100
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.” (www.canarymedia.com)
submitted 9 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

all 34 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] LilNaib@slrpnk.net 19 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] JoMomma@lemm.ee 16 points 9 months ago

I think it's super weird that we are suddenly even attempting to call LNG environmentally friendly, it has always been a mess

[-] federalreverse@feddit.de 10 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[-] Lemonparty@lemm.ee 12 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[-] Lemonparty@lemm.ee 0 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 4 points 9 months ago

I mean, clean burning is an perfectly accurate description of natural gas flames, that’s why it’s so terrible for lighting but good for heating, there’s extremely little soot and ash that need to be cleaned out of a flue of off the walls above a lamp.

I don’t doubt that gas companies really like or have indeed have helped feed the common misconception that “clean burning” has anything at all to do with climate effects, but that wasn’t my point, which was that natural gas is the common name for the mix, and it has been since long before companies had to form think tanks to pretend to care about climate impacts.

[-] Lemonparty@lemm.ee -3 points 9 months ago

Cool so your point was to give a history lesson on the origins of the original naming convention behind the mining and burning of methane, and disparage my point that it still being called natural gas in intentionally misleading, while also not actually disagreeing with it or bringing any sort of evidence to the contrary?

So you just wanted to...look pompous? Gaslight? Distract from the fact that burning methane is just as bad if not worse than drilling for and burning crude oil based fossil fuels for the environment? Point out that it's all fine because it was originally used for lighting?

Okay then. Thanks for your contribution to society I guess. Go tell the bees in your safe space how you did your good deed for the day by defending the fossil fuel industry!

[-] sonori@beehaw.org 4 points 9 months ago

My point is that your staring comment on which the majority of your argument rests, “Natural gas is a think tank tested way to brand methane.” is clearly false. I figured this was an honest mistake, as its something someone who is not well informed on the topic might think, but it’s something which a lot of people do know, and so I politely added more information you or others could use for a jumping off point if you didn’t know that syngas even existed.

Calling something by the name it has always been known by is not “intentionally misleading”, but basic communication.

There are enough enough true criticisms of useing natural gas for power and heat, such as the parent’s post that gas leaks are more damaging to the environment than the coal it replaced, without making wild claims about the name itself being a hundred year old PR spin.

When most climate activists are dismissed as having no idea what their taking about, making claims like yours that people know wrong because they live down the hill from the old synthetic gasworks is how you convince people that the parent claims are just as poorly researched and easily dismissed as some wild comment.

It is kind of important to be accurate is your criticism least it be used to diminish far more well researched and damming criticism.

[-] FatCrab@lemmy.one 3 points 9 months ago

You said something incorrect, were pretty gently corrected, and then rather than simply move on and learn, you decided to crawl all the way up your own ass into a deeply entrenched position. You are not the one being useful or coming off worth listening to here.

[-] Lemonparty@lemm.ee -2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Upvotes say otherwise, sunshine. Keep fighting the good astroturfing fight tho!

[-] blazera@kbin.social 7 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 17 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] federalreverse@feddit.de 6 points 9 months ago

It's not all the same, partly because gases leak and may cause more damage than CO2.

[-] zinaer@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

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?

[-] silence7@slrpnk.net 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] zinaer@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Great, thanks! Why doesn't the chart show costs of transportation of coal via ship as well? Do you have a link for the study mentioned in the graph by chance?

[-] silence7@slrpnk.net 1 points 9 months ago

It doesn't show those because the US isn't about to start large-scale coal exports.

The preprint is linked in the article

[-] HerrBeter@lemmy.world -3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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?

this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
100 points (93.1% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5197 readers
877 users here now

Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
silence7@slrpnk.net