Chart: Is LNG worse for the climate than coal? Research suggests that liquefied natural gas can have a bigger emissions footprint than coal, undermining LNG’s status as a “bridge fuel.”
Chart: Is LNG worse for the climate than coal? Research suggests that liquefied natural gas can have a bigger emissions footprint than coal, undermining LNG’s status as a “bridge fuel.”
Research suggests that liquefied natural gas can have a bigger emissions footprint than coal, undermining LNG's status as a "bridge fuel."
Howarth found that LNG’s total emissions are between 24 and 274 percent more than coal’s, depending on how the LNG is transported.
Horrific.
We're making the same mistake now as we did after the Iraq War. During/after that war, there was a massive push to decrease US reliance on Middle Eastern oil. That was great, but unfortunately, most of the effort centered on domestic oil production, including fracking, which is even nastier than conventional oil production. We should have been building out and transitioning to renewables instead.
Now we have the same basic problem: Europe has realized it can't rely on Russia for its fossil fuels and is now greatly increasing consumption of LNG, which is even nastier (for climate emissions) than conventional fossil fuels, even apparently coal, which I didn't know was possible. That's insane!
Let's learn from this and build as much wind, solar, and other renewables as quickly as possible.
EU 2023 LNG imports have been below 2022 imports. That is still a massive increase compared to 2021, but that was to be expected. Maybe even more important the natural gas price is falling extremely quickly. It halved over the last year. LNG is more expensive then other transport methods of natural gas, so it is the first to be cut.
I think it's super weird that we are suddenly even attempting to call LNG environmentally friendly, it has always been a mess
The one positive point is that methane-burning power plants can be spun up in under an hour whereas coal plants usually need a week to power up. If the vast majority of power comes from solar/wind/batteries and gas is only used as (secondary) backup, this may make sense.
Fossil marketing pretty successfully tries to eradicate the caveats and nuances from the discussion of course.
Speak for yourself. I love my flaming tap water and deformed baby.
Woah there, we say 'differently formed babies' now buddy
I don't think anyone was actually buying that right?
The only people pushing for LNG were the oil companies selling it. Which, I mean, come on, we know better than to believe a word that comes from them.
For those that don't know natural gas is a think tank tested way to brand methane. Natural gas is methane. They are the same thing. When you hear natural gas think "methane" because that is what natural gas is. For some reason "natural" makes you think it's a perfectly fine and good thing, but that's just good ol' propaganda that you believed because you didn't know any better.
Petroleum is also "natural". It forms naturally, in nature, all by itself, and it combusts if you light it on fire. It's so natural we can't make it ourselves that's why we drill wells several miles down and then inject compressed fluids at insane pressure to fracture the rock formations that natural petroleum is trapped in.
The problem is that methane is significantly worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and if you burn methane, it breaks down into CO2. So when you hear "Clean burning natural gas" you are being spoon fed bullshit. It's not clean burning, it's lighting methane on fire to produce the same greenhouse gas they want you to think they're cutting down on.
While I don’t doubt that it helps with branding in the modern day, the name natural gas entered the public vocabulary centuries ago to differentiate it from synthetic gas/coal gas/town gas, not as a think tank branding exercise.
Created as a byproduct of the coking process, the aforementioned syngas was used primarily for its bright white light, and indeed in the US much of the network was built out after the invention of the lightbulb but before they got bright enough to be competitive.
Natural gas by contrast is produced by drilling into naturally occurring deposits of methane and other flammable gases as compared to being a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide produced by coal gasification. As electric lights got better and fewer factories needed to turn coal into coke, most cities decommissioned their syngas systems. A few decades later cites rebuilt gas distribution systems using natural gas to provide for a far more efficient form of heating, and people needed to easily tell the difference since syngas lighting and appliances arn’t practically useful with natural gas and so used the common name for it in much the same way most people don’t go to a restaurant and ask for a glass of high concentration dihydrogen monoxide, they just ask for water.
If you think that "Clean Burning Natural Gas" hadn't deliberately been kept in the advertising vernacular intentionally to avoid negative connotations, I have a bridge to sell you.
Coal, oil, gasoline, propane, natural gas, biodiesel, wood fired stoves, candles, its all the same; molecules made up of a bunch of carbon bonded together. Add heat and oxygen and the bonds break in order to bond with oxygen, creating co2 or carbon monoxide and releasing heat. Its always gonna emit a shit ton of greenhouse gases, the entirety of the fuel is being turned into one.
Wood takes atmospheric carbon to grow though, so it’s not a net addition. The carbon taken from the ground does increase the carbon in the atmosphere.
It's not all the same, partly because gases leak and may cause more damage than CO2.
Ok, but why are we comparing coal that somehow doesn't have to be transported against LNG that does. Can coal be teleported or something?
Mostly because the US has huge coal deposits but fairly limited coal exports. A lot of the discussion about LNG is whether it makes sense to use it to displace same-country coal extraction & use vs ship in LNG from far away.
Sus
Edit so coal has been deemed the absolute worst energy bearer for combustion but suddenly there's a report that the somewhat better natural gas is dirtier?