Gas has been widely touted as the world's 'transition fuel' away from coal, but a landmark study casts doubt on the fuel's 'clean' credentials.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.
And at the heart of Professor Howarth's finding was not carbon 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.
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.
From virtually a standing position in 2016, when Washington overturned a longtime ban on gas exports, the US has risen to become, at various times recently, the world's biggest exporter of the commodity.The rapid ascent had delivered not only America's prestige as a dominant energy exporter, but outsize returns for US gas investors.
Last month, the boss of US energy behemoth Chevron attacked the decision in a broader swipe at the Biden administration's policies. Samantha McCulloch, the head of lobby group Australian Energy Producers, said in the first instance the study "significantly overestimates emissions from US gas production".
While much of America's industry used fracking to extract the gas, Australia's was largely based on conventional drilling techniques on offshore wells. Kevin Morrison from the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said the industry was flattering itself to think its emissions were as low as it claimed.
Prior to his role with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Kevin Morrison spent 30 years as a financial journalist. What's more, Mr Martin said some of the assumptions made by Professor Howarth were open to debate, such as his estimate that 2.5 per cent of LNG leaked as methane from the pipes and distribution networks of gas companies.
While methane lost much of its potency when measured over a 100-year time-frame, he said it was 86 times' more potent than carbon over a 20-year horizon — a time when action to reduce global warming would be most pressing.
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