not do that, instead of more costly CCS?
If the net outcome is the same and the cost lower, won’t the economy benefit?
And while CCS may leak, so long as the leak is managed so as to be non-catastrophic, it’s a success if it reduces CO2 emission to just 0.5% (http://judithcurry.com/2011/03/23/inconvenient-truths-about-energy-policy/#comment-57319), so why not use slightly leaky-CCS, if the cost is much lower?
It’s been a couple of years since any of my own family lived in Colorado, a very beautiful state by any measure, but I don’t recall it having so much farmland as some states, so I doubt the Dyson proposal is really a huge winner there.
As a place to locate charred biomass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar) and integrate it into terra preta for biosequestration, though, Colorado’s pretty well-positioned. Has this practice been figured into the CCS model?
I can see careful and prudent local management of natural gas being a good way to go for places blessed with the sweet and easily tapped variety, close to markets for it. Is this the situation for Colorado?
For most uses, in situ H2 extraction is not likely to be a very good solution, but I don’t know Colorado’s circumstances well enough to comment. Isnt’ much of Colorado is very concentrated into urban centers or resorts that might find trendy hydrogen or natural gas vehicles appealing?
Overall, because it’s a kick of mine, I generally appeal to those who can influence such decisions, take away the subsidies from all industries so much as possible, make the playing field level, and let the democracy of the markets sort things out.
They want roads for their internal combustion vehicles, let the auto industry and the oil industry and their customers pay for those roads directly.
Put a price on GHG emission at the state level with local state emission taxes and give that revenue _not_ to the general revenues of the state, but to each owner of the air of the state — the citizens of Colorado — per capita.