Abundant reserves of natural gas won't reduce the amount of harmful greenhouse gas emissions by the United States but will increase the consumption of electricity and halt expansion of clean energy sources such as solar and wind.

The results of the study that reached this conclusion are based on the modeling effect of low and high gas supplies in the power sector of the U.S. The study was made by researchers from Stanford University, University of California Irvine and nonprofit organization Near Zero.

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The nation's largest source of power, coal-powered plants, produce massive volumes of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas pollutant in the Earth's atmosphere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's recent proposition relies heavily on weaning the U.S. from coal and turning to natural gas to reduce carbon emissions by 2030.

"In our results, abundant natural gas does not significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions. This is true even if no methane leaks during production and shipping," said lead author Christine Shearer, a postdoctoral scholar in Earth system science at UC Irvine.

Prior studies have put more emphasis on the risks of natural gas, which is mainly made up of methane, leaking into the air from pipelines and wells.

The new data from the research suggest that even if none of the gas escapes, the benefits to the climate would likely be small as the consumption of the gas would delay the construction of power plants that use low-carbon energies such as solar arrays.

After analyzing a number of climate policies, the team of scientists figured out that high gas usage could actually increase cumulative emissions from 2013 through 2055 by five percent.

"Natural gas has been presented as a bridge to a low-carbon future, but what we see is that it's actually a major detour. We find that the only effective paths to reducing greenhouse gases are a regulatory cap or a carbon tax," Shearer said.

Tagsglobal warming, coal, Coal Power Plants, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power, Wind energy, wind power