For generations natural gas has been embraced as the clean alternative to burning coal to make electricity, so clean indeed that we pipe it into our living rooms to sit around its warmth, to cook our food and heat our water.
Now a growing global movement of scientists and activists has cast it as a fuel so dirty that it should not only be avoided but even banned from new buildings.
A Santos gas flare burns off unwanted gasses.Credit:Dean Sewell
Despite its reassuringly benign name, natural gas is almost entirely methane, a gas that during its first decade in the atmosphere is around 84 times more powerful a climate warming agent than the carbon dioxide released by burning coal.
As a fuel for electricity production it remains far cleaner than coal, but when burnt in our stoves it releases potentially dangerous fine particle pollution and nitrogen dioxide.
Because it is colourless and odourless, the amount of methane escaping unburnt into the atmosphere has been impossible to measure until recently. Now a new generation of satellites can track methane emissions and have proved a dangerous global increase.
According to the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the increase during 2021 was a record 17 parts per billion, following another record the year before of 15.3. Atmospheric methane levels averaged 1895.7 parts per billion during 2021, or around 162 per cent greater than pre-industrial levels.
The new satellites confirm scientists’ fears that methane is escaping as so-called “fugitive emissions” from Russia’s warming tundra, from landfills and coal mines around the world, from agriculture and from the world’s sprawling web of natural gas infrastructure.
At last year’s COP26 climate talks in Glasgow more than 100 nations signed a pledge to contribute to a global effort to reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030.
Spurred on by activists, New York City last year banned the connection of new buildings to gas mains, joining a growing slate of mostly Democratic jurisdictions across the United States. (The Greens are championing a similar policy in Victoria.)
Pursuing ambitious climate targets and seeking to sever its link to Russian exports, Europe is fast-tracking its efforts to dump gas, with the Netherlands in May announcing that it would ban the use of gas for heating in new homes from 2025.
The industry is fighting back and was revealed last year to have paid social media influencers to post about how much they liked using gas in both the United States and Australia.
Australia, at the time pursuing a “gas-led recovery” from the economic shock of the pandemic, did not sign the methane pledge in Glasgow, though this week Resources Minister Madeline King told The Guardian the new government would consider signing on.
Despite this, King has also told the Herald and The Age that new domestic gas fields would be part of the solution to the current energy crisis. Energy experts agree that gas “peaker plants” will be needed during a transition to a cleaner energy system to back up renewables during periods of extremely high demand.
So concerned about the potentially damaging impacts of the gas-led recovery were Australian scientists that in 2020 a group of 25 wrote a letter to Australia’s then-chief scientist, Alan Finkel, to voice their opposition.
“The combustion of natural gas is now the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the most important greenhouse gas driving climate change,” they wrote.
“On a decadal time frame, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
“In Australia, the rapid rise in methane emissions is due to the expansion of the natural gas industry. The rate of methane leakage from the full gas economy, from exploration through to end use, has far exceeded earlier estimates.”
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