2Celsius
"A podcast 2 degrees Celsius hotter" (2C) is a Brussels-based enterprise that brings about hot dialogues about everything climate. The episodes are made and edited by Francesca Fazey and Raul Cazan while the whole product is supported by Association 2Celsius (2Celsius.org).
2Celsius
METHANE. Is Natural Gas Clean or Are We Being Gaslit?
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Natural gas is the ideal bridge fuel to support the global energy transition, or so the story goes. But what about methane emissions? Environmentalists want us to throw it on the pile of the other fossil fuels and doom it to the past. The energy community says: Not so fast. Where are we on our energy transition journey when it comes to natural gas and if we’re going to invest in it going forward, what are the implications of the methane problem for our chosen direction to a renewable future?
Host:
The show is presented by: Francesca Fazey
Affiliation:
The show is brought to you by: 2Celsius Association
Resource List:
1. Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA)
2. International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO)
3. International Energy Agency (IEA)
5. United Nations Global Methane Pledge
6. Rocky Mountain Institute Climate Program
7. Oxford Institute for Energy Studies
9. Greenhouse Gas Laboratory, University of Royal Holloway
10. Romanian Methane Emissions from Oil and Gas
Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Paris
11. University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, USA
12. NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, Washington DC, USA
Contributors:
Raul Cazan, Founder of The 2Celsius Association, Bucharest, Romania
Kim O’Dowd, Campaigner at The Environmental Investigation Agency, London, UK
Dr Roland Kupers, Global Advisor to the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Methane Emissions Observatory, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Deborah Gordon, Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University; Senior Principal at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) Climate Program, Washington DC, USA
Dr Philippe Ciais, Associate Director, Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL), Paris, France
Théophile Humann-Guilleminot, Campaign Manager, Clean Air Task Force ,Athens Greece
Dr Dave Lowry, Reader: Stable Isotope and Greenhouse Gas, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Royal Holloway, London UK
Dr Rebecca Fisher: Reader: Atmospheric Methane, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Royal Holloway, London UK
Dr Thoman Roeckmann, Professor of Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Professor Jonathan Stern, Distinguished Research Fellow, The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, Oxford, UK
Melanie Kenderdine, Principal, Energy Futures Initiative, Washington DC, USA
There are undisputed benefits of gas when it comes to, as I said, local air pollutants.
SPEAKER_11If you haven't heard his voice before, that is my colleague, Raul Kazan, a longtime methane campaigner and founder of the 2Celsius Association, which is the organization behind this podcast.
SPEAKER_06Because if you use natural gas that comes with small amounts of NOX, negligible amounts of SOX, right? Like NOx and SOCs, it's less. Almost no particulate matter whatsoever. All these are uh essential contributors to smog and to poor air quality, especially in cities, right? However, we gotta point to the mounting concerns about fugitive methane emissions.
SPEAKER_11This is Methane, a podcast about the world's second most important greenhouse gas and the only greenhouse gas that is also a fossil fuel. So far, we've looked at the scale of the world's methane problem and at some of its sources. In this episode, we consider the importance of methane leaks for the future of natural gas.
SPEAKER_00In my view, renewables and natural gas need to be working together to get to the net zero target, not an opposition.
SPEAKER_03The question about natural gas being a substitute here has everything to do with its methane leakage.
SPEAKER_11The show is brought to you by the 2Celsius Association, and I'm your host, Francesca Fazy. In the context of the global energy transition, natural gas has long been held up as the perfect candidate for a bridge or transition fuel. Cleaner from a carbon emissions perspective and from an air quality one than oil, but especially than coal, its proponents argued that it was the perfect solution to the problem of how to bridge the gap between a fossil fuel-based present and a renewables-based future. Many oil and gas companies still rely on this preconception to market natural gas. Even the name, natural gas, makes it sound somehow cleaner and more sustainable than your average fossil fuel. But now we know that methane is 20 to 80 times worse for the climate than CO2. How much needs to leak for gas to become as bad as coal? And if we're going to pursue natural gas in the short term, what does that mean for the importance of methane emissions? That's what we'll look at in this episode. In the first half, we'll consider the idea of natural gas as a bridge fuel and whether we need it at all. And in the second half, we turn back to methane leaks and find out how much needs to leak for gas to become as bad as the thing we're trying to replace.
