Gas industry in damage control as landmark study finds LNG ‘worse than

In January this year, seemingly out of nowhere, US President Joe Biden made a decision that sent shock waves through the trillion-dollar global gas industry.

With the stroke of a pen, Mr Biden put a pause on approvals for any new project looking to ship super-chilled liquefied natural gas — or LNG — from US shores.

It was a decision that left many in the industry floored.

After all, within just a few short years America had rocketed from a position of having no LNG industry to being one of the world’s biggest exporters of the fuel alongside Australia and Qatar.

And it was a decision that has set off a political firestorm in the US, where energy and America’s insatiable needs for it are looming, as ever, as a critical issue in an election year.

Underlying that decision, however, was a landmark report that has cast fresh doubt over the supposed environmental benefits of gas compared with coal.

Gas emissions ‘worse than coal’

It’s a study that has raised fresh questions over the role of gas as a bridge to a renewable energy future.

The peer-reviewed study by Robert Howarth, a professor at Cornell University, found American LNG, at least, was worse than coal when it came to emissions.

Specifically, the report found greenhouse gas emissions from LNG were 33 per cent greater than those related to coal when measured over a 20-year timeline.

And at the heart of Professor Howarth’s finding was not carbon dioxide but, rather, methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas.

“Even though carbon dioxide emissions are greater from burning coal than from burning natural gas, methane emissions can more than offset this difference,” Professor Howarth wrote in the paper.

“As a greenhouse gas, methane is more than 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when considered over a 20‐year period and so even small methane emissions can have a large climate impact.”

According to Professor Howarth, at every point along the chain of gas production methane was found to be leaking.

From extraction of gas at the well to liquefying it through chilling; from the transport on specially designed ships to its regasification and distribution in pipes when unloaded — in each step methane escaped into the atmosphere.

It was particularly pronounced in the US, where he noted that most of the LNG came from fracking, a process in which huge volumes of water are pumped underground to fracture rock containing the gas.

As a result, Professor Howarth estimated as much as five per cent of the gas for an LNG project in the US was lost as leaked methane.

So significant was the heating potential of methane, Professor Howarth…