Leading gas producers promote natural gas as climate-friendly transition fuel

BEIJING: Some of the world’s leading natural gas producers pitched their fuel as the solution to countries grappling with expanding use of intermittent renewables to cut their emissions.

Burning gas emits about half the greenhouse gases of coal, and countries shouldn’t ignore the benefits of such incremental step toward reducing emissions, TotalEnergies SE Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne said during a panel discussion at a World Gas Conference in Beijing. Gas producers need to focus on lowering costs to compete with coal in emerging markets, he said.

“Coal is the real enemy for gas, the competitor, because it’s produced in many emerging countries like China and India, it provides jobs and, whether we like it or not, it’s cheap,” Pouyanne said.

The view is in stark contrast to environmentalists, who warm that rather than serving as a temporary bridge to clean energy, gas could become as entrenched as coal once was. What’s more, satellite observations suggest that the gas industry generates more methane than reported – and such emissions pose a greater immediate threat to the climate than carbon dioxide.

Gas and renewable can complement each other as power systems adopt more wind and solar that only generate electricity when weather conditions are right, he Pouyanne added. He pointed to the example of Germany, where the government is looking to build more gas plants after a prolonged period of low wind earlier this year sapped power.

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“There was no wind coming a week,” he said. “You think that customers wait a week to have electricity? No way. They want 24/7 electricity. That means that even if you build a beautiful renewable system, you need a backup system.”

That potential complementary relationship has led some to label gas a transition fuel as countries move toward eventually ending the use of fossil fuels. But for Malaysia’s state-owned Petronas, that’s an unlikely outcome in places like Asia where energy demand continues to grow rapidly. Instead gas companies should develop ways to control the planet-warming emissions that come from burning or releasing the fuel.

“Gas is not a transition fuel,” Petronas Presidnet Tengku Taufik said on the panel. “In certain geographies it’s a destination fuel if properly abated and if properly managed within the energy mix.”

Comapanies like Patronas and Australia’s Woodside Energy Group Ltd, are talking with custoemrs about long-term solutions that emit no greenhouse gases, such as ammonia and hydrogen. But until those fuels are scalable and economically competitive, buyers should take incremental steps that help reduce coal emissions, Woodside CEO Meg O’Neil said.

“There are some people in the world who would just as soon see us leap from where we are today to a net zero emissions world tomorrow,” O’Neil said. “And we need to acknowledge that steps that help us reduce emissions over time are good steps and we should be supporting those steps.”