If you don’t know of Ella Langley, you probably have at least heard her song “Choosin’ Texas”. I say that because “Choosin’ Texas” has just tied a record for the most consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 (The tie is with Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston). The song involves leaving something new and returning to something from the past.
But there is another “Choosin’ Texas” going on these days in the energy and climate arena. Texas is the nation’s largest producer of natural gas by a not-so-small margin, so I am using it as a proxy term for natural gas, which is what I want to talk about.
Many today question why the word “natural” is attached to gas. While it seems like it must have been a move by a PR consultant to differentiate it from the other fossil fuels, it was actually meant to differentiate the gas that is drilled for or captured from oil operations from “manufactured” gas. The latter was made on-site from coal and oil using several different methods. In the late 1900’s and early 20th century many individual towns and cities had their own manufactured gas plants. Unfortunately, the methods used (such as coal carbonization) left some unfavorable by-products on-site, and today many of these places are Superfund sites.
In the 1950’s the economy was booming, and it was easy to build pipelines (from a permitting standpoint) especially in the southwestern and western regions of the U.S., i.e. the regions that people and businesses wanted to go to. In the Northeast, people also wanted natural gas because it seemed like a new wonder fuel for use in the kitchen and in heating their homes. They were tired of having a tank full of oil in their basement. And natural gas took off, not just as a primary fuel, but as a household fuel for cooking and heating. Natural gas boomed.
I myself worked in the late 80’s on projects to bring more natural gas into the Northeast. From an environmental standpoint, I saw gas as being better than coal and oil relatives to the emissions back then that we really cared about, i.e. things like SOX, NOX, particulates, etc. This was before climate scientists testified on the Hill and opened all of our eyes to the threat of CO2 emissions and global warming.
But natural gas still looked like a good choice even with the new focus on CO2, given that it emitted a lot less (roughly half) of the CO2 that oil or coal does. Natural gas stood apart due to that lower CO2 content and positioned itself as the bridge to a cleaner, lower carbon and eventual zero-carbon future.
There was not a lot of discussion, if any, as to how long the bridge should or would be.
Things changed for natural gas a bit when the scientific facts of climate change became more fine-tuned and climate awareness rose. It became clear that CO2 was not the only greenhouse gas to be concerned about. There was also methane, which scientists say is 80 times more potent as a warming gas than CO2 in the 20 years after it is released into the atmosphere. Natural gas is 70-80 percent methane at the well and 95-98% methane after processing and refinement to yield end products. And the industry loses a lot methane to the atmosphere. So, when you combine the CO2 and methane, gas doesn’t look all than much better than its fossil siblings.
There are reports that indicate that the gas industry internally knew early on (in the 1970’s) that it was emitting massive amounts of methane and knew of its high potency for warming but kept that to themselves. And it seems that methane was not anyone else’s focus until only recently, and now that seems almost to have been a blip. One doesn’t hear all that much about methane these days.
At the same time that natural gas was being seen in a beneficial light relative to CO2, renewable energy (especially solar) began to slowly but surely become cheaper and more widely available. In recent years, solar has gone bonkers. So has storage that can complement it over 24 hours. Today, solar has become a viable competitor to gas not only in the home and kitchen but also in the commercial and industrial sectors.
But as renewables were getting traction, the natural gas industry upped its game to not lose business and began to work (mostly successfully) against any policies (like via the “ban on bans” I talked about in my last essay), to prevent renewables growth and any erosion of their market share.
But something else has now gone bonkers – the rise of demand for electricity. And while this has happened for a number of reasons, the most visible and prominent one is AI and data centers.
The data centers’ thirst for electricity seems almost insatiable. And the hyperscalers behind data centers are devolving into a simple position of “feed me”. They want any electricity at all, no matter how it was made or what was used to make it. When that happens it means that environmental concerns can easily fall by the wayside, even at some of the name brand companies that the general public might think of as highly environmentally responsible. That appears to be happening already.
If we as a people and as a nation were serious about addressing global warming and climate change, natural gas use would not be rising. We would not still be talking about that bridge. But according to numerous sources, gas use is expanding. Orders for gas turbines for power plants are backlogged until 2030. Simple gas engines (with the worst emissions of all) are being deployed to serve data centers. Energy use overall is expanding. Methane continues to leak from wells and pipelines as part of its production and transport.
Natural gas is a fossil fuel, and we are supposed to be weaning ourselves off of those. We are not supposed to be “Choosin’ Texas” if it means we are choosing to have greater warming and its associated impacts.
The good news is that we are in a clean energy transition. The bad news is that it is not happening fast enough. It is not matching in pace or quantity what we need to do to prevent climate impacts that are not already baked in and still to come. Also, this is not a managed transition, as one could be if it was governed by policy that encouraged clean sources and prevented incumbents who have market and political muscle from kneecapping clean energy. Instead of the transition being accelerated by government, the fossil fuel industry is being allowed to delay it.
Fossil fuel use cannot be ended overnight. No one should think or talk that way. But at this point on the climate change calendar, we ought to have turned a corner. We ought to be able to see the end of the bridge that natural gas is said to be providing. We should be able to see that land of clean energy on the horizon. Can we?
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