The Bridge to Nowhere

We kicked off this season of Sea Change with a globetrotting journey. A quest to understand a booming new industry on the Gulf Coast: liquified natural gas, or LNG.

In a historic move, the Biden Administration froze any decisions on new gas export projects…until it could study how shipping so much American gas overseas could affect the economy, health, and the climate.

Well, that long-awaited study was just released. The findings? Increasing LNG exports is bad news for American consumers, communities, and our climate. But that might not mean much to the new administration determined to drill baby, drill.

One of the hottest flashpoints in this fight over the future of LNG centers around whether it's a climate solution, as industry claims, or actually a carbon bomb. Today, we talk to leading scientist Dr. Robert Howarth about his recent study revealing that LNG is worse for the climate than coal.

This episode was hosted by Halle Parker and Carlyle Calhoun. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski. And our theme music is by Jon Batiste.

For more about LNG, check out our 3-part series, All Gassed Up, or our 1-hour special. You can find Sea Change wherever you get your podcasts.

Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

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TRANSCRIPT

CARLYLE: I’m Carlyle Calhoun.

HALLE: And I’m Halle Parker, you’re listening to Sea Change.

CARLYLE: We kicked off this season of Sea Change with a globetrotting journey. A quest to understand a booming new industry on the Gulf Coast: liquified natural gas, or LNG. It’s natural gas that’s been supercooled so it can be shipped around the world.

HALLE: We learned that the natural gas industry wants to massively expand. Companies are trying to get whole countries hooked on gas. And the U.S. with its abundance of natural gas has turned into its home base.

CARLYLE: Today, the U.S. produces the most natural gas in the world. And it’s also grown into the world’s largest exporter. But we found that this push to become a global gas giant comes at a steep cost.

HALLE: Exporting lots of gas requires huge industrial facilities that are transforming communities on the Gulf Coast.

JOHN: I've shown you the photographs of what it looks like at night. I mean, it's just, it looks  There's the noise. You can smell it. So it's, uh, way different than it was three or four years ago before all that was there. 

JANE FONDA: It's like driving into Manhattan at night when you approach these structures. And then you realize they're right on beaches, they're next to communities, next to homes. It feels like looking into the devil's eyes. 

CARLYLE: These industrial plants are destroying wetlands and even risking public health. But you don’t have to live next to these plants to be harmed.

HALLE: Turns out, if the gas industry has its way, the expansion of LNG could spell climate disaster.

CARLYLE: That’s why, earlier this year, the Biden administration took a historic step.

DEMOCRACY NOW: In a victory for the climate movement…

MSNBC: The Biden administration paused approvals for massive fossil fuel projects, specifically liquified natural gas

CARLYLE: The Department of Energy froze any decisions on new gas export projects… until it could study how shipping so much American gas overseas could affect the economy, health and the climate.

HALLE: And answer a critical question: whether exporting all this gas is in the public’s best interest. Especially in a world that’s supposed to be transitioning away from fossil fuels.

CARLYLE: That’s where we left off in our 3-part series All Gassed Up. We’re not going to recap everything for you here.

HALLE: Buuuuttt we do encourage you to go back in your feeds and take a listen. Or check out our 1-hour special out now.

CARLYLE: Since that series dropped, a couple big things have happened.

HALLE: That historic pause? Well, it was overturned.NEWS CLIP: 16 states including Texas, Louisiana and Alaska are fighting that pause arguing it’s illegal

HALLE:: That was a blow to the climate community. But then another thing just happened:

CARLYLE: The Department of Energy dropped their big study. Their findings? Exporting even more LNG is NOT in the public’s interest.

HALLE: The federal study laid out a list of reasons why. Sending more gas overseas would raise electricity bills, have massive climate impacts, and threaten national security. If gas exports expand, U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says LNG companies would win big.

GRANHOLM: But American consumers and communities and our climate would pay the price.

CARLYLE: But that might not mean much to the new administration.

TRUMP: We will drill, baby, drill. <<applause, crowd chants “drill baby drill>>

HALLE: The Trump administration wants to begin approving new LNG export terminals starting Day 1. More than a dozen proposals for new LNG plants are waiting to be unleashed.

