No, natural gas is not a bridge fuel that will transition us to green energy
Peggy Cameron
1. No, natural gas is not a bridge fuel that will transition us to green energy
On Monday, Tim Bousquet wrote at length about the liquified natural gas plant proposed for Goldboro.
Bousquet notes that Pieridae Energy, the LNG plant’s proponent, has said nothing in its environmental assessment applications about where the gas to be liquified at the plant and shipped to Europe will come from.
In those documents, he notes:
There is no mention of the sourcing of the gas except to say it will be fed with gas from the Maritimes & Northeast Pipeline (M&NP).
That pipeline was built a couple of decades ago in order to service Nova Scotia’s offshore gas. Gas from the Sable Island field was delivered via subsea pipelines to the Sable Offshore Energy Project (SOEP) plant in Goldboro, where the gas entered the M&NP. There are a couple of laterals to the pipeline — one goes to Halifax and feeds the Heritage Gas lines in the city and Nova Scotia Power’s Tufts Cove plant, another goes to Saint John. But those laterals were almost immaterial to the main purpose of the pipeline, which was to sell Sable Island gas to New England. The pipeline crosses the international border at Saint Stephen, New Brunswick/ Baileyville, Maine, with an ultimate destination of Dracut, Massachusetts, outside Boston…
But now that the Sable Island field has played out, the M&NP pipeline has lost its primary purpose.
Enter Pieridae. In 2014, Pieridae filed an application with the US government to reverse the direction of the M&NP pipeline in order to deliver natural gas from New England to Nova Scotia.
It appears likely that the natural gas will come from fracking the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania.
One of the things that struck me reading Bousquet’s piece is that in some ways the M&NP is a case study in precisely why natural gas is not a bridge fuel to transition us from coal to renewables. Nobody is likely to build expensive infrastructure — and recall that Pieridae has asked the government for close to a billion dollars — and then happily abandon it because it was merely built as a transition.
Think about the M&NP pipeline — it was built only two decades ago, in some cases (as I wrote about here) over the opposition of locals.
My family moved to Nova Scotia around the time the pipeline was being built. Talk of Sable Gas and the riches that would flow from it was ubiquitous. And yet here we are, looking for a new use for the thing, environment be damned.
Premier Iain Rankin supports the Goldboro LNG plant, on the basis it makes environmental and economic sense. In response to a question from Tim Bousquet, Rankin reiterated his support, saying that natural gas is a more environmentally-friendly choice than coal, and part of a transition to an economy built on renewables:
So this facilitates the world getting off coal. And I think it’s a very important environmental initiative to be part of and impacts our economy here and allows us to bring in more revenue to spend on fighting climate change, transitioning to electrifying our transportation system, bringing our buildings to net zero. So I acknowledge there’s differences of opinion and natural gas is something that is cleaner than coal.
Is natural gas really cleaner than coal though? In a Mother Jones story from last year, Rebecca Leber writes:
The claim that natural gas is environmentally-friendly is disingenuous. Though it was once seen as the lesser of two evils compared to coal’s high carbon pollution, we’ve learned over the past decade that natural gas has come at a high cost. We’ve vastly undercounted the amount of methane escaping from these operations by as much as 60 percent, reporting from the Environmental Defense Fund shows, as the industry has been largely left to regulate itself.
A report from the Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs Center on Global Energy Policy published in 2019 raises the question of whether the bridge fuel argument is “under fire.” The authors, Akos Losz and Jonathan Elkind, note that there are all kinds of problems with the data showing natural gas is cleaner than coal. They write:
For the past decade or so, the gas industry has made a case that gas can be a critical factor in the ongoing energy transition as a bridge fuel, primarily by displacing more-polluting coal (as well as some oil) in the energy system…
Methane leaks, flaring and venting, which are receiving steadily greater attention in recent years, have the potential to undermine the environmental bona fides of natural gas, however. Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas with a warming potential that is roughly 30 to 90 times greater than that of CO2, depending on the timescale of the assessment. While global understanding of the methane leakage problem is still limited, an International Energy Agency study indicates that the methane emissions associated with oil and gas operations worldwide are probably quite significant, totaling about 2.4 billion tons of CO2 equivalent…
The gas industry’s green credentials are also increasingly called into question due to its highly visible gas flaring activity, which has been growing fastest in the United States.
The Columbia paper cites a report from Global Energy Monitor on how increased use of natural gas could undermine progress on climate change. The report, released on July 1, 2019, was widely covered in the media, including in this CBC article by Don Pittis. (I assume Rankin didn’t read it.) Pittis writes:
Effectively, the report warns that rather than being an environment-friendly product that can help solve our climate problems, gas is the new coal.
The explosion in spending on planned new liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities — the vast majority in the U.S. and Canada — combined with new calculations for leakage from the LNG supply chain called fugitive gas — means the world may soon turn against gas in the same way it turned against its solid fuel relative…
Karen Tam Wu, regional director for the Pembina Institute in British Columbia, where Canada’s giant LNG project has already got the go-ahead, is sympathetic to countries trying to move away from the polluting effects of coal. But she said the so-called rush to gas may turn out to be a wasteful intermediate step on the essential path to low-carbon energy.
She’s afraid that in pushing LNG, B.C. is wasting money it could have spent competing with the rest of the world in developing better renewable technology.
And where did this bridge fuel narrative come from, anyway?
According to DeSmog, which tracks fossil fuel industry PR and misinformation, the idea of natural gas as a bridge fuel is little more than industry propaganda. In a piece published last February, Dana Drugmond writes:
“The bridge fuel sales pitch was invented by the American Gas Association [AGA] in 1988 and has had a lasting impact on the gas narrative,” the Food and Water Watch report states. The report cites a 2017 paper by sociology scholar Dr. Anthony Ladd, who writes, “First crafted by the American Gas Association in 1988 to help ‘green’ the public image of the natural gas industry — just as the first scientific warnings about global warming were emerging — the clean energy bridge fuel discourse has been innovatively used to champion the use of natural gas, as well as nuclear power, based on their lower CO2 emissions than coal or oil.”
Ladd’s historical accounting of AGA originating the bridge fuel claim is confirmed by Washington Post archives from 1988: “Michael German, vice president of planning and analysis for the American Gas Association, refers to natural gas as a bridge fuel — the least harmful alternative while the world looks for other, longer-lasting solutions to the ‘greenhouse’ effect.”…
Stanford research and science historian Ben Franta, who studies the history of climate science denial and fossil fuel disinformation campaigns, told DeSmog that the industry’s promotion of gas as “clean” is rooted in efforts to avoid regulations restraining fossil fuel use.
“I do recall from my archival research that by the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, fossil fuel interests were discussing the promotion of natural gas as an industry-friendly alternative to reductions in fossil fuel use,” Franta said. “It was, in a sense, part of the industry’s counterproposal to discussions of reducing fossil fuel production and use. That counterproposal basically said: instead of binding agreements to reduce emissions, let’s switch to natural gas, focus on efficiency, and carry out more research. The industry was successful in promoting these terms, which in practice have yielded expanded fossil fuel production, increased emissions, and ever-worsening damages.”
The whole thing is a testament to the power of a good disinformation campaign. And now, more than three decades after it was launched, we’re still being taken in.