Natural gas or methane suffers a bad reputation in relation to climate change because, unburnt, it is a profoundly dangerous greenhouse gas, being 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide in trapping radiation. Equally, of course, if you burn it, it turns into carbon dioxide and water, so the logic would be to burn as much as possible! This is a flippant remark, but what is certain is that reducing the amount of methane in the atmosphere is probably the quickest route available to reducing climate change and this is already happening in some parts of the world. Equally, of course, the bulk of the stuff that goes into the atmosphere does not come from drilling rigs planted in the earth and the oil and gas industry, although what does is probably easiest to control.

If this is a surprise, google searches can be very interesting. Tap in ‘natural gas’ and you get the impression that virtually all of it comes from deep in the earth and mankind’s desire for fuel. Tap in ‘methane’ (CH4) which is around 90% of what we call natural gas and you will find a huge variety of sources that generally outweigh by far the amount produced from drilling. The list is extensive: decaying marine organisms in oceans, rice planting, marshes, ruminants, manure, landfill and – let it not be forgotten – some species of termites.

There is a curious ambiguity here, to do with ‘anthropogenic’ emissions. The automatic assumption amongst many climate change activists is that anthropogenic simply means the oil, gas and coal industries, which unhappily is not the case. At least 38% of methane emissions come from natural sources, notably oceans, vegetation and biomass. What is concerning here is the likely effects of climate warming on this output. Where mankind marches in, with ruminants – notably cattle – and rice growing, probably accounts for 25%. Add in manure – some of it from a growing human population – and landfill at maybe 14% and that leaves about 23% coming from energy supplies and the rest from volcanos and the never to be forgotten termites.

These figures are taken from an April 2023 study by the International Centre for Climate Governance and are hardly precise, reflecting the perceived state of play. Frankly, the stats are pretty varied from many studies. Geothermal sources may be higher than previously estimated, while rice growing and termites both seem lower than previously thought, although the impact of rice growing may start to rise again due to increases in population.

In relation to energy, more than a third of the atmospheric methane does not come from the stuff that heats our homes, or indeed from the natural gas used to produce electricity. At least 43% of energy related methane comes from coal mines. This is unlikely to surprise many deep miners, where methane explosions have been the commonest source of fatalities down the ages. Open cast put an end to that, but its resident methane simply escapes into the atmosphere. The shift away from coal consumption thus has dual benefits by reducing both CO2 and CH4.

This is encouraging. As the IEA has pointed out, coal consumption worldwide has been on the decline since around 2012, falling from around a total 5,700 to 5,000 million tonnes. Around 60% of this consumption is for power production, which has fallen by a similar proportion. Although put down to Covid, this is not perhaps surprising. Coal-fired power plant take a lot of time – days – to fire up and run at around 35-40% thermal efficiency. By comparison, combined-cycle gas-fired turbines (CCGTs), use their heat to push steam through other turbines and have thermal efficiencies of up to 60%. They can also be fired up extremely rapidly.

In a power grid with an increasingly large component of renewables, like wind and solar, where supply fluctuates rapidly, coal-fired capacity has insufficient flexibility. While there is still a need for base load power, the general outlook would seem to suggest that it will diminish over time, which is happening in the USA and certainly happening in the European Union.

European production of coal declined from 277 million tonnes a year in 1990 to 57 million in 2021. With a special coal transition fund in place, most of the EU will be without coal-fired power generation by 2033 leaving only Poland and Germany still using it. These should be free of it by 2050, according to the plan. Of course, much of this transition has been due to the availability of natural gas, or methane itself. Elsewhere in the world, increasing use of solar is likely to reinforce this trend.

Yet it is in natural gas production and in its transportation that the quickest means to reduce global methane emissions can be found. This is not to say that gas transportation in pipelines is not a highly sophisticated business. The pipeline networks move gas through transnational pipelines across hundreds of kilometres from Siberia into Europe and from Canada into western USA and then into tiny rural and urban networks that deliver it directly to individual homes as well as power stations.

