LNG export boom runs up against climate goals

The U.S. is on track to export more liquefied natural gas (LNG) than any other country on earth in 2023 — and the U.S. LNG export industry is planning for a surge of growth over the coming years. But to avoid the worst of climate chaos, the world needs to dramatically slash demand for natural gas, bringing it down at least 20% by 2030 and 75% by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency.

Will expansion of LNG exports hold the world back from aggressive climate action?

From the 1950s through the turn of the 21st century, the United States was a net energy importer, but the shale oil and fracking boom of the 2010s completely redrew the global energy map. Within just a few years, the U.S. became a net energy exporter. In 2016, for the first time, the U.S. began exporting natural gas in its liquefied form.

To serve a market for LNG that has been turbocharged by the Russian war in Ukraine, the U.S. and other countries are rushing to expand export terminals and their industrial capacity for the energy-intensive process of preparing natural gas for shipping overseas.

Without a pipeline, moving gas at scale requires super-cooling it to -260º Fahrenheit, at which point it is liquefied and reduced in volume so it can be loaded into specially designed LNG tankers roughly 1,000 feet long.

If the gas industry succeeds in building all those facilities, their operation could emit more greenhouse gases each year than 20 new coal-fired power plants, according to the Environmental Integrity Project. And that would not account for the emissions from drilling or fracking the gas before it’s exported or the emissions from burning it at its destination.

“U.S. LNG exports pose a direct and serious threat to our ability to secure a livable, habitable and just climate,” Morgan Johnson, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Canary Media. “Natural gas in all forms contributes to climate change, and at every step of its lifecycle LNG emits potent methane. LNG production, transport and processing are highly energy-intensive, which makes the LNG industry’s climate footprint even more sizable.”

The prospective LNG-export buildout in the U.S. would also boost air pollution and explosion risk in nearby areas, which are home to many lower-income residents and communities of color, demographic groups that are already heavily exposed to dangerous air pollution. The planned LNG-export facilities “are more likely than existing terminals to impact people of color and Hispanics or Latinos, which represent 38 percent of the population living within three miles of proposed LNG terminals — 10 percent higher than those living in proximity to existing terminals,” the Environmental Integrity Project reported in 2020.

“Sacrifice zones and sacrifice communities are now being further sacrificed with the exploitation of this gas,” John Beard of the Port Arthur Community Action Network told Canary Media. “They don't build these facilities in places like Beverly Hills.” Beard, a former oil-refinery operator, now leads a community group trying to stop two LNG-export projects in Port Arthur, Texas, a city whose population is 75% Black and Hispanic. “Not only is it disrupting the local ecosystems,” he said, “but now they're exporting this very toxic, harmful gas to other parts of the world, which is going to further exacerbate climate change.”

LNG exports also drive up energy bills for Americans, consumer advocates contend, because gas sells for more on the international market than on the domestic market.

But the impacts of LNG exports extend far beyond the U.S.

So who is buying all of this American LNG?

South Korea aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The country’s plan calls for phasing down coal, scaling up renewables, and embracing hydrogen in a big way — as well as continuing to import LNG, at least for the next decade or so.

Hydrogen doesn’t emit carbon dioxide when it is burned, but today about 95% of it is produced using gas and other fossil fuels in processes that do result in CO2 emissions. South Korea intends to produce some of its hydrogen with renewable energy and some with gas paired with carbon capture — though that technology has yet to become commercially viable and its climate benefits are hotly contested.

China uses more natural gas directly in homes and businesses than it does for power generation, and it uses more still for industrial operations.

By using gas instead of coal for these purposes, China has improved its air quality and cut greenhouse gas emissions. “Gas has been a key ally in China’s war on pollution,” the International Energy Agency reported in 2019.

Gas advocates tout the pollution-cutting benefits of switching from coal to gas and say the fuel can play a “bridge” role, helping countries move away from coal before they’re ready to switch largely to clean energy.

Clean-energy advocates point out that while gas releases about half as much CO2 pollution as coal when it burns, methane that leaks from gas production and distribution systems could potentially cancel out that climate benefit. They also make the case that a rapid shift to renewables is increasingly within reach.

To avoid locking in reliance on gas, capital should be invested in clean energy rather than new LNG facilities, the renewables advocates argue. Building out export capacity for fossil gas is inconsistent with the pathway the IEA has laid out for reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, which calls for no new oil and gas supply beyond what was approved as of 2021. The net-zero-by-2050 goal is intended to keep overall climate warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the threshold scientists say we need to stay below to avert catastrophic climate change.

Gas currently plays widely differing roles in different countries’ energy systems, as shown in these charts of the electricity mixes of top importers of U.S. LNG.

It’s not clear whether gas will help these countries meet their commitments to reach net-zero emissions in the coming decades. The Climate Action Tracker gives all 10 top importers of U.S. LNG poor to middling grades for their current climate progress, ranging from “critically insufficient” to “almost sufficient.”

Seven of the top 10 countries importing U.S. LNG have signed onto the Global Methane Pledge, as has the U.S. Launched in 2021, the pledge calls for cutting methane emissions at least 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030. Methane is dramatically more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide for the first 20 years after it’s released, and it’s now leaking from every link in the chain of fossil gas and LNG production and transport, so upping gas production and LNG exports is likely to lead to more methane pollution, not less.

Some gas producers and LNG exporters in the U.S. are starting to address methane leaks and seeking to certify some gas shipments as “green” or climate-friendly. Reducing methane leaks is all for the good, but so far the market for this so-called green gas is “a Wild West frontier filled with mudslinging and smoke and mirrors,” as Jeff Ball reports in an investigation for Canary Media.

The big danger behind building out new LNG export capacity in the U.S. and other exporting countries — and constructing LNG import infrastructure and gas systems in importing countries — is that nations will get locked into using gas and likely fail to rapidly make the needed shift to clean energy.

Under the IEA’s net-zero pathway laid out in a report last year, global LNG trade would peak in the mid‐2020s and then fall to 2021 levels by 2030 — a scenario that appears to be at odds with a major new buildout of LNG export infrastructure. “Natural gas now faces existential questions about its long‐term future” because of increased climate ambition in some emerging-market and developing countries in Asia, said IEA in the same report.

Anne-Sophie Corbeau and Abhiram Rajendran, energy market experts at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy, last year cautioned the LNG industry about aggressive buildout. “With an eye on the energy transition, preventing overbuild will be important,” they wrote in a September 2022 paper on U.S. LNG and gas capacity. “Net-zero scenarios highlight the possibility that LNG exports could peak in the 2030s, providing a long-term risk for U.S. LNG export facilities.”

The U.S. LNG industry has cited Russia’s war in Ukraine, which choked gas supplies in Europe, as a major rationale for building more export terminals. But the war has also pushed European countries to speed up their shift to clean energy and electrification. And as gas prices have risen, renewable energy has looked ever more appealing. “Competition from low-cost renewables such as solar PV and wind has now narrowed the space for growth in natural gas,” IEA noted last year. “The environmental case for clean energy needed no reinforcement, but the economic arguments in favor of cost-competitive and affordable clean technologies are now stronger — and so is the energy security case.”

The Climate Action Tracker, an independent research consortium, also cautioned in a November report that the LNG industry’s latest expansion strategy, in part a reaction to the energy crisis triggered by Russia, “is an overreach that must be scaled back.” It calculates that if all of the LNG capacity currently under construction or planned around the world is actually built, the oversupply of LNG by 2030 could be almost five times the amount that the European Union imported from Russia in 2021.

The Climate Action Tracker report lays out the situation bluntly: “Massive LNG expansion plans will seriously compromise meeting the 1.5°C limit.”