The carbon footprint of shale gas combusted in Europe was estimated from nine European shale gas plays as potential production regions. Greenhouse gas emission sources during shale gas production, such as fugitives from hydraulic fracturing or combustion emissions from horizontal drilling, were added to emissions occurring for conventional gas extraction. Greenhouse gas emissions are expressed as g CO2-equivalents per MJ delivered, and calculated for a kWh of electricity generated. Estimated total GHG emissions from the use of European shale gas for electricity production range from 0.42 to 0.75 g CO2-eq/kWh when the combustion in the power plant is included. This is within the range reported in the literature. The cumulative carbon footprints for a number of fossil electricity generation scenarios for Europe were also calculated. The results indicate an advantage of gas over other fossil sources in a wide range of scenarios. These results are only reversed with very high (10%) upstream losses for shale gas. With the current knowledge there is still a substantial climate benefit of replacing coal with (shale) gas even in the EU reference scenario.

The work was undertaken by TNO, the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research with support from (S&T)2 Consultants Inc. It can be found online at Taylor & Francis Online.

Another bug fix model has been released.

Registered users can grab GHGenius 5.0d on the Downloads page.

Another new bug fix model has been released. Thanks to Matt Beck for pointing out one of the errors that was fixed.

Registered users can grab GHGenius 5.0c on the Downloads page.

Another small bug fix release has been made. The difference between GHGenius 5.0a and GHGenius 5.0b is just the press of a single default button.

While there was no news post at the time, two more reports were added in early September. Technology Data for Renewable Fuels and Addition of Materials Data to the Danish Transportation LCA Model are both from work with the Danish Energy Agency. The associated links include reports and an LCA model that S&T Squared helped work on.

A new model version, GHGenius 5.0a, is available to fix two bugs that have cropped up.

About versioning. Going forward we intend to keep our version numbers more meaningful than in the past. Lettered versions of the model such as 5.0a are intended to be strictly bug fix releases that do not add any new data or pathways. They will be used for bug fixes with macros, labels, or small fixes to pathways.

If any bug fixes are far reaching or impacting default pathway settings they will be pushed to a decimal incremented release such as 5.0.1 or 5.0.2. Our plan is to have lettered versions almost entirely cross compatible, and decimal versions with small updates. Larger, probably annual, updates will be labelled as 5.1.0 or 5.2.0.

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