Yes, Foghorn. Maybe if you analyse the water you would find, that if any contamination, it comes from the farmers. In fact it is so here in denmark. An other thing, even the Hydro Quebec contaminates and this is mercury from the dams, so you can't eat the fish for 20-30 years or maybe 50, I dont know, but I know this, cause in DK we have the biggest cement producing company in the world (if you exclude China:) The water levels/dam security is a risk. Like Rocco says: There is a risk with every big industry.
# Natural gas electric power generation emits roughly half as much carbon dioxide (CO2) as traditional coal-fueled electricity generation per kilowatt-hour.
# Compared to gasoline- and diesel-fueled vehicles, vehicles fueled by natural gas can have greenhouse gas emissions that are roughly 15-30 percent lower.
# Electricity Sector
* Fuel switching: Fuel switching refers to displacing traditional coal-fueled electricity generation with less carbon-intensive natural gas generation. The most economic option for fuel switching is to operate fewer existing coal power plants, or to operate those plants at lower levels of output, and to ramp up generation from existing natural gas power plants or to build new natural gas plants to replace coal generation. In 2007, U.S. natural gas combined cycle plants had an average capacity factor of 42 percent compared to nearly 74 percent for coal power plants, indicating potential for fuel switching with existing power plants.
* Electricity generation efficiency improvements: Modern natural gas combined cycle power plants have higher efficiencies than gas-fired steam cycle plants; replacing the latter with the former can reduce the GHG emissions from gas-fired electricity generation.
* Carbon capture and storage (CCS): Similar to its application with coal-fueled power plants, CCS can be coupled with natural gas power plants to capture and permanently sequester large percentages of the CO2 emissions from electricity generation (see Climate TechBook: Carbon Capture and Storage).
# Industrial Sector
* Combined heat and power (CHP, or cogeneration): In natural gas-fueled industrial CHP applications, natural gas is used to generate both useful heat and electricity. CHP has much higher efficiency than separate generation of heat and electricity from the same fuel supply, so replacing separate power and heat generation with CHP requires less fuel use and thus lowers emissions.
* Other efficiency measures: Other efficiency measures, such as preventive maintenance and advanced process controls for steam systems, can lead to more efficient use of energy and thus lower emissions.
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Oil and Gas Industry Operations
* CCS: Natural gas processing facilities that remove CO2 from raw natural gas already generate high-purity streams of CO2. Such facilities offer some of the least expensive opportunities for deploying CCS, since capturing a high-purity stream of CO2 is less expensive than capturing CO2 from power plant exhaust streams. In some cases, CO2 from natural gas processing is already being captured and injected into geological formations for enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR).
----And they tend to forget about the mercury-emission from coal. It's alot from the US.---
I took this from a climat-change site:
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http://www.pewclimate.org/technology/factsheet/natural-gas
http://www.pewclimate.org/what_s_being_done/in_the_business_community/energy_supply.cfm
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I was thinking about if there are some people who protests against the shale-protesters?
Maybe some people from Alberta and B.C. Some shale-gas supporters?
