Texas
Back to mapTo get to zero by 2050, Texas must cut emissions by 3.7% a year
Emissions in Texas
Million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) [?] equivalent (MTCO2e [?]) emissions
Note: Grey area indicates missing data due to processing delays.
Source: WRI, Mar 2021
This is how we're going to do it
- Boilers and furnaces with heat pumps [?]
- Gas stoves with electric induction stoves [?]
- No-till farming to keep CO2 in the soil
- Capturing methane leaks from landfills
- Capturing CO2 to make emissions-free concrete
- Burning green hydrogen to make emissions-free steel
- Plugging methane leaks from gas pipelines
Decarbonize Our Buildings
3% of Texas's climate pollution comes from buildings.
We burn fossil fuels to heat our air, water, and food.
To cut this pollution...
Let's electrify our heat!
We'll replace...
...in all of Texas's 10.7 million buildings.
In fact, 57% of appliances in buildings in Texas are already fossil fuel free!
That means we only need to electrify the remaining 4.6 million dirty buildings in Texas. That's around 171,000 per year.
Source: Microsoft, Mar 2021; NREL, Dec 2021Electrifying all buildings cuts 3% of the pollution.
Decarbonize Our Transport
27% of Texas's pollution comes from cars, trucks, trains, and planes.
But mostly from cars.
To cut this pollution,
your next car must be electric.
Or consider going car-free with public transit, bikes/e-bikes, car share, or other alternatives!
There are 8.1 million vehicles in Texas and 52,000 are already electric (0.6% of the total).
We need to electrify (or replace) the remaining 8.0 million gas-powered vehicles. That's around 297,000 a year.
Source: DOT, Feb 2021Electrifying all transportation cuts 27% of the pollution.
Decarbonize Our Power
22% of Texas's pollution comes from burning coal, gas, and oil to make power.
To cut this pollution...
Put solar panels on your roof!
Then, we'll replace all fossil fuel power plants with solar and wind farms.
...and find good jobs for those workers.
Current Fossil Fuel Power Plants in Texas
16 coal plants
W A Parish
Fort Bend County
4,008 MW
Oak Grove
Robertson County
3,397 MW
Martin Lake
Rusk County
3,180 MW
Limestone
Limestone County
1,850 MW
159 gas plants
Cedar Bayou
Chambers County
2,295 MW
Morgan Creek
Mitchell County
2,164 MW
Sabine
Orange County
2,051 MW
Forney Power Plant
Kaufman County
1,894 MW
6 oil plants
Valero Refinery Corpus Christi West
Nueces County
77 MW
State Farm Insur Support Center Central
Dallas County
11 MW
Seadrift Coke LP
Calhoun County
8 MW
Works 4
Wichita County
6 MW
PRSI FCC Generator
Harris County
5 MW
Tenet Hospital
El Paso County
4 MW
But wait!
It's not enough to replace our power plants with wind and solar farms.
To power our electric cars and buildings, we need two times the electricity we have today.
In all, we'll need to build 29,000 megawatt (MW) [?] of wind power and 35,000 MW of solar power.
Since the average wind turbine provides 2.75 MW of peak capacity, Texas would need to install about 10,000 turbines.
Since Texas already has 11,000 MW of wind and 2,000 MW of solar, that's 17,000 MW of wind power we need to build and 33,000 MW of solar power. That's around 637 MW of wind power and 1,000 MW of solar power a year.
Source: EIA, Apr 2022Decarbonizing all dirty power cuts 22% of the pollution.
And gives us zero-emissions power we need to eliminate pollution from buildings and cars!
Other Emissions
The last 47% of Texas's climate pollution comes from other sources...
This includes farming, landfills, industry, and leaks from gas pipelines.
There's no one solution to solve these problems, but there are lots of great ideas:
That doesn't mean there's no solution, it just means that clean electrification [?] doesn't help with these problems, and you could fill a whole book with covering all of them. We need to encourage our politicians to invest in researching new solutions and implementing existing solutions to these problems!
Ready to do your part?
Learn how to electrify your own machines and pass local policy to electrify the rest
Take Action