"Mainly, it argues that its LNG exports are replacing and displacing coal in Asia – and that gas has roughly half the emissions of coal when burned to create electricity. Ergo, Australian gas must be cutting global climate pollution. This line has been swallowed and repeated by politicians from the major parties in federal and state governments.
Former Coalition energy and emissions reduction minister, and current shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor claimed in parliament that the gas industry was cutting global emissions by 150m tonnes a year – an extraordinary amount if true, equivalent to about a third of Australia’s annual climate pollution. The current resources minister, Madeleine King, argues Australia’s Asian trading powers “depend on our gas to meet their commitments to net zero”.
The Western Australian premier, Roger Cook, has probably been the most audacious, declaring that gas from his state was leading to a “dramatic reduction in global emissions” and it had a responsibility to continue to sell it or people may die.
Over the past five years, Guardian Australia has asked industry leaders and MPs for specific evidence showing that Australian LNG is substantially displacing coal in Asian countries, or that LNG has substantially lower emissions than coal across its lifecycle. We are yet to receive any.
That failure to produce data to support these claims looks more conspicuous after a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Energy Science and Engineering earlier this month. Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at New York’s Cornell University, calculated the total emissions from the US LNG industry, which exports to Europe and Asia.
Once all upstream stages were factored in – extraction, piping to a processing facility, compression from gas into liquid form, shipping, decompression back to gas and burning for energy – he estimated the total climate pollution from LNG was 33% greater than that from coal over a 20-year period.
This is not an entirely new idea – previous studies have suggested the gas industry is dirtier than often claimed – but it is nevertheless a potentially extraordinary finding. It should have major ramifications for how policymakers think about what is necessary to cut emissions to as near zero as possible."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/15/new-evidence-says-gas-export...Back to coal then.
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LNG- Worse than coal - The Guardian (Read 263 times)
