Study Questions Natural Gas’s Environmental Benefits .
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303815404577334013970875438.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Shockingly! it seems that converting from coal to natural gas has some unintended consequences. This, of course, is what happens when profit and politics (which are just two sides of the same coin) are put ahead of science and society: damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
This reminds me of the earlier research I read that, after modelling the same sorts of losses during fuelling, accidents, etc., switching to hydrogen (which is a total boondoggle anyway, the only economical way to produce it currently is from natural gas, so it has no net reduction in carbon impact, plus because it is so much more difficult to compress (let alone liquefy), it uses even more energy than the original natural gas!) could lead to an ice age. The theory went something like this: because hydrogen is lighter than air any escaped gas will quickly rise to the stratosphere, there it will interact with ozone and form water which will lead to very stable ice crystals that will reflect solar radiation, thus leading to a tipping point that would accelerate the arrival of the next ice age (note that ice ages are the true ‘normal’ for our planet at present and our current interglacial period is due to end in the thousand years or so).
Of course, that didn’t dampen the enthusiasm for hydrogen, practical economic realities did that (or so I hope).
If we used hydrogen properly we could produce prodigious amounts of energy while filling untold numbers of balloons. That’s all I have to say on the subject.