CARLYLE: Including one in Louisiana that would be the largest LNG export plant in the world.

<<music>>

CARLYLE: The Department of Energy’s study wasn’t the only one to make a big splash this year. One of the hottest flashpoints in this fight over the future of LNG centered around a different study that was published by Dr. Robert Howarth - one of the world’s leading experts on methane.

HALLE: After a year of intense peer review, Howarth’s study refutes the industry’s claim that LNG is better for the climate than coal.

CARLYLE: This is a huge deal…and could be extremely consequential… because it totally upends a major part of the industry’s marketing campaign in countries that still burn coal. that LNG is a good thing for the climate. Luring them away from renewable energy and hooking them on natural gas instead.

HALLE: According to this study, LNG could actually warm the planet more than coal does.

CARLYLE: Today on Sea Change, Halle sits down with Dr. Robert Howarth of Cornell University to talk about his LNG study and how it could shape the future of American energy policy.

Stay with us.

HALLE: Dr. Howarth, welcome.

HOWARTH: Thank you. Good to be with you.

HALLE: So to start, why did you decide to research how much the production of LNG contributes to climate change?

HOWARTH: Well, I've been working on the role of methane as a driver of climate change for the better part of 15 years now. And natural gas, is made up of methane. And, and small emissions of unburned natural gas are a major contributor to methane in the atmosphere. It's a major contributor to climatic warming. Now, people think that climate warming is all about carbon dioxide. But, Methane has actually contributed about a third of all the climatic warming we've seen over the last 150 years. So it's a big player.

Liquefied natural gas, to be honest, I wasn't paying too much attention to it until a few years ago, but a lot of colleagues and also environmental advocates said I should be paying more attention to it because, you know, we exported no LNG from the United States until 2016, and since then we've become the world's largest exporter of LNG in the planet. We're also the largest producer of natural gas in the world now in the United States and LNG exports are part of that reason, you know, people were asking me if I knew how much of a contributor that was to climate change. The answer was, I did not.

And really, there are a few studies out there before mine, but I didn't think they had done a particularly good job and looking at the methane side of it. So I, I took that on as a research challenge. Oh, probably about a year and a half ago now. It took almost that long for the paper , to be written and get to purity unpublished.

HALLE: Yeah, yeah. Let's linger on methane for a moment. Tell me more about what methane is and how it affects the climate.

HOWARTH: Sure. Methane's the other carbon gas, as we think of it. And it's an incredibly potent greenhouse gas. For the time it's in the atmosphere, it's more than a hundred times more potent in absorbing infrared radiation than is carbon dioxide. So it's a, it's more than a hundred times more powerful as a greenhouse gas.

That's the bad news. The good news is it doesn't stay in the atmosphere for as long. It's got a half life of a little over 12 years or something like that, so if we put a pulse of methane in now, half of it's gone in 12 and a half years. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for longer, but nonetheless, the methane stays there long enough, and it's a potent enough greenhouse gas that it really is a big problem for the climate.

HALLE: Yeah, and your study has gotten a ton of attention. Everyone's trying to figure out if LNG is also a big problem for the environment. And your study found that LNG, when you look at the entire production process, has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than coal. Can you talk about why that is?

HOWARTH: Yes. I and others, Tony and Graphia in particular, published a paper way back in 2011, looking at shale gas development in the United States and what the greenhouse gas footprint for that might be.

And the argument at the time was that natural gas could be considered a Bridge fuel, that we can wean ourselves off of using coal, burn natural gas instead to get the same amount of energy. The carbon dioxide emissions are lower, so that was viewed as a good.

Anyway, our paper from back in 2011, we didn't have great data then on what the methane emissions associated with shale gas and natural gas were, but we said, using the best information which is available, natural gas probably has about the same footprint as coal.

That was a, you know, a speculative conclusion to have made then, and we urged people to get more data again. There are now about a million observations on what that methane emission rate with natural gas that confirms what we had said in 2011, that natural gas has about the same footprint as coal once you consider the methane emissions.

