How natural gas went from clean fuel to evil, so evil
Natural gas allows affordable electricity with lower greenhouse emissions. Some in politics prefer a good crisis.
A generation ago, environmentalists urged power utilities and other energy users to replace coal and petroleum with natural gas. Mostly methane, natural gas generates about half the greenhouse gases per unit of electricity as coal, and lowers emissions of compounds that cause smog and acid rain. Homeowners using heating oil were urged to switch to natural gas for the same reasons.
The drawback was that as recently as 2000, in some areas natural gas was in short supply. New technology began to produce a jackpot of methane, sufficient to last the nation at least decades.
The techniques include fracking, and nobody likes fracking. Yet wind power, which everybody likes -- so long as it’s somewhere else -- has more negatives. At any rate most of the new gas is found by horizontal drilling and 3D seismology.
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Because of new tech, the U.S. “proved reserve” of natural gas has tripled since 1991 – see Figure 10 – despite gas use rising. A good chance exists there is far more methane in deep rock formations and the seabed, enough to provide reasonably clean electricity for centuries and to serve as the chemical feedstock for “green hydrogen,” a zero-emission fuel, if a practical way to make green hydrogen is developed.
So environmental activists, the left and academia must be happy, right? No. They are furious.
In 2019 the city of Berkeley, California, banned natural gas lines in new buildings. The Berkeley ban is in legal limbo owing to a federal appellate ruling. Last month New York became the first state to prohibit natural gas hookups in new construction. San Francisco, Seattle, New York City and other cities are attempting to impose bans on natural gas stoves, grills and furnaces.
The New York and California bans will have the effect of discouraging the building of housing units, while raising the price of those units that are built. California and New York are among places that badly need more homes and apartments. But making natural gas sound evil, so evil, is more important to the hard left.
Vice President Kamala Harris has proposed a national ban on fracking. She says this would prevent climate change, though the impact on greenhouse emissions would be vanishingly slight. The primary results would be to reduce the supply of natural gas and raise the price, both of which suit the left agenda.
Elements of the Democratic Party are enraged that the recent debt-ceiling compromise includes a title allowing completion of a natural gas pipeline from West Virginia, where methane is ample, to cities of the Atlantic coast. In early June demonstrators tried to block entry to the White House to protest the pipeline.
Joe Biden wanted a debt-ceiling compromise, agreeing to the pipeline over protests from his base, including the Sierra Club, which has already endorsed his reelection run. To please the base, Biden issued orders blocking planned deliveries of liquified natural gas by rail to a seaport, for shipping overseas.
Countries including China, Japan, South Korea, Israel and Vietnam are scrambling for every TCF of natural gas they can get, because it’s a low-emission way to make progress against smog and the greenhouse effect. Japan, especially, is ready to switch from burning coal for electricity and substitute methane from the United States or from new Asian fields. That NGO activists denounce natural gas, and try to block the United States from sharing it, must strike Japanese planners as nuts.
To other countries the fact that the United States has ample reserves of methane, but government is trying to discourage use, must seem like some kind of mass insanity. At the least, interest-group insanity.
The natural gas pipeline activists want to block isn’t carrying poison. It will carry clean fuel – which is what upsets the left.
Burning natural gas does result in some greenhouse emissions, much less than coal but definitely some. Industrial engineers have proposed methane be called a “transition fuel,” providing relatively clean electricity while renewables are developed and nuclear power plants and pump-generating storage is built.
The United States will need a boatload more electricity if the White House gets its way on electric cars, electric trucks, electric buses and electric tanks for the Army.
The developing-world needs a substantial increase in electricity production. Robert Bryce’s book A Question of Power shows that more electricity syncs closely with reduction of developing-world poverty. Making developing-world kilowatts from natural gas will be better than from coal. We can’t simply wish away that if China, India and other growth economies cannot get methane they will burn coal, with untoward consequences.
Plentiful, affordable, reasonably low-emission natural gas is the way to generate more electricity in the two or three decades between now and practical green and atomic alternatives.
What that describes is a solution. The left hates solutions. The left wants a permanent sense of crisis, to justify more government power.
The left is hardly alone. The right wants more power too, and has been using courts to seek ideological agenda items that voters refuse to support at the ballot box.
But here the topic is energy policy, and on energy policy, when it became clear there is plenty of natural gas to go around, reducing though not eliminating greenhouse emissions associated with power production, activists were horrified.
Item Number One on the right-activist agenda is putting the Supreme Court into control of the bedroom. Item Number One for the hard left is declaration of a “climate national emergency,” putting the kooks into control of the economy.
How could declaration of a climate national emergency be justified if there’s plenty of clean fuel? Plenty of clean fuel – the horror!
Induction cooktops are a great alternative to gas stoves. People who have magnetic induction stoves (and the special pans and pots you must buy) really like them. But every extra dollar spent on an induction-based kitchen is a dollar that can’t be spent on something else.