SPEAKER_04The idea of natural gas as a bridge fuel stemmed from the notion that natural gas produces less carbon dioxide emissions when burned than any other fossil fuel.
SPEAKER_11That is Professor Jonathan Stern. He's a research specialist in natural gas and energy, and more recently in the energy transition.
SPEAKER_04I am Professor Jonathan Stern. I'm a distinguished research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. I've spent a lot of my career working on natural gas and LNG issues globally. The institute itself has a specialization in fossil fuels but is doing a lot of work on the energy transition and decarbonisation, particularly of fossil fuels.
SPEAKER_11From a carbon dioxide perspective, gas is certainly the best of a bad bunch. CO2 emissions from burning gas are about 50% lower per unit of energy than burning coal, about 30% lower than burning oil, and the release of other nasties, nitrous oxide or NOx, sulfur dioxide or SOCS, and particulate matter is all a fraction of what is given off by burning coal.
SPEAKER_04Hence it was suggested that natural gas could be a bridge or a transition between a fossil fuel-based energy society and a renewables or zero carbon energy society.
SPEAKER_11The idea has a long history, at least as far back as the nineteen eighties, and as recently as the twenty tens, it was still very much in vogue, especially in the United States, where discoveries of huge shale gas reserves made the relative cleanness of gas a very convenient reason to invest in multiple new gas projects that offered cheap domestic power, jobs, and energy independence. Here's Barack Obama singing the praises of natural gas in his 2014 State of the Nation address.
SPEAKER_01One of the reasons why is natural gas. If extracted safely, it's the bridge fuel that can power our economy with less of the carbon pollution that causes climate change.
SPEAKER_11But its credentials as a greener fossil option are based only on carbon dioxide. Here's Jonathan Stern again.
SPEAKER_04This is in some ways correct if you just take into account the burning of natural gas compared with coal and oil. The problem is that's not the only source of emissions. And more recently, research that we and a lot of others have done has focused on other greenhouse gas emissions than carbon dioxide, and particularly methane. And methane is very important because it's a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it has a shorter lifetime. So this complicates trying to report what we think the emissions are. And the notion of natural gas as a bridge or a transition fuel has been questioned by many as well, is this is this really realistic given the additional emissions that you can get from the natural gas industry?
SPEAKER_11Questioned indeed by those like Kim O'Dowd at the Environmental Investigation Agency.
SPEAKER_10How do you see the energy transition? And do you think there is a role for gas as a transition fuel, or do you think that's a narrative that is dangerous and problematic?
SPEAKER_07I think that's a very, very dangerous narrative because more and more research are showing that if you take into account methane and its potency, gas can become worse than coal. So gas becomes worse than the thing that we're supposed to replace with a 0.2 leakage rate, which is so small. And like if you look at the exporters from to the EU, most of them have a higher leakage rate than that. Like it's just everywhere. You could just take the satellite data, and you'll see you can't say that this is a transition fuel if it's worse than the thing we're supposed to transition from.
SPEAKER_11And Dr. Roland Cooper's advisor to the United Nations on methane, having spent a decade at Shell.
SPEAKER_08That was an argument 20 years ago that it no longer makes any sense because nobody had expected wind and solar to be cheaper than fossil already now. The projections were that that was going to take decades. And we've reached the crossover point that wind and solar are cheaper than gas and coal. And therefore, there's absolutely no justification for any transition fuels. And one of the things I've learned from my shell days is that you can basically build anything in five years. Anything. And therefore, if we wanted to decarbonize our power system entirely, we could in five years. There's no reason this needs to take till 2040 or whatever. We can. But we don't.
