Editorial: Burning Question

The Financial Express , Thursday, February 20, 2014
Correspondent :
In 2001, Delhi, in line with many metropolitan cities in developed countries, announced that it would convert all of its buses from diesel to CNG. The city administration received praise from around the world for what was considered a significant step towards battling climate change and mitigating the harm to the environment vehicular traffic was posing. At the time, the shift from diesel to CNG definitely seemed like a good one. Most studies agree that burning natural gas as fuel produces 30% less carbon dioxide—a notorious greenhouse gas—than burning diesel does. Given the amount of diesel that was burnt daily by public transportation buses, this reduction in carbon dioxide worked out to a significant amount on a global level. However, a new study published in the journal Science shows that the damage done to the environment by drilling for natural gas could very well be negating all the benefits of using it as fuel.

Basically, the drilling and production of natural gas results in leaks of methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The paper’s authors—scientists from Stanford, MIT and the US department of energy—found that these methane leaks negate the climate change benefits of using natural gas as a transportation fuel. So, all these years of plying CNG buses may have made the cities cleaner, but the overall effect on the planet has been just the same; we just shifted the pollution somewhere else.

 
SOURCE : http://www.financialexpress.com/news/editorial-burning-question/1227535
 


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