Similarly, efficient “heat pumps” that provide winter warmth solely from kilowatts have improved a lot in recent years. They make sense for many homes.
Heat pumps and induction kitchens will require another boost in electricity production. Even supposing gas stoves and gas furnaces were ripped out, the greenhouse emission reduction would be negligible unless the electricity came from nuclear, solar, hydro or wind.
The politics of the issue are not about reducing greenhouse gases – rather, about stopping people from seeing any fossil fuel as acceptable. Which is easy for someone like Gov. Kathy Hochul, who supported the New York state ban on natural gas in new buildings, to advocate. Her household bills are paid by someone else. For average people who pay their own bills, putting obstacles between them and the cost effectiveness of natural gas does harm.
Plus there is $369 billion for green energy subsidies in last summer’s Inflation Reduction Act. If an existing clean fuel is plentiful, how could that be justified?
Most of the $369 billion will go to the Silicon Valley elite and other already-rich types; will not help average families hit with higher bills if artificial fuel shortages are created.
Natural gas is currently the leading source of electricity in the United States. Battery vehicles mean more electricity is needed. Yet the left is trying to make natural gas evil. This is as kooky as the right’s lies about election results.
Washington has been badly wrong about natural gas before.
In the 1970s, a Washington-insiders consensus developed that methane reserves were already depleted. James Schlesinger, Jimmy Carter’s Energy Secretary, said in 1978 that natural gas was “gone.”
This was part of the Club of Rome/Paul Ehrlich end-times analysis ruling the roost in the Ivy League, at Manhattan soirees and at foundations. Some smart guy (hey, me!) memorably spoofed the fashionable gloom as Instant Doomsday. It all built up to the 1978 Energy Policy Act, which essentially banned use of natural gas for generating electricity, requiring instead that utilities – ready? -- burn more coal.
Instant Doomsday proved totally wrong on every count. But The Experts that backed it kept their positions. Details here.
That natural gas was “gone” was what was said by Aspen Institute grandees and people who inherited trust funds – the sorts who would get more power if the public was held in a state of fear. Who were we to question The Experts?
A cub reporter at the wonderful Washington Monthly decided to ignore The Experts, go into the field and interview wildcatters. I went to Alberta, where there were few rules on energy exploration, versus a highly regulated energy business in the United States.
To his credit, late in his term Carter deregulated energy production, saving trillions of dollars for average Americans and setting in motion the United States passing Saudi Arabia as world‘s top oil producer. Carter had faults but should be perceived as a great man. See Jon Alter’s biography His Very Best.
In Alberta, wildcatters told me there was a bonanza of natural gas, depending on geologic formation.
Which turned out correct. My Washington Monthly October 1980 cover story titled PSSST – THE ENERGY CRISIS IS OVER, read today, is right on every point The Experts of 1980 were wrong about. Though, The Experts got paid a lot better.
I had figured it out on my own, without insider connections. It wasn’t just that The Experts were wrong – it was that they didn’t care what was true, so long as they could cling to power and money. Exactly what’s going on with so many in Washington today.
Let me quote myself. (“I quote myself to add spice to the conversation” – Oscar Wilde.)
“In 1980, according to the Department of Energy, there were 2,500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the global reserve. I wrote that the real figure would prove far larger.
From 1980 to 2020, the world consumed about 3,400 trillion feet of natural gas, and today there are about 7,100 trillion feet in the global reserve. Society used more natural gas than the total amount in 1980, yet we have twice as much left.
Maybe no one at the time could have known a huge amount of gas was waiting to be discovered? In fact, there were plenty of leading indicators. They were just not visible in Washington, D.C., where politicians and The Experts live.”
Let me add extra spice my quoting myself again, from 1980, when The Experts said oil was nearly exhausted and we’d soon freeze in the dark:
“In 1980, the United States was importing 5.6 million barrels a day of oil from Persian Gulf dictatorships. Based on my reporting, I estimated domestic discoveries and new drilling technology could produce enough North American oil for the United States to need only 3 million barrels a day from the Gulf. I was wrong: by 2022, the U.S. imported only 1.9 million barrels a day from the Gulf.”
Bonus: Demonizing Natural Gas Bad, Energy Efficiency Good. Some commentators have conflated bizarre attempts to ban gas stoves with Biden’s initiative to increase the efficiency of air conditioners and furnaces. Both the latter are desirable.
In every past instance that government has mandated more efficient energy use – low-electricity refrigerators, higher MPG cars and so on – everyone’s been better off. Energy efficiency not only holds down prices (by moderating demand) it reduces air pollution. It’s an actual win-win.
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thanks for such kind words!
The WSJ had an article with quotes from Toyoda (head of Toyota). He argues hybrids are better for the environment because they need far fewer batteries, which require mining. It's a transition engine, which makes sense to me.
I own a hybrid (I average about 47-50mpg 3 seasons of the year about 42 in winter). Eventually, RVs will make sense for me, but not now. I'm not opposed to EVs, but I think we'd be better off if more people switched from exclusive ICE to hybrids.