SPEAKER_11But is it simply a question of costs? That's not what those in the energy community say.
SPEAKER_00Well, my name is Melanie Kinderdine, and I'm a principal and owner of the Energy Futures Initiative. And what we do, we are a think tank, and we do deep dive, unbiased, technically based analyses of pathways for deep decarbonization of energy systems. I had eight years in the Clinton administration at the Department of Energy and four years in the Obama administration. And so I believe that I am the longest serving political appointee in the history of the Department of Energy. I've heard one other person claim it. I think I'm right. Okay, so he said his was consecutive. Mine was tw was eight years, then four years. So this is what I've been doing for a living for a long, long time.
SPEAKER_11First of all, Millini argues, the reliability of renewable energy like wind and solar, even in the areas of the world that have an abundant supply, is still far from guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00We did a study of California. We looked at every day of one year, 2017, power generation in California. It had 90 days in one year with no wind. Battery storage is four hours. You need natural gas to firm and provide power when renewables are not providing power. And so, in my view, renewables and natural gas need to be working together to get to the net zero targets, not an opposition.
SPEAKER_11She's also skeptical of the cost comparison argument.
SPEAKER_00I opened up the New York Times one day. Wind and solar are cheaper than than gas generation. This is fibbing with numbers, okay, is what you're what you're hearing.
SPEAKER_11Most cost calculations include factors like the cost of the initial investment, the cost of operation, maintenance, and the cost of the fuel you put in over the course of a plant's lifetime. This all gets crunched together in a number called levelized cost. But as Melanie points out, there are other associated costs like battery storage for renewable power that aren't included, and considerations that need to be taken into account, like how much of the day it actually produces energy. This is known as the capacity factor.
SPEAKER_00Combined cycle generation has a capacity factor of 87%.
SPEAKER_11A combined cycle generator just means a gas-fired power plant.
SPEAKER_00So if you install a 250-megawatt combined cycle generator, you are getting electricity 87% of the time. Solar standalone, 29%. And so on the levelized cost, yes, but not when you consider a capacity factor. And then there's one other pesky little problem. Battery storage is $128 per megawatt hour. And the wind and solar need battery storage. So again, I would go back to because of that huge cost of batteries and because of the low capacity factors, gas and renewables should be working together.
SPEAKER_11But doesn't all this so-called realism simply stop us from investing in the technology to improve the situation? As long as we rely on a fossil fuel, like natural gas, we won't get those storage or transmission or capacity factors up.
SPEAKER_09I had an earlier interview with Ronald Cooper. He's at the methane observatory at UNIT. And his point was that in the developed world where there is money and political will, if you've given up people five years, you can build the capacity for anything. So he kind of put it out that, you know, okay, if you have storage problems, if it's a technological gap, you know, build it. We can build it in five years. We shouldn't be investing in natural gas as a bridge fuel. I just want to know what your response is when people put comments like that out there.
SPEAKER_00Let me say, uh Francesca, that what we've been talking about is power generation. Okay, and the need for a fuel for power generation. And right now we don't have the technologies. You know, it's the four hours of battery storage, and you have technology limitations. But there's another very, very significant issue, and it is the need for a fuel or a feedstock for industrial processes. I'll give you a reference frame that I've done. It's not reality, but it's it's based on reality. In the United States, 2016, there are 160,000 miles of long-distance high voltage transmission lines, 160,000 miles. We need to increase that capacity by 75% by 2030. There are 5 to 5.7 transmission towers per mile. That means we need 360,000 towers. Those towers are made with steel, aluminum, and copper, basically. So are wind turbines, so are cell towers, so are EVs, so are EV charging stations. For steel and aluminum, you need temperatures of 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, you know, 700 degrees centigrade. Electricity gives you 400 degrees max. Concentrated solar gives you max 480, 400 degrees. You need a fuel for that kind of heat for your industrial sector. But natural gas is also a feedstock. It's not just the heat and the fuel, it's a feedstock for ammonia. You make fertilizer with basically natural gas. So there are huge issues of food security associated with that as well. And we can't play around with it and we can't be ideological about these things. We don't have any other technologies other than a fuel for those industrial processes.