Long pipelines only make sense if they are at high pressure, sometimes around 1,500 psi to speed the progress of the gas. The Urenguoy-Uzhhorad line, which feeds Europe from western Siberia runs for 4,500 km, is 1,420 mm in diameter and is serviced by 42 compression stations. It is capable of transporting 32 billion cubic metres of gas every year. Even without the war in Ukraine, any accidents to this line and its resulting disruption can cause major increases in European gas prices, as happened as a result of three explosions in December 2022.

The war with Ukraine created a substantial difference to the supply of Russian gas into Europe, which is now at around 20% of its former level. Mysteriously lines from Russia, going under the Baltic Sea, were badly damaged in late September 2022. The lines were not transporting gas at the time, due to the war and who actually blew them up remains a mystery. Nord-Stream 1 was actually undergoing maintenance, while Nord-Stream 2 had never actually started to shift gas. This was, to say the least, fortunate, because the combined capacity of the lines was 110 billion cubic metres a year. As it was, the amount of natural gas released into the atmosphere was between 100,000-400,000 tonnes, or a record from a single source. It would have been much more if the lines were in full operation.

Either way, it can be certain that the lines did not blow themselves up, but the fact that neither was operating at the time makes the sabotage both less dangerous and more difficult to understand. The explosion did not benefit the Russians as they were not selling gas anyway and primary beneficiaries were US gas exporters, who ramped up Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) sales to Europe. That said, it is difficult to believe that the US Government could be that monumentally stupid for purely commercial gain.

What matters here in relation to climate change is whether the oil and gas industry does remotely enough to keep its gas production in pipes and not leaking into the air. The previous largest known leak was at Aliso Canyon in California, where SoCal Gas had an underground storage facility. How long the leak had been going on when it was discovered on 23^rd October 2015 remains unknown, but by the time it was actually declared safe in February 2016, it had delivered around 97,000 tonnes of methane into the atmosphere. For their corrupted pipes and lack of valves, SoCal was fined $4 million on a misdemeanour charge, which says rather a lot about the US legal system. Quite why it took so long to discover the leak and do something about it is a surprise, not least because a great many people in the surrounding area fell ill.

Things are improving, at least in terms of detection, largely through satellite technology. In this regard, Kayrros, the excellent Paris-based environmental data agency, is ahead of the field, with its slogan “what gets measured, gets managed.” To take just one example, Kayrros examined methane leakage over Turkmenistan and found that its onshore fields were releasing around 2.6 million tonnes of methane a year. Given that satellite detection is more difficult over water, this may be an under-estimate of Turkmenistan’s contribution without data from the Caspian Sea. According to Kayrros, Turkmenistan has more detected methane emitters than anywhere else on the planet.

This may be accounted for by the fact that Turkmenistan is venting their gas, rather than flaring it as used to happen under Soviet control. With the 4^th largest gas reserves on the planet, it is now China’s largest supplier. Given the impact this methane has on the global climate it is surprising how little attention has been brought to it, but it is unlikely that any nation outside China can have much influence. At bare minimum, this vented gas could be flared, with relatively little capital expenditure. Or better still it could be used to produce electricity.

This leads naturally on to flaring and why so much gas is flared. Here too, data has been much improved by satellite tracking. According to the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, gas flaring has fallen by around 14% since 1996. Nonetheless, the world still burned around 138.5 billion cubic metres of natural gas in 2022 as part of producing around 81 million barrels of oil a day. If this was actually sold on world markets it would probably be worth around $16 trillion.

The problem is that you can’t get the oil without also getting the associated gas and the oil is much easier to store. Equally, using the gas appears to require an expensive infrastructure over vast distances. When Britain, for example, developed its southern North Sea gas fields, which largely pre-dated its oil production, it already had a gas grid using ‘coal’ or ‘town’ gas made from heating coal and consisting largely of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. It was comparatively easy to replace this with natural gas, although it did require some adjustments to burning rings.

