Worrying Too Much, Or Not Enough, About Natural Gas?

Posted by Sonja Ebron

Unlike oil, whose production follows a bell curve, natural gas production tends to peak and drop off a cliff. Oil is liquid and therefore easy to import, while natural gas is mostly restricted to pipelines because it’s a gas. You don’t want to carry large volumes of gas over the shipping lanes unless you like fireworks a lot.

Five or ten years ago, something like 90% of all new power plants were being built to use natural gas as a fuel. Lots of industrial processes also switched to use natural gas directly. Over time, those changes lifted demand for natural gas while supply stayed flat, and now it’s expensive. Natural gas production in the lower 48 U.S. states has nearly peaked, so we get a lot from Canada and Mexico. But exporting countries increasingly need more of their own stuff, so we’ve either got to find a way to import from others or to dramatically decrease consumption soon.

Liquified natural gas to the rescue! According to the Center for Liquified Natural Gas (CLNG), an industry trade association, the gap between supply and demand for natural gas will be 20% in 20 years, and only LNG can fill the gap. In short, wherever you find a natural gas field overseas, you pump it through pipelines to the LNG plant on the coast, which cools it down to liquid state. Then you pump it onto a ship and drive it to an LNG plant on our coast, which heats it up to regasify it.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says LNG now comprises 2% of the gas used in the northeast but could make up 17% by 2025. But it will take hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment to make that happen. And that doesn’t begin to address the environmental dangers. The Energy Justice Network is a great resource for some of the serious environmental consequences of natural gas production and LNG facilities.