SPEAKER_11To be fair to Dr. Coopers, his rejection of the bridge fuel idea is specifically in the context of power or electricity generation, and not in the wider context of industry and petrochemical production.
SPEAKER_08Gas is a very good feedstock for the chemical industry, so you you might continue that for a longer time. And then you get to these hard-to-abate sectors like steel and cement. And there, frankly, it's not easy, right? So there may be a certain element of transition of using gas in these hard-to-abate sectors. In power, absolutely not, right? Power should just move out of should decarbonize ASAP.
SPEAKER_11If the difference isn't clear, in the public, we often use the terms electricity, energy, and power interchangeably when we're thinking about the energy transition. But electricity or power generation that we can switch on or off in our homes or our offices is only one piece of the full energy puzzle. Energy used in manufacturing and industry doesn't count as electricity or power. Neither does the energy used in transport nor for heating our buildings or water. For these, as Melanie points out, we're still heavily reliant on fossil fuels. The backup for that electricity still matters because as things like electric vehicles or heat pumps gain momentum, electricity will contribute a larger share to the overall mix. So the main point still stands. From the perspective of the status quo, there's an awful lot that natural gas is necessary for in our modern economies. And the picture that Melanie paints hardly suggests that this is likely to change.
SPEAKER_00Aluminum, plastics, fertilizers, glass, chemicals, and steel. All of those use natural gas, either for heat or as a feedstock or both. The value of those industries to the U.S. economy in one year, over a trillion dollars. We need to be realistic about all of these issues, not ideological. It is not ideological to say that climate change is an existential threat to the planet. I do not argue that. But transitioning our energy systems and providing the services that we need, enabling the developing world to develop, we've got to figure out how to do this.
SPEAKER_11There's politics that comes with raising energy costs too, not just in the US, but in Europe.
SPEAKER_04My view is really how much do you want to spend? And have you got the money to spend that now? You know, I happen to work on fossil fuels, but I'm not a I'm not somebody who's promoting them. So if societies and governments want to spend very large sums of money now to aggressively phase out fossil fuels, I'm fine about that. The problem I have with that notion is that as we saw in 2022, when natural gas prices went up massively to levels that we we'd never ever seen before, the response of governments was not to say, well, this just proves that actually renewables are not expensive, and and you guys now realize that you've got to pay these prices if we have problems in the gas market. They didn't say that. They subsidized everybody's gas bills. That was a great opportunity for governments to actually say, sorry guys, this is why you've got to pay a huge amount more for your energy, and this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna put this money into aggressive renewables. But of course, that's not politically possible because you can't let people get cold or not be able to cook their food because they won't vote for you next time. And this is, we get to the heart of the question of, you know, what's the real politique of this? And the real politique in advanced countries is that most citizens think that they should be able to get their energy relatively cheaply.
SPEAKER_11But even if those costs make investing more in renewables look more attractive, lower costs for renewables can look pretty theoretical when you're sitting a long way away from that. In the global south, for example, and on reserves of fossil fuels like gas in your own backyard.
SPEAKER_04The other side that you don't hear so much about, but we heard a lot about at COP28, was developing countries with fossil fuel resources are saying, don't tell us not to develop our fossil fuel resources. This is how you got rich on fossil fuels. You know, no one ever industrialized using renewable energy.
SPEAKER_11This is an aspect of the energy transition issue that development economist Vijayia Ramachandran grapples with as part of her research at the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, California.