That's for natural gas, plain and simple as we'd use it here in the U.S. LNG is natural gas that you super cool to liquefy it so you can put it on a tanker and transport it. And that takes a lot of energy to super cool it. It takes a lot of energy to transport it. For the most part, that energy is being met by burning more natural gas.

And so, you're releasing more carbon dioxide emissions. From the LNG process than for just plain domestic use of natural gas and the methane emissions also go up pretty substantially. And so, while natural gas has a greenhouse gas footprint, that's about the same as coal. Once we liquefy it, make it into the LNG process, the greenhouse gas footprint is about, 33 percent worse than either coal or natural gas used domestically.

HALLE: 33 percent worse than coal. That's a lot. And it's the opposite of what the industry keeps saying. Now, it took a while for this paper to actually get published. You mentioned you submitted it, like, last fall, and it finally published a few weeks ago.

HOWARTH: It took a year.

HALLE: Yeah. What changed?

HOWARTH: Took a long time.

HALLE: Which I, I understand like journals take a while, but what changed in this paper from then to now?

HOWARTH: Well, they, they do. And you know, I've been an editor in chief of three different academic journals for a total of over 30 years. Wish I could tell you the Journals never take a year for anyone, but that's not true. The years, it's not the norm, but it's not unusual. In this case, there are two factors which added to that. And, and I'll blame it on Bill McKibben, the author. Uh, you know, Bill McKibben contacted me and basically asked what I knew about the greenhouse gas footprint of LNG because the Biden administration had an important decision to make last winter.

Would they allow a further expansion of LNG or would they put a stop on that until there's further study? I said, “Well, you know, Bill, I have a paper almost ready to submit on this. Uh, I can tell you about my findings, but of course it hasn't been published yet. So, it'll probably be, what, six, six to nine months before it's published.” I was being optimistic. Bill convinced me to share my paper with him. And once I did that, I decided I ethically should make it publicly available to all.

So, in addition to submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal, we made it publicly available. Bill publicized my findings in the initial paper, pretty close to what we have in the final paper. And the Biden administration used those in ordering a pause on further LNG.

That's the good news. The bad news is that, the editors of the journal knew that my paper, Was being used in political decision-making. And so they put more scrutiny into it than is normal. They use more peer reviewers, larger range of expertise. Um, you know, I ended up with I think eight different anonymous peer reviewers over time.

Most, most all of the reviews were very helpful. The reviewers generally were supportive, but they had picked out a number of things they thought I could do a better job of discussing. Along the way, more information became available as well. I mentioned this as paper published in Nature on methane emissions last March.

Halfway through the process of my paper being reviewed, but, but I decided to revise the paper using information in that paper because it was better than what I had used when I submitted the paper a year ago. That slowed things down as well. It's a better paper in the end, but it, it took time. And it took time because the editors were being extremely conscientious, and I would too if I were them.

That's the appropriate action. It's really my fault isn't the right word. It's a result of my own action for making the paper publicly available. I, I asked for close scrutiny. I got it and that takes time.

HALLE: And, you know, there are other reports, many by industry groups that find that LNG is cleaner than coal. And you mentioned that line, that bridge fuel line that has been used in the past, and now the natural gas industry, as you know, is encouraging the expansion of LNG export here on the Gulf Coast and worldwide. Can you talk about why your paper comes to a different conclusion than those reports?

HOWARTH: Well, those reports are wrong, is the quick and dirty answer to it. Uh, there are two things they don't really consider well. One is that developing shale gas itself is an energy intensive process. So even the carbon dioxide emissions from shale gas are not just burning the final fuel, there's also energy used for, for fuel, drilling the wells for the fracking process for processing the gas and their carbon dioxide emissions associated with all that energy.

The industry-supported studies just ignore that they pretend somehow that you're magically getting the gas out of the ground without expending any energy or having emissions of their own even for carbon dioxide Then there's the methane side of it and basically they rely on the official US government, estimate for what methane emissions from natural gas are that the EPA compiles on an annual basis.

Those numbers are wrong. And the scientific community has been saying they're wrong. And with increasingly loud voices for the better part of a decade now. The EPA does not use independent verified measurements. They don't use peer-reviewed science. There are thousands of papers out there now on this, over a million observations.

