Thank Goodness for FPP
To The Editor:
Regarding the recent headline article, “Dubious Distinction,” it is widely known that coal power plants emit several times as much CO2 as natural gas power plants. However, I was darned glad to have the Fayette Power Project (FPP) run without interruption, during our February 2021 deep freeze, aka The Snowpocalypse.
I had the pleasure of meeting the manager of the FPP at Orsak’s Cafe, a little while back. I asked about the freeze, and he said they had essentially no downtime. (Editor’s Note: According to ERCOT, FPP had an outage of just five hours during the storm.) Hats off to him, and ALL of the FPP employees who kept it running! The FPP most certainly emitted lots more CO2 than all of the power plants which were SHUT DOWN during that time! Thank goodness that it did.
In 1980, as a mechanical engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin, our ASME group toured the FPP, during its initial operations. Now, with over 40 years of oil and gas operations and engineering experience, I am certainly a natural gas proponent. In fact, I regret that former Governor Rick Perry’s “Texas Triangle” plan to jump start natural gas vehicles and stations did not occur. Even earlier, Democrat Garry Mauro, four-term commissioner of the Texas General Land Office, made quite an effort to promote natural gas vehicles. We have large reserves of natural gas in our country, and natural gas vehicles make a lot more sense than electric vehicles, in many applications.
In the same breath, though, I will tell you that we need ALL of our energy sources. Conservation efforts should be accelerated, and solar and wind should be utilized where they make sense. Uranium and thorium are plentiful (more thorium reactor development is needed.) So, we need to accelerate development of new nuclear plants, and so called “neighborhood nukes” – small, local plants which can be designed to be inherently safe. (It might surprise many that there is a small nuclear reactor operating safely within a mile or so of The Domain shopping center, in North Austin! Fortunately, UT is better at operating a reactor than they are – recently - at operating a football team. TAMU has a similar reactor.)
Natural gas power plants? Of course. The wind doesn’t always blow, and it gets dark at night. Coal? Yes, we need coal, too - at least until we can transition to more nuclear power. Coal power plants are reliable. Coal doesn’t freeze!
All of these energy sources have “costs,” in addition to our electric bill. Solar takes land out of agricultural production, or scars the desert. Wind disturbs the vistas of West Texas and other locales, and also may (I believe) disrupt weather in that it pulls billions of watts of energy from the wind – which is what distributes moisture and temperature. Today’s natural gas well requires massive hydraulic fracturing, which in turn requires large amounts of energy and water. The nuclear energy waste disposal issue is yet to be solved, and coal plants have high emissions. So, there are tradeoffs.
By the way, trees breathe in CO2, and use the CO2 along with water and sunshine to make … wood. Well over half of a tree’s mass is from carbon, in turn, from CO2. Some rough calculations show that a tree might average about 50 pounds of carbon sequestration, per year (depends on age, species, location, etc.). Yes, I’m a gas well hugger, and a tree hugger! And I believe we need to keep FPP producing electricity – until another plant can take its place.
Martin B. Payne
Fayetteville