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The answer depends on where it’s going and what it’s replacing.
President Biden’s decision to pause approving liquified natural gas export terminals until it can better study their climate effects — functionally delaying or even outright preventing their construction — got real political, real fast. Almost immediately, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin called for a hearing on the president’s decision-making.
“If the Administration has the facts to prove that additional LNG export capacity would hurt Americans, they must make that information public and clear,” he said in a statement last week. “But if this pause is just another political ploy to pander to keep-it-in-the-ground climate activists at the expense of American workers, businesses and our allies in need, I will do everything in my power to end this pause immediately.”
While Senator Manchin is not exactly the administration’s biggest fan lately, he’s also asking some pretty interesting questions. One of the animating ideas of the past few months in climate politics has been the argument that LNG (and maybe even pipeline gas) are in fact far worse for the global climate even than coal, which has long been assumed to be the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fossil fuel around. That view is based on research by Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth and has been expounded by climate advocates and elected officials alike.
But that research has not yet passed through peer review. Even if it had, Howarth’s past research has gotten criticism from other climate scientists for using some idiosyncratic assumptions that yield more dramatic results.
Make no mistake, meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement and holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels requires winding down our use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. If we meet those goals, the natural gas export terminals delayed by the Biden administration’s decision will likely go dormant well before the end of their expected lifespans. But it’s not the case that in all possible worlds, continuing or even expanding natural gas production and exports would actually be worse for the climate.
The basic physics of coal emissions versus LNG emissions are just part of the equation. When it’s burned, natural gas releases carbon dioxide, the primary source of human-caused climate change, albeit less carbon dioxide than coal. But natural gas is itself mostly methane, CH4, which traps far more heat than CO2 when it leaks from wells, pipelines, and production facilities. (LNG is also much more energy-intensive to extract, produce, and store than regular natural gas, since it has to be cooled to -260 degrees Fahrenheit, sailed across the ocean and then “regasified” and shipped via pipeline on the other side.) While CH4 is more potent than CO2 from a warming perspective, it also breaks down much more quickly in the atmosphere, which means the warming effect doesn’t last as long.
How to think about LNG’s effect on overall emissions, then, largely depends on how much you think each of these factors matters. “Only if we assume high methane leakage rates and a 20-year global warming potential is natural gas worse than coal, and such assumptions are likely unrealistic,” wrote Carnegie Mellon energy systems researcher Paulina Jaramillo in an essay titled, aptly, “Navigating the LNG Dilemma.”
Absolute emissions aren’t even what we should be asking about, Arvind Ravikumar, a professor at the University of Texas and a leading scholar on natural gas and energy policy, told me. “The climate impact of U.S. LNG depends on what it replaces in countries — whether those alternatives have more or less emissions than U.S. LNG.”
When the United States stepped in to replace much of the gas the European Union would otherwise buy from Russia with LNG, Ravikumar explained, it likely reduced overall emissions because of lower methane emissions from the U.S. gas industry. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia supplied about 155 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Europe; by 2022, that was down to around 80 billion cubic meters. That’s a lot of energy to replace. In that time, the U.S. more than doubled its LNG exports to Europe, which has guaranteed demand of at least 50 billion cubic meters from the U.S. through 2030.
Had the U.S. not ramped up its LNG exports, boosters argue, these countries might not have had a viable alternative and might have turned to coal, instead. But that won’t be the case in every single possible future scenario. “There’s no right answer,” Ravikumar told me. “It depends on who buys, what time frame, which country, and how are they using LNG.”
There’s at least one clear case study of the coal-to-gas switch working to lower emissions: the United States itself.
In 2007, the U.S. was consuming just over 1 billion tons of coal for electricity; by 2016 that had declined to 679 million, and by 2022 to just under 500 million — in other words, by more than half. In that same time, natural gas use for electricity grew from 7 trillion cubic feet in 2007 to 10 trillion cubic feet in 2016 to 12 trillion cubic feet in 2022.
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have dropped more than 15% since 2007 to even below their 1992 levels, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Rhodium Group. The drop in emissions has been going on since 2010, which the EPA attributes, in part, to "the growing use of natural gas and renewables to generate electricity in place of more carbon-intensive fuels.”
