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Opponents of dams have long argued against putting barriers in the natural flow of a river. Dams, they point out, prevent endangered fish from migrating, alter ecosystems, and threaten the livelihoods of local communities.
Native Americans, fishing communities, and environmentalists have made these arguments in their quest to decommission four dams on Klamath River, which runs from southwest Oregon to the coast of California. But with California requiring a 25 percent reduction in the state's carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, clean energy has suddenly entered the Klamath dam debate.
Bill Fehrman, president of PacifiCorp, the hydropower company that owns these Klamath dams, says replacing the power from these dams "could result in adding combustion emissions to the environment."
Meanwhile, across the border in Canada, Hydro-Québec, the world's biggest producer of hydropower, claims that "compared with other generating options, hydropower emits very little greenhouse gas," thus "contributing significantly to the fight against climate change."
Maybe not. Recent reports on methane emissions suggest that dams are anything but carbon-neutral.
According to recently published estimates from Ivan Lima and some of his colleagues at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, the world's 52,000 largest dams release 104 million metric tons of methane annually. If Lima's calculations are correct, then dams would account for about four percent of the total warming impact of human activities -- and would constitute the largest single source of human-related methane emissions.
As Lima points out, if methane released from reservoir surfaces, spillways, and turbines were taken into account, India's greenhouse emissions could be as much as 40 percent higher than its current official estimates. But though India ranks among the world's top polluters, as a developing nation it is not required to cut emissions -- and has yet to measure methane from its 4,500 dams. And that's a problem, because while methane does not last as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, its heat-trapping potential is 25 times stronger.
A Swirling Debate
Lima is not alone in questioning whether dams' emissions may be as harmful in terms of climate change as those from fossil fuel plants. In 2004, Philip Fearnside of the National Institute for Research in the Amazon suggested that a massive surge of methane emissions could occur when water is discharged under pressure at hydroelectric dams in a process known in the industry as "degassing."
The problem with dams is that organic matter gets trapped in them when land is first flooded, and more gets flushed in, or grows there, later on. In tropical zones, such as Brazil, this matter quickly decays to form methane and carbon dioxide.
But just how big a problem this creates is controversial. A debate has been raging for years between researchers connected to Hydro-Québec and Brazil's Electrobras, the world's largest hydropower companies, and several small teams of independent hydrologists.
According to Fearnside, if degassing emissions were factored in at several large hydropower plants in Brazil, then these dams would be larger contributors to global warming than their fossil fuel counterparts. To be precise, Fearnside suggested that during the first decade of its life, each of these dams would emit four times as much carbon as a fossil fuel plant that makes the same amount of electricity.
Fearnside's claims have triggered a firestorm. Luis Pinguelli Rosa, formerly of Electrobras but now based at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, claimed Fearnside had made "scientific errors," including a failure to grasp how degassing works, and so had exaggerated the emission levels.
Rosa pointed out that Fearnside had extrapolated his calculations from data taken from the Petit Saut dam in French Guyana in the years immediately following the creation of the reservoir, when organic matter, and thus methane emissions, would likely be their highest. Patrick McCully, executive director of the Berkeley, CA-based International Rivers Network, says that one of the areas of strongest disagreement among reservoir emissions researchers is how to quantify net emissions.
In a recent paper, "Fizzy Science," McCully shows that key factors influencing reservoir greenhouse gas emissions include fluctuations in water level, growth and decay of aquatic plants, decomposition of flooded biomass and soils, the amount of methane bubbling from the surface, and the amount of carbon dioxide diffusing in.
But as McCully points out, "The most comprehensive analyses of net emissions have been done by Fearnside -- while Pinguelli Rosa has only presented data on gross emissions."
With controversy continuing to swirl about methane emissions from dams, including those in boreal regions such as Québec, where the soil is famously peaty, as well as those in China and India, where lots more dams are planned, Stanford University researchers Danny Cullenward and David Victor are calling for more study of the issue. "Whether you are a conservative Brazilian like Rosa, or a more aggressive Brazilian like Fearnside, we are looking at a significant amount of methane that currently is not being factored into global models for atmospheric methane and global [climate] change," says Cullenward, who believes that more data are sorely needed.
See more stories tagged with: global warming, climate change, hydropower, damns
Sarah Phelan covers the environment and City Hall for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. A native of London, England, she loves bridges and fog.
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