Natural Gas and Net Zero: Mutually Exclusive Pathways for the Southeast
Adam D. Orford
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Climate policy increasingly focuses on pathways to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, providing a clear standard against which to evaluate energy system planning. Examining the current and projected fuel mix of the electric power sector in the southeastern United States shows that an ongoing transition to natural gas for electricity risks locking in decades of greenhouse gas emissions at levels fundamentally incompatible with net zero goals. Furthermore, southeastern regulatory proceedings are not well designed to engage with this reality, although useful regulatory models are emerging. Natural gas will remain an important part of the southeastern fuel mix for years to come, but plans need to be laid today for its timely phaseout. Going forward, southeastern regulators should incorporate net zero targets into their resource planning processes and require their regulated utilities to begin developing planning scenarios that achieve net zero.
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I. Introduction & Background...............................................1035
A. Net Zero Pathways—More Net vs. More Zero................1038
B. Electric Power Sector GHG Mitigation..........................1043
II. The Southeast Natural Gas Transition..........................1047
A. The Southeast's Significant GHG Reductions Since 2005 ..........................................................................................1047
B. Switching to Gas for Electricity Drives the Region's Progress...........................................................................1052
C. Switching Reductions Will Plateau as Remaining Coal Disappears.......................................................................1058
D. Southeast Electric Sector Plans Include Major Natural Gas Expansions.......................................................................1063
1. Fuel Mix Planning Regulatory Basics in the Southeast ....................................................................................1063
2. Fuel Mix Planning Authorities and Processes in the Southeast .................................................................... 1067
3. Current Fuel Mix Plans and Projections in the Southeast ....................................................................................1076
III. Conclusion: Toward Net Zero Planning for the Southeastern Electric Power Sector............................1080
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The nations of the world, the global scientific community, and, as of recently, the United States executive branch all agree: to limit the impacts of global climate change, humanity must achieve net zero worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050.1 But net zero is only an initial step along a longer path which requires a further half-century of net negative emissions after 2050 to stabilize earth's climate by 2100.2 Compounding these challenges is the relative ease or
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difficulty of achieving both net zero emissions and climate stabilization through net negative emissions, which will be impacted by decisions we make today about the kind of energy infrastructure we build and use.3 In short, the lives of our children and grandchildren will be deeply affected by the technological inheritance we leave to them.
This Article examines one small but important piece of the larger story: the technologies used to generate electricity in the southeastern United States, confined here to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee (the Southeast or southeastern U.S.).4 There are many reasons for focusing on the Southeast's electric power sector, but fundamentally, this topic deserves examination because of the negative impact that current decisions about the region's long-term energy future—and, thus, its long-term climate future—will have on the country's ability to achieve
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net zero and effectively implement climate stabilization strategies.5 Many lessons can be drawn from a regional analysis that are not clear at either the state or national level. But most importantly, the legal, policy, political, and technical processes underlying the analysis deserve to be clearly understood by those with the greatest stake in their impacts: the next generation of leaders in the Southeast.
As explained in detail below, stakeholders in the Southeast—particularly state governments and regulated utilities but also the federal Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—are in the process of replacing most of the Southeast's coal-fired power plants with natural gas-fired facilities instead of lower-carbon alternatives, a fundamentally problematic solution.6 Unfortunately, although large-scale investments in natural gas infrastructure provide short-term benefits in terms of electric reliability, cost savings, and GHG reductions, they are inconsistent with the net zero and climate stabilization goals of tomorrow. In fact, such investments lock the Southeast into a future of more GHG emissions than it can remove, and for far longer than is sustainable. Quite simply, every gas plant built today will need to be shut down tomorrow. Perhaps the region could justify its focus on natural gas if it lacked viable alternatives, but, in fact, there are many alternatives to which the Southeast's energy policy experts should turn. The majority of the region's future capacity
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additions should be met with solar energy, offshore wind, nuclear power, and other low-carbon energy resources integrated with energy storage. But these technologies will succeed only if Southeast decisionmakers insist on the transition, support its development, and temper the growing reliance on natural gas while they do so. This requires planning, starting now.
To explore these issues, this Article is broken into three Parts. The remainder of Part I introduces some basic concepts key to the discussion: what net zero means, how it can be achieved, and what concepts and terminology are necessary to compare different energy pathways and strategies against net zero goals. Part II explores the ongoing natural gas transition in the southeastern U.S. and its implications for climate change and then turns to the planning processes that will govern how much natural gas is used in the future for powering the Southeast's electric sector. Finally, Part III provides recommendations for improving these planning processes by incorporating net zero pathways into fuel mix planning.
A. Net Zero Pathways—More Net vs. More Zero
At the broadest scale and in simplest terms, achieving "net zero" emissions means striking an even balance between anthropogenic (human-caused) additions of GHGs into earth's atmosphere (aGHGin) and anthropogenic removals of GHGs from earth's atmosphere (aGHGout), such that the total sums to zero.7 That is:
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At the scale of nations, businesses, and individuals, these definitions become more complex. There is always a pressure to continue emitting and counting removals that, in reality, are more fairly attributable to somebody else, would have happened anyway, or are not, in fact, permanent removals.8 But the idea remains the same: to balance additions and subtractions of GHGs evenly such that the sum climate impact of a nation, a business, or an individual is zero.9 Humanity's net zero requires accurate accounting such that the collective "net zeroes" also sum to zero.10
Today, humanity's annual GHG emissions far exceed humanity's removals.11 The result is increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHGs and associated global warming and climate change.12 By definition, there are only two pathways from this point toward net zero: first, to decrease the rate of GHG additions into the atmosphere
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(-aGHGin); and second, to increase the rate of GHG removals from the atmosphere (+aGHGout).13 But because humanity currently lacks the technology necessary to remove GHGs from the atmosphere at anything close to the scale necessary to reach net zero, there is, in reality, only one currently feasible pathway toward achieving net zero: to decrease GHG emissions substantially. This approach is commonly called "mitigation."14
However, the net zero mitigation pathway represents an enormous challenge—really, a set of interconnected challenges. To start, mitigation requires a near total transformation of humanity's energy systems, including those systems related to generating electricity, fueling transportation, and providing heat.15 The closer to zero emissions each of these systems can become, the less work will need to be done by the yet unproven "net" part of "net zero"—that is, the less reliance must be placed on new technologies being invented to balance out emissions on a large scale.16 That is not to say that such technologies should not be investigated and developed—in fact, achieving negative emissions after 2050 will require their perfection and widespread deployment—rather, that mitigation now reduces the negative emissions burden later.17 This is the driving force behind initiatives as seemingly disparate as electric vehicle development and efforts to reduce natural gas in home heating.18 The primary benefit of
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the mitigation pathway is that it is built on technologies that, after decades of research and development, are now cost-competitive and equivalently functional as their fossil fuel counterparts.19 One might think of the mitigation pathway via widespread low-carbon electrification as a "more zero, less net" approach to net zero.20 There may be some atmospheric carbon removal, certainly, but it is not the majority of the equation.