SPEAKER_05There's no question that solar and wind are going to be very significant sources of energy going forward. I think that's certainly true in Africa, where solar will have tremendous potential or already is in some countries. And it's probably true in many Asian countries as well. And there's also no question that prices are coming down. They're already coming down a lot, they'll continue to go down. There's no question about that. I think that the problem is that we don't have substitutability for the things that are made with natural gas. You cannot substitute solar and wind for manufacturing fertilizer, for making cement and steel, for liquid fuel, for air conditioning. You know, this is the problem that I think we have not tackled and we're sort of avoiding. And so I think telling African governments that they cannot develop their natural gas reserves, Africa sits on 600 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, huge reserves in Nigeria and Mozambique. You know, these are countries that suffer massive power cuts all the time. Telling them they can't develop their gas reserves because, you know, solar is cheap is kind of missing the point around substitutability and how much we need to kind of think about poverty alleviation and development in these countries that desperately need more fertilizer, they need more manufacturing capacity, they need more jobs, they need schools and hospitals with power. And so we have to, at least for the next several years, think about what mix might be the most appropriate. We can't just sort of point to prices of one particular energy source.
SPEAKER_11What do methane emissions have to do with any of this? Kim O'Dowd mentioned a leakage rate from natural gas infrastructure being enough to. To make gas worse for the climate than coal.
SPEAKER_07Another reason why it's also super important is because if you have a 0.2 leakage intensity on your pipeline, for example, then gas has the same climate impact as coal.
SPEAKER_11That figure comes from a landmark report whose first author was Deborah Gordon.
SPEAKER_03I'm Deborah Gordon and I have I wear two hats. My main hat is a senior principal at RMI, an NGO that works on the energy transition and climate change, but also a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
SPEAKER_11I spoke to Deborah about her and her colleagues' findings to get a better understanding of how they got to this threshold and what the implications of methane leaks from the gas industry are for our energy transition.
SPEAKER_03There's a lot of movement afoot, especially in the global south, to transition utilities, power generation, from coal to gas. That's been the first move for decades. And now that liquefied natural gas is really making gas going global, it's opening up markets to help that to happen. And for a long time it's been considered that natural gas is a bridge fuel, and that this 19th-century fuel of coal, which really started up in the 1800s, is so outmoded and out of date and so dirty that we should do anything in our power to get off of coal. The question about natural gas being a substitute here has everything to do with its methane leakage. In other words, gas can replace coal, but what if it's dirtier than coal in terms of its net greenhouse gas emissions? How much? In the short term, in the near term, using the higher potency of methane, because that's what's impacting the climate now, gas with as low as a 0.2% leakage rate can be on par with coal.
SPEAKER_02When you did the comparisons, given how variable, can you just tell me how you went about doing that?
SPEAKER_03We ended up using there's a, and it's referenced in the supplemental information in the study, which I think anyone interested should go into, because we have cataloged decades of studies on life cycle emissions from the oil and gas supply chain, which we needed as the basis. And so we used averages there, we used different global warming potentials, we used different leakage rates, we really put in every variable we could imagine in all the calculations, all of the equations are in the supplemental for anyone to put in. And when we put in enough reasonable assumptions, we have figures that trace all of these different parity lines between gas and coal. And we got below 0.2%. That's why we thought that 0.2% was a was a was the right conservative low. We got much higher, we got much lower.
SPEAKER_11It's important to note that the variability of different sites and the complexity and complications involved in coming up with numbers like this for each operation is hugely varying. Here's Jonathan Stern again.
SPEAKER_04You've got to be very careful, as I tried to say earlier, of using these percentages. If you're looking at gas project A and comparing it with coal project B, you need to know that it's very complicated to compare and you need not to be using generalized factors. I know the literature does, and I know that a lot of environmental literature does, because people want to simplify, and I understand that.
SPEAKER_11Those complications accounted for, though, the threshold of a 0.2% leakage rate has gathered a lot of momentum, not only in the environmental community, but as a standard for the industry to meet internally as well.
