IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aen/journl/ej40-2-huang.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is Abundant Natural Gas a Bridge to a Low-carbon Future or a Dead-end?

Author

Listed:
  • Kenneth Gillingham and Pei Huang

Abstract

A fierce debate rages on whether abundant natural gas is a bridge to a low-carbon future or a hindrance to long-term decarbonization. This paper uses a detailed energy-economic market equilibrium model to study the effects of an upper bound case of natural gas availability. We show that a market-driven abundant natural gas supply can provide substantial reductions in air pollution but does not considerably reduce CO2 emissions in the longer-term, especially relative to a moderate carbon price. However, we quantify large welfare benefits from abundant natural gas. The spatial disaggregation of our results allows for a clear picture of the distributional impacts of abundant natural gas under different carbon price scenarios, illustrating welfare gains by most regions regardless of whether there is carbon pricing, but substantial heterogeneity in the welfare gains.

Suggested Citation

  • Kenneth Gillingham and Pei Huang, 2019. "Is Abundant Natural Gas a Bridge to a Low-carbon Future or a Dead-end?," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 2).
  • Handle: RePEc:aen:journl:ej40-2-huang
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=3325
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gillingham, Kenneth & Huang, Pei, 2021. "Racial disparities in the health effects from air pollution: Evidence from ports," ZEW Discussion Papers 21-058, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    2. Woollacott, Jared, 2020. "A bridge too far? The role of natural gas electricity generation in US climate policy," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
    3. Li, Raymond & Woo, Chi-Keung & Tishler, Asher & Zarnikau, Jay, 2022. "How price responsive is industrial demand for natural gas in the United States?," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    4. Brown, Marilyn A. & Li, Yufei & Soni, Anmol, 2020. "Are all jobs created equal? Regional employment impacts of a U.S. carbon tax," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 262(C).
    5. Guo, Jiaqi & Long, Shaobo & Luo, Weijie, 2022. "Nonlinear effects of climate policy uncertainty and financial speculation on the global prices of oil and gas," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 83(C).
    6. Wiktor Hebda, 2021. "The North-South Gas Corridor in the Context of Poland’s Gas Transmission System—A Perfect Opportunity to Diversify Gas Resources," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(21), pages 1-21, November.
    7. Kenneth Gillingham & Marten Ovaere & Stephanie Weber, 2021. "Carbon Policy and the Emissions Implications of Electric Vehicles," CESifo Working Paper Series 8974, CESifo.
    8. Paul Wolfram & Stephanie Weber & Kenneth Gillingham & Edgar G. Hertwich, 2021. "Pricing indirect emissions accelerates low—carbon transition of US light vehicle sector," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 12(1), pages 1-8, December.
    9. Grzegorz Zych & Jakub Bronicki & Marzena Czarnecka & Grzegorz Kinelski & Jacek Kamiński, 2023. "The Cost of Using Gas as a Transition Fuel in the Transition to Low-Carbon Energy: The Case Study of Poland and Selected European Countries," Energies, MDPI, vol. 16(2), pages 1-13, January.
    10. Li, Raymond & Woo, Chi-Keung & Tishler, Asher & Zarnikau, Jay, 2022. "Price responsiveness of commercial demand for natural gas in the US," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 256(C).
    11. Filipe M. Quintino & Edgar C. Fernandes, 2021. "Numerical Investigation of the Impact of H 2 Enrichment on Lean Biogas/Air Flames: An Analytical Modelling Approach," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(2), pages 1-17, January.
    12. John E. T. Bistline & David T. Young, 2022. "The role of natural gas in reaching net-zero emissions in the electric sector," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-11, December.
    13. Kaixin Huang & Matthew J. Eckelman, 2022. "Appending material flows to the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) for projecting the physical economy of the United States," Journal of Industrial Ecology, Yale University, vol. 26(1), pages 294-308, February.
    14. Prest, Brian C., 2020. "Supply-Side Reforms to Oil and Gas Production on Federal Lands: Modeling the Implications for Climate Emissions, Revenues, and Production Shifts," RFF Working Paper Series 20-16, Resources for the Future.
    15. Raymond Li & Chi-Keung Woo & Asher Tishler & Jay Zarnikau, 2022. "Price Responsiveness of Residential Demand for Natural Gas in the United States," Energies, MDPI, vol. 15(12), pages 1-22, June.
    16. Cisneros-Pineda, Alfredo & Aadland, David & Tschirhart, John, 2020. "Impacts of cattle, hunting, and natural gas development in a rangeland ecosystem," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 431(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F0 - International Economics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aen:journl:ej40-2-huang. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: David Williams (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iaeeeea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.