What about natural gas

Reading time: 4 minutes

TL;DR

Hot take

Natural gas is correctly known as fossil gas. It is often touted as lower carbon emissions intensity than coal, but it can be just as bad as when you consider the end to end lifecycle.

The fossil fuel industry pretends to be our friend and says we can use fossil gas instead of coal, but the time for that was the 1990s. In the 2020s it’s very much too late.

Explanation

When the world started to move away from burning coal for electricity there was an opportunity for the fossil gas industry to offer itself up as a replacement. By spreading the lie that fossil gas only produced half the emissions of burning coal, it seemed like a way for society to ease out of coal while still maintaining the inherent manliness of digging stuff out of the ground and burning it.

A lot of fossil gas infrastructure already existed, we’ve been piping it into people’s homes for cooking and heating. Also starting up a gas fired power station is much more nimble than starting a lumbering coal fired power plant, so what’s not to love about gas? Smells like an evolution and who doesn’t love evolution? So gas became known as this thing called transition fuel. A bridge solution while we waited for renewable energy to get all serious and grown up.

Where’d all the gas go

Fossil gas does produce less emissions when burnt when compared to coal, but it’s a gas and gas can leak. These leaks are known as fugitive emissions. Fugitive emissions are when gas escapes from the well, or pipelines in transport, or through other woopsies. This goes straight into the atmosphere as methane. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, so 1kg of methane is equivalent to 29.8kg of CO2. At least coal can just sit around without leaking.

Large gas producing nations export a lot of the gas they extract (e.g. Qatar, Australia). This is done by liquefying the gas which requires a lot of energy. Ever wondered what they use … the gas they are extracting. Put another way, the gas industry consumes a lot of the gas it extracts just to package up the remaining gas and ship it overseas.

When you factor in all the emissions that have been incurred by burning gas to transport gas, and leaks of gas, plus the emissions from the gas being burnt … all of a sudden it’s closer to coal than those cheeky money men told you about.

Health issues

Even if you ignore those problems, there’s a bunch of serious health side effects from gas - in the environment and also when using it indoors to cook or heat. There’s an excellent paper from the Climate Council detailing the health impacts including the rise of asthma.

Missed opportunity

If we were actually replacing coal with gas we actually need a lot more infrastructure both in distribution and power generation locations. Why invest all that time, money and effort in establishing infrastructure that we cannot use because it’s already too late for a transition fuel.

We need to jump straight into renewable electricity generation, and transform our homes replacing gas appliances with induction cooktops and electric heating. By burning less fossil fuels in everyday life and electrifying as much as possible we can then continue to decarbonise the grid as we build out more renewable energy.

Fun facts

You can see a map of all the gas pipelines in Australia right here thanks to the pipeline register.

A really good video covering this topic, including a bonus gas industry rap is It’s Time To Break Up With Our Gas Stoves | Climate Town Worth a watch, do it up.

Despite producing more and more gas each year in Australia, prices have actually gone up significantly for Australians. So heating and cooking has been more expensive than if you had been using electricity. All the extra gas is being exported overseas, it’s not for domestic use. It got so bad the Australian Federal Government was forced to intervene and set a maximum price on gas in 2022.