Seven years ago, Oregon’s biggest natural gas company set out to convince lawmakers and residents that an abundant new source of green energy was out there, just waiting to be tapped.
Seven years on, the utility has not delivered on its clean-energy sales pitch. NW Natural has more retail gas customers than ever. It supplies them little, if any, renewable natural gas. It sells them as much fossil natural gas in an average year as it did before. And it wages steady battles in the courts and in local city halls to keep the gas flowing.
An early ad from the Less We Can campaign suggested that Oregonians — and maybe NW Natural itself — could save the world with little in the way of personal sacrifice. It shows the sun emerging from a cloud. “Renewable Natural Gas is on the way home,” it reads. “Change for the better. Without changing a thing.”
The gas executives agreed that climate change needed to be addressed but that climate policies in the Northwest should not penalize natural gas utilities or their customers. “It’s a theme line,” Rush’s slideshow, dated July 2017, explained. “A rallying cry. A movement. A coalition with customers. A celebration. A call to action. A clean energy stake-in-the-ground… in 3 words or less.”
“Can a natural gas company be serious when it says it wants us to use less gas?” one video asked before showing a scene of a couple chopping vegetables together in the kitchen. “Can we really raise our families and lower emissions? Can we heat our homes and fight climate change? Can we expand our economy and use less?”
It started earlier in 2017 with a bill in the Oregon Legislature that put forward a seemingly straightforward proposition. Oregon would take stock of its every landfill, every dairy farm, every sewage plant and every conceivable pile of woody debris: sites that could emit methane as organic matter broke down. Why not study how much was out there? The bill, a precursor to similar bills in other states, including Washington, sailed through with little opposition.
Barnhart, the former state lawmaker, says the utility’s selective interpretation of the study not only overstated the size of the resource, it left out “the real denominator” by ignoring industrial and commercial gas use. Including those and transportation customers in the equation would put total gas demand in Oregon at three times the figure NW Natural cited; the state’s potential renewable natural gas resources, using current technology, could meet less than 7% of that demand.
The new bill aimed to address another key barrier to NW Natural’s plans for renewable natural gas. Under existing state rules, utilities had to purchase gas for their customers at the lowest available price, and gas made from biomass could be 10 times more expensive than fossil natural gas. But the bill would allow NW Natural to pursue renewable natural gas and recoup the added cost from its customers.
On social media, the company’s Kim Rush soon cheered the bill’s success, sharing a photo of Oregon Gov. Kate Brown at a September 2019 signing ceremony, flanked by fellow lawmakers, NW Natural CEO David Anderson and at least three other employees of the company. The winner of a million-dollar contract to build just such a coalition and launch a pro-gas campaign across the Northwest was the communications firm Quinn Thomas. It had helped Washington business interests win fights against cap-and-trade and a carbon tax in that state in 2015 and 2016. Now the firm pledged to “defeat policies detrimental to the natural gas industry” once again.
Another fight loomed at the state level. With cap-and-trade dead in the Oregon Legislature, Brown had issued an executive order mandating statewide controls on greenhouse gas emissions. For much of 2020 and 2021, the state prepared new rules to put Brown’s order in action. Meat and poultry giant Tyson Foods kept two of its biggest beef slaughterhouses there, each week churning through tens of thousands of cows that, in turn, churned out hundreds of thousands of pounds of manure as they awaited their end at the facility.Rotting manure lets off methane. Rotting carcasses let off methane. Rotting garbage lets off methane.
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