As climatologist Zeke Hausfather put it in an earlier commentary on an earlier Howarth paper, “While it isn’t responsible for the majority of emissions reductions, natural gas replacing coal is the largest single driver.”
Much of the conceptual infrastructure on which climate policy operates relies on estimating what the world will be like in the future — not just figuring out the effects of different levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, but also figuring out different likely pathways for the evolution of those emissions over time.
This works in both directions — asking how specific projects either reduce or lower emissions, and asking about what an energy system would look like in a world where emissions have been reduced enough to avoid certain levels of temperature increases. And that’s really where the rubber meets the road.
In a scenario where the world hits its Paris Agreement goals, there would not be the coal-to-gas switching envisioned by LNG advocates precisely because there would be very little coal still being used to generate electricity. The fear, then, is that LNG terminals would either become stranded assets, capital investments that wind up becoming liabilities; or that, once they’re in operation, the companies behind them would use their political and economic leverage — not to mention just the power of inertia — to keep enough natural gas in the global energy system to be profitable.
“Either you’re building and planning to shut it down early,” Hausfather told me, “or you’re building something that’s going to be inconsistent with the world we’re aiming to have under our climate targets.”
In a Paris-compliant world, almost 90% of the world’s coal reserves and over half of the natural gas and oil reserves will stay in the ground, according to researchers from University College London. They estimate that in order to meet the Paris targets, gas production would “see rapid decline” from 2020 to 2050 and would be eliminated as a fuel for electricity generation by 2040, with accompanying “low utilization rates of infrastructure, and limited prospect for future additional liquefaction capacity” for exports.
In other words, in a world that comes in under 1.5 degrees of warming, the emissions reductions from coal-to-gas switching peter out after 2035; with 2 degrees of warming it’s around 2040 to 2045 — in any case, beyond the planned life of the export terminals that the Biden administration’s decision affects.
But how much LNG export capacity the United States builds up in the next decade is only a tiny part of the overall emissions picture now, in 2035, or in 2050. “This is the issue with regulating at a project level in general,” energy consultant Sean Smillie told me. “The decision of any given project in the scheme of global emissions is small. For me, that points to the fact that we’re trying to regulate climate change — which is a systemic issue — at the project level, and that’s a very hard thing to do.”
The biggest question is just how energy systems overseas evolve — and what role LNG exports play in that determination. The European Union is about to decide whether to reduce its net collective emissions 90% from 1990 levels by 2040, on their way to zero by 2050, which would signal a sharp reduction in demand coming from that part of the world. Meanwhile, for U.S. LNG export projects currently in the permitting pipeline, Asian countries are contracted to receive a much bigger share, according to a Public Citizen analysis. Bloomberg reports that those buyers have started looking elsewhere — including to Russia.
But what if we don’t hit our Paris Agreement targets, as the United Nations and Bill Gates agree we’re increasingly unlikely to do? What if developing countries prioritize cheap, available energy (like India’s growing coal production) over climate goals? In that case, Ravikumar argues, then LNG export capacity turns from a potential “stranded asset” into an insurance policy.
“The way to think about LNG in the longer term is the insurance against a 3 [degrees of warming] world,” Ravikumar told me. If we fail at taking quick action to change our systems from carbon-polluting to zero-carbon energy, we might still be doing some coal-to-gas switching by 2050.
“It’s hard to say for certain that we will or not need the LNG export terminals by 2050 and 2060,” Elan Sykes, an energy policy analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute and an opponent of the Biden administration’s decision, told me. “Absent aggressive foreign policy measures [like] a Green Marshall Plan for worldwide clean energy, it’s hard to imagine a world where LNG doesn’t provide” some value, whether from continuing to help reduce emissions or simply maintaining a reliable supply of energy, he said.
Modelers are good at figuring out what the energy mix of a 1.5, 2, or 3-degree world would look like. They’re less good at predicting how that energy mix will evolve over time in the world we actually live in — and it’s in that world that the Biden administration will have to decide whether more LNG exports will serve the public interest.
The job isn’t just to make decisions for an ideal world. As Hausfather told me, it’s “aiming at the best versus mitigating the worst.”
With reporting by Emily Pontecorvo.
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.