A recent DOE report put the numbers to what many folks in the oil and gas industry have been saying - zero carbon generation sources may be the ideal method for CO2 reductions, but the fastest way to reduce CO2 emissions in the short-run is to replace coal-fired generation with natural-gas fired generation. We’ve written a lot recently about how the efforts to decarbonize the U.S. economy have played out across several states, most recently in You Can’t Hurry Love and our newest Drill Down Report, and overall CO2 emissions are down 18% in the long term (2005 to 2022, the last year for which full data is available.)
But overall reductions only tell part of the story, and the EIA has taken the analysis a step further, looking at avoided emissions - i.e. comparing current generation sources' emissions to the counterfactual of a world where the energy mix had stayed constant. And that's were the story gets interesting. In that same period, the shift to natural gas from coal (blue bars below) has avoided more CO2 emissions than all of the increased renewable generation (green bars).