By contrast, most of the countries with flaring in relation to oil production have no, or little, gas infrastructure, or have production in areas far from inhabited places. Venezuela is a case in point, flaring around 7 billion cubic metres a year. Naturally enough, getting the gas to city markets through a network of large and then much smaller pipes would be a huge undertaking, but generating electricity in situ with gas turbines would make a significant difference to Venezuela’s chronic problems with its hydroelectricity. And much the same goes for Iraq, Iran and other chronic gas flaring countries.

At least part of the problem is that, surprisingly, large scale electricity lines are more expensive to build than large pipelines. In Canada, a joint Bonneville Power Administration and Northwest Gas Association concluded that gas pipelines could be laid at half the price of a power line, although the pipeline was more expensive to operate. In addition, gas lines were less subject to bad weather. Nonetheless, most nations have urban and rural access to electricity, even when they do not have a gas grid. In most parts of the world outside Europe and urban USA, the use of natural gas for cooking and central heating is a comparative rarity.

Either way, flaring, let alone venting natural gas for oil production, is not merely a chronic waste of a valuable energy resource but a major contributor to global warming and should be reduced as fast as possible. Fortunately, it is reducing, but it is not falling nearly fast enough. In 2022, around 139 billion cubic metres (Bcm) was flared compared with 144 Bcm in 2021, while oil production rose from 77 million barrels a day (mbd) to around 80 mbd. This lowers the figure of 5.1 cubic metres flared per barrel of oil to 4.7 cubic metres, but it is still not enough. The amount of gas flared in 2022 could have produced more electricity than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa used in the same year.

Yet, if gas flaring or venting is a major concern about methane’s contribution to global warming, that global warming effect also has an effect of increasing methane in the atmosphere. There is now a general consensus that the Arctic is warming rapidly, as shown most obviously by the significant reduction in snow fall and glacier retreat in Svalbard. What is of even greater concern is what climate change is doing, right across the Arctic and particularly in the 18 million square kilometres of Russia’s Siberia.

Here, accumulated vegetation has largely been held under a shield of permafrost and the natural processes of rotting down have been kept in check for, presumably, centuries. If that permafrost melts as result of rising Arctic temperatures, this biomass mixes with air and goes through a process of methanogenesis, whereby it introduces significantly more methane into the atmosphere. Studies by the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences in the Lena River Delta from 2004-2022 suggest that 1.9% more methane is now coming into the atmosphere every year, mostly in summer. This is described as ‘still moderate’, but the results are backed up by similar studies in the Beaufort Sea, north of Canada.

Beyond that, evidence that methane has the capacity to destroy the planet’s atmosphere as a result of global heating lies in what is known as clathrates. These are molecules trapped inside the crystalline structure of other molecules. In this case methane hydrates are molecules of methane trapped in water and they are astonishingly abundant in the sea. Indeed, methane hydrates may contain more hydrocarbon energy than has ever been found on the planet using conventional methods. Indeed, so much potential hydrocarbon energy resides in gas hydrates that both the Japanese and the Chinese have attempted to mine it, happily without much success.

Indeed, the vast bulk of this ‘resource’ is roughly between 350 and 3000 metres below the surface and thus unlikely to be released. However, that said, the hydrates, like the methane molecules trapped in permafrost, do represent a potentially catastrophic ‘feedback’ loop from climate change that cannot be ignored as the climate warms.

That said, whatever the dangers of atmospheric methane, this hydrocarbon does make a significant contribution to mankind’s well-being. Its primary use in the future is to produce large amounts of electricity in a sufficiently flexible way to match the increasingly necessary but uncertain supplies coming from wind and solar. Simply banning its combustion globally is an absurdity almost as bad as venting it to produce more oil. And boy, given the transit to electric vehicles and steel and concrete produced from power, are we going to need more electricity…!