EPA ignores all of that. Instead, they rely totally on industry self-reporting without any independent verification. And should not be a surprise that industry lowballs what they report to EPA. So if you take those lowball numbers and use those as your sense of reality, you are very much underestimating the greenhouse gas footprint of natural gas generally and of LNG.

HALLE: Is yours the first paper to make this kind of finding or assertion or are there other papers that have done this kind of analysis too?

HOWARTH: Now there are actually several papers out there. As you say, there's some industry supported reports. There's a report from the U. S. Department of Energy, and then there are a few reports in the peer-reviewed literature as well. And though industry likes to portray my paper as some sort of a strange outlier, it really isn't.

In one of the other peer-reviewed papers, they actually come up with an estimate that's higher, bigger greenhouse gas footprint than I say overall. So that's, that's generally supportive. The other papers, for the most part, have lower estimates.

I'm using the best and most recent data, and I don't necessarily mean to criticize those other papers for the use of the methane number. Some of them are 10 years old.

We have better information now. But if you look at the details of, of what we all assume about the energy needs and emissions from tankers and the liquefaction process itself and those sorts of things, my numbers are very much average in there, very much mainstream.

HALLE: What do you think allows this narrative to exist then? Especially because you mentioned earlier that natural gas itself isn't even cleaner than coal, even though that is still put out there even without the LNG element. What do you think allows this to persist even though it seems like you've debunked it and it's been debunked many times?

HOWARTH: Well, the oil and gas industry is very powerful, right? They have a, a lot of money, and they, uh, they advertise, and they lobby, and they're very effective at getting their messages out. Frontline, PBS, together with the BBC did a series of 3 specials, uh, 2, 2. 5 years ago on misinformation, disinformation from the fossil fuel industry generally.

And there's, you know, this is a century worth of misinformation, starting with coal, but picked up by the oil and gas industry, certainly going back 50 years ago. The 3rd in the series there in the frontline series was totally on methane emissions from natural gas and the industry's efforts to infuse mislead distract on that, which they, uh, they've been doing for at least 15 years.

And with, a fair amount of success. Unfortunately. It's very frustrating as a, as a scientist, but, uh, Tony and Graffi and I published our first paper on this in 2011. It was really the first paper sort of challenging them on that. Uh, at the point, we didn't know if we were right or not.

It really did require more information, but now joined by hundreds of other scientists, hundreds of other papers, a million observations. No, we were right, and the industry's wrong. So, uh, They have public relations. We have fact.

HALLE: I mean, you've mentioned that we know that the U. S. has grown to become the largest exporter of natural gas, and it's more than tripled how much we send out since 2018, and you talked about how the federal government is now looking into whether this industry should keep growing. How do you feel like your paper fits into this debate over the rise of LNGs in the public interest? It sounds like it already had an impact, but moving forward as well. Well, yes,

HOWARTH: Apparently it did. I actually have not talked to anyone in the Biden administration about this, but according to several people in the press and elsewhere, my paper definitely had a had an impact on them and, basically, President Biden ordered the Department of Energy to To take a close look at what the greenhouse gas emissions would be.

The Department of Energy had their own analysis from 2019. That's 5 years ago. And you could say only 5 years ago, but 5 years ago is a long time in this business of methane. We really know a lot more about the science now. So he's ordered them to take a closer look. Presumably, they're looking at my paper.

Presumably, they're looking at the other research that's out there. He also ordered them to take a close look at the, energy security issues and the economic issues. So, you know, I'm not an economist, but there are many economists who are also looking at the LNG situation, and I think it's pretty clear from them – both common sense and from their research – that LNG has increased the price of natural gas domestically in the U.S. and that also increases the price of electricity in almost all 50 states. So virtually every consumer, even if you're not directly burning natural gas, is, is paying a price for our LNG export.

You know, people are terribly concerned about inflation, well, LNG exports are Big part of the inflation in energy prices in the U. S. So the Department of Energy is also supposed to be looking at that. I would hope and expect if they do their jobs that they will basically ratify my analysis for the greenhouse gas.

