[rad-green] Green Myths Canada’s LNG Sales Forc e Tells the World

*https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2020/01/23/Canada-LNG-Sales-Force-Green-Myths/
<https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2020/01/23/Canada-LNG-Sales-Force-Green-Myths/>*

*TheTyee.ca          January 23, 2020*







*Green Myths Canada’s LNG Sales Force Tells the WorldNo, methane’s no fix
for global coal-fired energy. Here’s why.By Andrew NikiforukAndrew
Nikiforuk is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about the
energy industry for two decades and is a contributing editor to The Tyee. *

[image: Trudeau-Horgan-Handshake-Cover.jpg]*Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
and B.C. Premier John Horgan shake hands as LNG Canada CEO Andy Calitz,
back right, watches during a news conference in October 2018. Photo by
Darryl Dyck, the Canadian Press.*

Representatives of the British Columbia, Alberta and federal governments
are making the global rounds these days to sell the notion that liquefied
natural gas exports can help the climate crisis.

Dave Nikolejsin, deputy minister of the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and
Petroleum Resources, for example, flew to Japan
<https://www.glaciermedia.ca/story/energy-group-attends-key-tokyo-briefing-canadian-lng>
last
September along with members of the Canadian Society for Unconventional
Resources.

There they tried to impress upon the Japanese attendees “the role of
Canadian LNG in meeting global climate policy objectives and reducing
emissions of carbon dioxide.”

The pitch goes like this: According to LNG Canada, the big Shell project
now under construction in northern B.C., could replace 20 to 40 coal-fired
plants in countries like China and India with Canadian methane, and reduce
their emissions by 60 to 90 million tonnes.

That’s impressive, says LNG Canada
<https://www.lngcanada.ca/news/a-company-of-significance-to-all-of-canada-essay/>,
because 90 million tons equals about 80 per cent of Canada’s car pollution.
Or all of B.C.’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

And so, while the blockaders of northern B.C.’s LNG Canada pipeline await
police eviction while claiming to stand up for Indigenous sovereignty and
climate protection, backers of the project lay claim
<https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/the-lng-canada-project-will-help-asia-kick-its-dirty-coal-habit-why-are-we-resisting-it>
to
their own moral high ground.In fact, Darren Gee, president and CEO of Peyto
Exploration, which fracks for gas in B.C., believes Canada has a “moral
obligation to provide the rest of the world with the country’s clean,
responsibly-developed energy to improve lives and preserve the environment.”

Such claims are problematic, if not false. The best evidence to date
reveals two quite inconvenient truths.

One, B.C.’s LNG is not cleaner than coal, due to leakage rates in our
fracked shale fields of three per cent.

Two, there is no guarantee that China will use Canadian gas to actually
displace coal power production, given that coal-fired plants already
operate as efficiently as methane-fueled ones.

Let’s take those in order.

1. Leaky LNG actually poses a bigger climate threat than coal

It’s true that LNG burns cleaner than coal, but when unburned and released
into the atmosphere it is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon
dioxide in the short term. Methane’s warming effect is 87 times greater
than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, and 36 times greater over a
100-year period.
SELLING ASIA OUR LNG COULD RAISE GAS BILLS HERE

Respected energy analyst David Hughes turned up some odd numbers. Real
proven reserves of methane in Canada total 71 trillion cubic feet and have
been declining since 2015. But the Canada Energy Regulator has already
granted licenses to export 90 tcf over a 40-year period, leaving Canadian
gas consumers out of the picture.

According to Hughes, LNG exports will set “Canadians up for higher prices
and potential supply shortfalls, given the propensity of industry to
extract the most economic and lowest cost resources first.”

That has already happened in Australia, the world’s largest exporter of LNG
at the moment. There, LNG exports supported by massive volumes of fracking
have come with “staggering costs,” says
<https://ieefa.org/the-staggering-cost-of-gas-in-australia/> the Institute
for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Prices for gas consumers in eastern Australia have tripled. In addition,
many shale gas companies have recorded massive losses due to the high costs
of fracking. Because LNG exports have raised methane prices domestically,
local industries have reduced methane demand by 14 per cent since 2014.
High prices have also collapsed demand for gas powered electricity. “Simply
put, gas is not a transition fuel in Australia. It is too expensive,”
concluded IEEFA.

The report ends with this kicker: “Australians however are not the
beneficiaries of their own natural wealth. Australian consumers pay more
for gas than Australia’s gas customers in Japan.” — *Andrew Nikiforuk*

And thanks to fracking, a lot of LNG does escape unburned into the
atmosphere, the amount  accelerating
<https://thetyee.ca/News/2016/09/16/Oil-Gas-Methane-Emissions/> in recent
years due to venting, flaring, leaks, spills and other factors tied to the
drilling method.

Methane emissions rose in the last two decades of the 20th century and then
stabilized in the first decade of 21st century. But between 2008 and 2014 —
at the height of the fracking boom — methane levels climbed
<https://www.biogeosciences.net/16/3033/2019/> from 570 billions tons to
595 billion tonnes annually.

Robert Howarth, a professor at Cornell University, recently calculated
<https://www.biogeosciences.net/16/3033/2019/> that one-third of total
rising global methane emissions came from one source, “the
commercialization of shale gas and oil in the 21st century.”

If you want to slow global warming immediately, Howarth recommends, “the
best strategy is to move as quickly as possible away from natural gas,
reducing both carbon dioxide and methane emissions.”

Meanwhile the industry’s supply chain has developed a multi-billion-dollar
methane leakage problem.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the industry annually flares off
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/oil-producers-are-setting-billions-of-dollars-on-fire-11578652210>
more
than five trillion cubic feet of methane, or several billions of dollars
worth, mostly as waste from fracked oil fields.

