The burning issue

To reduce global greenhouse gas emissions (GGE), we need more people to have greater access to natural gas and oil.

For readers in Canada (especially Western Canada), this article is likely not to break new ground, but for my UK contacts, this may be both new and seem counter-intuitive. Bear with me, there is good logic and data to support the argument.

First off, this is not a polemic against renewable energy. Far from it, increasing the production of energy and distribution of energy from these sources is a sin qua non of reducing GGE. However, both the production and distribution of this energy requires very sophisticated technology, with attendant requirements for maintenance by trained people and capital outlay.

Consider this table (forgive me, but I can't remember from where I sourced it), and in particular the 'Residential' bottom half.

Each row tells you by energy source, how much is needed to produce 1M megajoules of energy, the number of suspended particulates, the amount of sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and carbon monoxide. Now compare wood against natural gas; to get the same amount of energy you would need 144 metric tons of wood versus 30,000 cubic metres of natural gas. Then compare the values of suspended particulates, hydrocarbons, and carbon monoxide. Wood is pretty nasty stuff. Also worth noting, this data is taken from heating stoves under US conditions; so the energy efficiency would be higher than, say a clay stove or a fire pit without a chimney.

In September 2010 the International Energy Agency, the UN Development Programme, and the UN Industrial Development Organization released the "Energy Poverty: How to make modern access universal?" report. In that report they stated that there were 1.4 billion people around the world that lack access to electricity, while 2.7 billion relied upon biomass for energy. It's worth noting what biomass means in this context; wood, agricultural crops and waste products after harvesting, animal manure, and human sewage.

Yep. You read that right. People are using manure and sewage as their primary household energy source.

To give you some idea of global energy poverty, the Energy Poverty report produced the above chart (pp 12) which showed the distribution across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Far East. The numbers are staggering.

In Africa it's estimated (https://www.biogeosciences.net/6/849/2009/bg-6-849-2009.pdf) that between 6 to 9 million tonnes of biomass are burned each day. Then look again at the table above and compare the amount of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide produced by burning wood against distillate oil or gas. Significantly higher for the former. Moving from wood or coal to distillate oil or natural gas would be a vast improvement on GGE, meeting the Paris Climate Accord targets, and reducing anthropomorphic climate change. Then there's the other positives on health, education, and the wider economy.

In Africa the majority of biomass is collected by women; who spend many hours foraging, carrying, and tending fires. So they are more exposed to the harmful effects of burning biomass, spend their days in drudgery and do so from a young age. Their health suffers massively from the effects of gathering and using biomass. The UN report above showed a clear link causal link between sub-Saharan woman, biomass, poor health, and shorted life expectancy. The report also showed a casual link between children's education and energy poverty; where outcomes are far lower as children also send significant amount of their time collected, as they cannot have proper lighting, nor use computers. You can extend this to healthcare, where adequate electricity is absolutely needed to build, maintain, and operate hospitals and clinics.

While many conservationists would argue the world needs to be weaned off its dependency on oil and gas, this would condemn billions to lives that are nasty, brutish, and short. Too often this perspective seems to be formed by those in the most developed nations, who have access to alternative renewable energy sources, and ignores the plight of those for whom no oil and gas would be to condemn them to poverty.

Getting distilled oil and natural gas to these markets, constructing facilities to produce power and a network to distribute the power, would dramatically reduce GGE globally, help raise poverty levels, and provide for better healthcare.