They might. I think some numbers around here or there, there's certainly room for some slight changes to be made. And I would think they would also agree that this is not in the energy security or economic interests of U.S. consumers, and therefore we should not be exporting LNG. That would be my belief, that that's what good government policy will lead to. Whether or not we have good government come next spring when this decision will be made. I don't know.

HALLE: Yeah. I mean, speaking of just how people should be thinking about this, you know, I'm coming at you from New Orleans, Louisiana and Texas are basically ground zero for this LNG export boom.

HOWARTH: Right.

HALLE: What do you hope that communities down here, especially where they're, they're proposed to be LNG export facilities, what do you hope that they take away from this paper? What do you want to say to them?

HOWARTH: Well, you know, I, it, the paper is focused on the, on the global aspects that the global change, it doesn't specifically address the issues that the people of the Gulf Coast would experience in terms of the local air pollution and the extreme levels of disruption of their communities and all. But I would hope that my paper will help feed into the arguments that I know local people there are saying that they don't want this LNG facilities. I'm hoping this will be, you know, part of the story which which can help those communities both along the coast and where the LNG is happening.

But also inland, you know, most of the of the gas that is being exported is coming from the Permian basin or from Louisiana. And it’s… Those communities, too, are being disrupted, right? And so I'm, I'm hoping that this will counter that to some extent. It's part of the story. It's not the whole story. The environmental justice aspect has to be looked at directly. The local air pollution has to be looked at directly. The economics have to be looked at directly. And my paper made no effort to try and deal with those. I'm a climate scientist, a methane expert, but my paper is part of the story.

HALLE: And where do you think the research on this goes from here, especially considering, you know, your long experience with methane? Where do, where do we go?

HOWARTH: You know, in terms of the methane thing, I think the story is pretty clear at this point. You know, I mean, literally, again, just to restate the history, uh, when Tony Ingrafia and Rene Santoro and I published our paper in 2011. It was the very, very first paper to sort of question this, whether or not natural gas was a bridge fuel.

And it was the first to look realistically at what the methane emissions might be. But at the time, there were no peer-reviewed, independently verified data on what methane emissions from shale gas were. So we were pulling estimates out of unpublished industry reports, out of government websites, which hadn't necessarily been particularly well-documented.

It was very, uh, poorly documented data. Uh, the industry criticized us for that. You know, I, I gave a series of talks, and from the very first talk I gave, I said, “You know, the, the quality of the data we're using is really, really poor, but this is what it says.” Industry would take, you know, my saying that, put it into a video, and then say, why did Howarth publish it when he says it's poor?

Well, because it was the best available data. And it was, it was a call for action for other scientists to get out there and make the measurements we we needed and that that has happened, you know, and to me, it's, uh, it's one of the most exciting things of my, uh, my professional career is that the community really rose to our, the challenge we threw out there.

And there's been an incredible amount of really, really good science. As of five years ago, we had a pretty good idea of what methane emissions were looking like. We have a really good idea now, but we know what's going on in the U.S. Globally, we don't. The focus of most of that research has been in the U.S., so we should be looking elsewhere.

And, the methane is going up incredibly fast in the atmosphere right now. It's definitely contributing in a major way to global warming. In terms of looking at what's going on with the footprint of gas in the U.S., I think we really, at this point, very well understand that the needs from here aren't scientific, they're political. Getting the EPA to pay attention to the science as opposed to industry, that's a political decision.

HALLE: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Howarth. I really appreciate you coming today.

HOWARTH: Oh, thanks for the chance to talk to you. Take care.

MUSIC

HALLE: That was Dr. Robert Howarth discussing his powerful new study showing that LNG is up to 33 percent worse for the climate than coal. This interview was conducted before the Department of Energy released its major study advising against the continued expansion of LNG due to the climate and economic concerns mentioned by Dr. Howarth.

MUSIC

HALLE: Thanks for listening to Sea Change. This episode was hosted, edited and reported by our managing producer Carlyle Calhoun and me, Halle Parker. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski. And our theme music is by Jon Batiste.You can find more Sea Change episodes wherever you get your podcasts, from Apple Podcasts to Spotify. If you want to support us, share this episode with a friend and remember to subscribe.

Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.

Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

We’ll be back in two weeks.