SPEAKER_03It's in the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency regulations. The coalition of major oil and gas companies have all agreed that this 0.2% is a threshold. And I wasn't thinking about that as we wrote this paper and did our analytics. It's highly variable depending on the sources of these things. It's highly variable depending on what global warming potential you use. But the 0.2% seems to be the agreed upon we need to get gas leaking less than 0.2%.
SPEAKER_11A 0.2% leakage rate is tiny.
SPEAKER_03It's zero tolerance for leakage. And that is the biggest challenge we have because the the industry makes money when it leaks. Inefficiency is built into the bottom line. Listen, inefficiency is built into my house's bottom line. I waste, you know, I go to the store and I might buy something that I end up throwing away later because it rotted, you know, went rotten in the fridge. I don't have zero tolerance for waste. So it's a hard one. That's not easy. But because this industry is massive and very profit-oriented, we need to incentivize them not to leak.
SPEAKER_02So if that's the target, what's the baseline? On average, from what satellites have found, what would you say are the current gas leakage rates that we're seeing?
SPEAKER_03The leakage rates are hugely varying, which to my mind, and I started my career in the in this industry, is the story of this industry. High variance, very high variance, both in terms of operators, in terms of resources and what they are under the ground. And now in terms of methane leakage, the leakage rates that have been cited in studies that we have in the paper, and we cite them all, are from 0.6%, which is still above the 0.2, but it's you know it's somewhere to go down to 66%. So that's a thousand-fold difference.
SPEAKER_11Just take a minute to let that sink in. That's obviously the maximum and not the average, but it hardly inspires confidence that the oil and gas industry is taking the threat of methane to the climate that seriously.
SPEAKER_02Who is leaking their gas 66% of what they're like extracting? Who is doing that?
SPEAKER_03It's a great question. And I think it might be a relatively limited number of producers, but they're still important. It turns out that that 66% came from offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico in state waters. And what's happening there is that these are oil platforms. Now, this is really common in the UK and the North Sea on the UK side. These are oil platforms that were designed sometimes 30 or 40 years ago to produce oil. They're not designed to contain the gas, and they don't have takeaway capacity for the gas. So over time, as the fields might become more gassy, and these resources change underground as you produce them, you don't have anything to do with the gas but to throw it into the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_11These are some of the operational realities we've heard about before. The challenges of containing gas in places you really don't want it. A million tiny hisses escaping from equipment, sometimes for years, because no one has thought to check. It's an industry culture that could be and was easily forgiven because no one was really looking at the consequences.
SPEAKER_03It's really too bad. When I think back on it, so we've been hyper-focused on CO2 for a generation. Methane was mentioned actually very obliquely back in 1990 when all of these climate conferences took off in the very COP one. But it was never a focus. It just wasn't. We really thought we could master this with CO2, pricing it and reducing it and an energy transition. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened enough, and we are facing a warming climate, dangerously so. So we didn't really focus on methane when we could have, when gas was regional, before it was going global. So in other words, these were fuels that would really, you know, they were transmitted by pipelines and they were kept in a country where you can have regulations that really garnered like a whole US or a whole country. A contained jurisdiction, if you like. Exactly. And so now we have a warming planet that's, you know, looking at, if we're lucky, 2.7 degrees, probably higher. And we have gas going global, and we know methane is super potent and emitting. And it's it's really it's a call to action more than almost anything else. Like for gas to go global, we really need to make sure methane doesn't leak. A call to action indeed.
SPEAKER_11Next up, we answer that call. From zooming in on leaks, we zoom out and look at policy. If methane emissions are such a big contributor to climate change and such an easy win in our global warming fight, then what's being done about them? We'll explore the instruments at our disposal, some of the challenges and tensions in implementing them, and look at the barriers that need to be overcome to make methane the climate success story it should be.