Last year, satellite imagery discovered
<https://www.pnas.org/content/116/52/26376> that just one major well
methane blow-out at a well site in Ohio released more methane into the
atmosphere than several European countries over a 20-day period. Well
blow-outs happen in Alberta and B.C. too.

According to Environmental Defence Fund, which has carefully studied
methane leakage in conjunction with industry experts for years, three per
cent of the methane produced at shale gas fields leak and destabilize the
atmosphere. “The potency of those emissions make natural gas from these
sites worse than U.S. coal in terms of its impact on climate change.”

Analysts note that if industry kept this leakage rates below one per cent,
it could argue that methane is cleaner than coal. But to date they haven’t.

Canada’s conventional and shale gas industry has long under reported its
so-called “fugitive emissions.” They occur at well sites, tanks, compressor
stations, gas processing plants and pipelines — the whole supply chain
feeding liquified natural gas.

One significant 2018 study measured methane leaks at 60 oil and gas sites
near Red Deer, Alberta. It found
<https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.284/> emissions
at ground level were 15 times higher than industry reported to regulators
and Canada’s national inventory for tracking methane emissions.

A recent paper on the state of leaking wells in British Columbia also
emphasized
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337350041_A_portrait_of_wellbore_leakage_in_northeastern_British_Columbia_Canada>
that
under-reporting was a major problem. It estimated that 10 per cent (2329
wells) of the province’s 21,000 wells tested for leakage spew about 75,000
tonnes of methane a year. “However, this number is likely higher due to
underreporting.”

The study explains that reporting of wellbore leakage in B.C. only goes as
far back as 1995, and there is currently no requirement to test for leaks
at the province’s nearly 6,000 abandoned wells. “In Canada, there is no
requirement to monitor wells for leakage following their abandonment,
despite the fact that gas leakage from abandoned wells in the province is a
well-documented phenomenon.”

To date, most estimates on well leakage in B.C. and Alberta are based on
just one-time measurements. But a variety of factors can affect how methane
moves and pulsates through the earth as it searches for pathways to the
surface or into groundwater. One of those factors is barometric pressure.
(Earthquakes are another.)

High-pressure fronts tend to keep methane in the ground. But an important
study <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-50426-3> by UBC
researchers found that low-pressure fronts encourage methane’s release by
more than 20 fold. That means current regulatory monitoring doesn’t provide
adequate estimates of gas leakage and that frequent and continuous methane
monitoring is required — something Canadian regulators and industry have
avoided.

Even the Canadian Energy Research Institute, a pro-industry group, has
aptly summed up
<https://ceri.ca/studies/economic-and-environmental-impacts-of-methane-emissions-reduction-in-the-natural-gas-supply-chain>
the
problem of extensive methane leakage from industry: “There is a consensus
about a knowledge gap in the amount of methane emitted from the natural gas
supply chain.”
[image: 851px version of LNG-Landscape.jpg]The LNG Canada project under
construction near Kitimat, B.C. The province’s LNG is not in fact cleaner
than coal, due to leakage rates in our fracked shale fields. Photo by Robin
Rowland, the Canadian Press.

2. There is no guarantee LNG will ‘replace’ Asia’s coal burning

But what about industry’s claim that Canada’s clean LNG will replace dirty
coal-fired power in China and India?

That doesn’t conform with reality. Recent Canadian research on Chinese
household behaviour illustrates
<https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/rural-china-rapidly-adopts-clean-energy-use-traditional-wood-and-coal-stoves-persists-303128>
 why.

Chinese homeowners adopted new clean stoves but kept their coal and wood
stoves working too. Canadian researchers noted that “Efforts made by
governments, NGOs, and researchers to incentivize households to switch
entirely to clean fuel stoves and give up their traditional stoves — even
in highly controlled randomized trials — have largely failed.”

In fact, people rarely substitute energy sources because they prefer to
augment them and thereby use more energy. In all likelihood LNG imports
would end up just supplementing energy demand.

In fact, a major component of China’s climate plan
<https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/23/china-energy-to-expand-ultra-low-emission-coal-fired-power-executive/>
has
nothing to do with methane. It encourages replacing inefficient, older coal
plants with ultra-efficient ones.And that’s exactly what the Chinese are
now doing
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2019/01/23/coal-is-not-dead-china-proves-it/#39e617c965fa>
with
coal. Rather than treat coal as hostile to the planet’s fate, China now
plans to fund $36-billion worth of coal-fired plants in Pakistan, South
Africa, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, while at home coal power generation has
been rising at six per cent per year.

David Hughes, one of Canada’s foremost energy analysts, recently did the
math on life cycle methane emissions from B.C. LNG and new coal plants in
China. He found
<https://docs2.cer-rec.gc.ca/ll-eng/llisapi.dll/fetch/2000/90466/94153/552726/3760154/3760155/3812245/C00919-2_Hughes_Report_-_Concerns_about_the_proposed_Kitimat_LNG_application_Aug_8_2019_FINAL_-_A6W7I1.pdf?nodeid=3812328&vernum=-2>
that
“best-technology coal would have 19.2 per cent fewer emissions at 20 years
than B.C. LNG.”

In other words, “B.C. LNG used to generate electricity in China compared to
best-technology coal would increase global emissions, thereby exacerbating
an already extremely serious climate problem.”

Don’t expect to hear any of this if you’re in the audience when Canada’s
virtue-signalling LNG boosters make their pitch. [image: [Tyee]]

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