“We think that we can switch to another vehicle, but we are still driving towards the abyss,” said Andy Gheorghiu, a Germany-based anti-gas and fracking campaigner after US president Joe Biden and European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen announced aUS-EU gas deal to reduce Russian energy dependence.
An extra 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas (LNG) — nearly all sourced from hydraulic fracking wells that have mushroomed across the United States — will now land on Europe’s shores from across the Atlantic this year. But this is only about one-third of the gas that Germany alone piped in from Russia in 2022.
Activists fear that replacing gas with more expensive gas — because of the new infrastructure required to significantly increase LNG imports — will not ensure energy security, but instead threaten longer-term climate goals.
“[This] agreement puts the EU and the US on a misguided and dangerous path by fast-tracking new infrastructure to import fossil gas into Europe,” said Murray Worthy, gas campaign leader at the environment NGO Global Witness. “Building new import terminals would mean locking in fossil gas imports for years to come, long after the EU needs to quit this climate-wrecking fuel for good.”
Concerns are also growing about the immediate climate impacts of LNG fracked from shale deposits deep under the ground.
Though fracking is banned in the European Union because of its environmental impact, including the use of chemicals, the EU says it is happy to source it from the US.
Fracked gas and climate-wrecking methane leakage
For campaigners, the push to ramp up so-called “freedom gas” has severe climate implications because of the fact that it derives from fracked sources that have high methane emissions. Noting that methane is the most potent greenhouse gas (GHG) — its global heating impacts are around methane 85 times higher than CO2 over a 20-year period — Gheorghiu says that little has been done to tackle the diverse sources of “supply-side” methane leaks on both sides of the Atlantic.
Nonetheless, the US-EU agreement announced on Thursday was careful to couple the goal of diversifying gas supplies with “climate objectives.”
The LNG deal therefore aims to “reduce the greenhouse gas intensity of all new LNG infrastructure and associated pipelines, including through using clean energy to power onsite operations, reducing methane leakage, and building clean and renewable hydrogen-ready infrastructure.”
Yet, if Russian gas is simply to be replaced in the short-to-medium term, it is likely to retain its mantle as the second-largest source of CO2 emissions after coal in the European Union.
Meanwhile across the Atlantic, Gheorghiu points out that inconsistent regulations have made some US states a “wild west” for the fracking industry.
In Texas, for example, high emissions from so-called methane flaring often go unregulated, allowing leakage from the tens of thousands of wells in the Permian Basin that stretches into New Mexico — its gas reserves have been labeled “some of the dirtiest in the world.”
Indeed, one 2019 study attributed a decade of a decade of growth in global atmospheric methane emissions to the fracking boom in the US. It concluded that shale-gas production in North America may be responsible for over half of all of the increased emissions from fossil fuels globally” in the previous decade.
Much of the gas imported to Europe is also being used as a chemical feedstock for plastics and fertilizers, notes Gheorghiu, meaning new LNG will be a disincentive to decarbonize these high emission raw material sectors.
1.5 degree target threatened by LNG exports
Researchers Amanda Levin and Christina Swanson from the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council have concludedthat US attempts to ramp up LNG production and exports would scupper any chance of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees.
They describe the “rapidly expanding” export of what has been marketed as a “bridging fuel” to a clean energy transition — emissions are about 50% lower than coal — but which will “lock in fossil fuel dependence, making the transition to actual low-carbon and no-carbon energy even more difficult.”
The research shows the climate impact of LNG will double when extraction, transport, liquefaction, and re-gasification is added to the GHG emissions of actual gas burning.
The 130 to 213 million metric tons of new GHG emissions in the US generated by a tripling of exports between 2020 and 2030 will be like putting up to 45 million more fossil fuel-powered cars on the road annually — it will also reverse the 1% annual GHG decline achieved in the last decade, say the authors.
LNG will still not replace Russian gas
While German Economy Minister Robert Habeck has also been in Qatar and the UAEthis month trying to find more gas alternatives, analysts say limited supply and soaringglobal demand make it difficult to massively increase the LNG flow to Europe.
Meanwhile, necessary infrastructure such as terminals will take two to three years to construct, making Europe’s goal of cutting Russian gas imports by two-thirds by year’s end unlikely.
For climate campaigners, fossil fuel energy is a key driver of war and needs to be phased-out and replaced by renewable energy.
“More investment and reliance on fossil fuels is music to the ears of despots and warmongers all over the world who recognize this is an energy system that benefits them,” said Global Witness’ Murray Worthy. “If Europe truly wants to get off Russian gas the only real option it has is phasing out gas altogether.”
“We have the unique historical chance and obligation to choose now for a radical shift of the way we generate and consume energy,” said Gheorghiu. “But the solution our trans-Atlantic governments presented was nothing but business-as-usual.”
The true cost of fracked US ‘freedom gas’
Source: Pinoy Pop News
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