In a November 4th column, Max Fawcett argued that LNG's role as a "bridge fuel" has started "to wobble" because of changing technological and market dynamics.

He’s right, in part: there’s increasingly little reason for developing countries in Asia to invest in the expensive infrastructure required to import LNG when solar, wind and batteries have become so cheap. Indeed, the buildout of renewable infrastructure has progressed so rapidly that some Asian countries are cutting domestic gas production and begging suppliers to defer or cancel LNG shipments.

But in making this argument, Fawcett reproduces a pernicious myth that has managed to become conventional wisdom in Canada: that fossil gas could ever have been a “bridge fuel.”

This bridge fuel narrative — the argument that we need to develop an entirely new fossil fuel resource, unconventional shale gas, in order to solve climate change — wasn’t accurate in 2009 when advisors to former president Barack Obama first laundered the idea into the mainstream, and it’s certainly not accurate today, more than a decade and a half and hundreds of billions of tonnes of emissions later.

Its basic premise is this: when burned, fossil gas produces fewer greenhouse gases per kilowatt hour of energy generated than coal, so if we replace coal-fired electricity generation with gas over relatively short timescales, net emissions will go down.

The United States has been the poster child for this story. By 2023, the US had reportedly reduced its emissions 17 per cent below 2005 levels, predominantly because of the replacement of coal-fired power generation with gas.

But it turns out this assessment missed something crucial: methane emissions.

According to a peer-reviewed study published this month in Energy Policy, when you properly account for methane emissions from fossil gas infrastructure, more than two-thirds of these emissions reductions disappear, yielding a very different picture.

Gas-fired generation in the US did displace coal, something there is effectively no evidence for in Asian markets. But in spite of that, it failed to meaningfully reduce US emissions. In no way, in other words, did fossil gas serve as a bridge to a renewable future or an important component of a (still-hypothetical) energy transition for the US.

The problem is fossil gas, which is mostly composed of methane, is a gas, which means it leaks constantly: at wells, in pipelines and from gas cookstoves in people’s homes. Most of it — at least since the early 2010s in North America — is extracted from shale deposits using hydraulic fracturing (fracking), which is a particularly leaky form of extraction. This matters because when it leaks, it ends up in the atmosphere — and methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over the short term.

If fossil gas didn’t act as a bridge to a low-carbon future in the US where it could be locally produced and transported by pipeline, how could it when shipped across the ocean as LNG? Transcontinental shipping introduces countless new opportunities for leakage — at liquefaction plants, from tankers, at regasification plants and across the infrastructure of the destination country. It also introduces huge additional energy costs that weren’t a factor in the US’s domestic consumption: liquefaction, shipping and regasification are all energy-intensive processes that are also typically emissions intensive.

LNG Canada is the only export facility that has begun operation in Canada. Despite promises by provincial and federal governments that BC’s new LNG industry would use electricity to power liquefaction, LNG Canada is burning its feed gas for this — between seven and 15 per cent for most facilities. LNG tankers also burn gas as fuel, which comes with its own emissions, while a 2024 study indicated that “methane slip” (leakage) from these engines is almost twice what international regulatory agencies had assumed.

Combined, LNG lifecycle emissions produce a situation where, according to another 2024 study, CO2 “from end-use combustion of LNG contributes only 34 per cent of the total LNG greenhouse gas footprint.” The study reported that “the greenhouse gas footprint for LNG as a fuel source is 33 per cent greater than that for coal when analyzed using GWP20,” a method of assessing the warming potential of carbon dioxide and methane over shorter timeframes — and it remains larger than coal “even considered on the time frame of 100 years after emission (GWP100), which severely understates the climatic damage of methane.”

It’s true that Canadian fracking has a lower methane footprint than many US fields (though these numbers are frequently revised upwards by new research). But what the US experience shows us is that this “bridge fuel” gas-as-climate-action narrative has simply never been borne out. Nearly two decades of “bridge fuel” enthusiasm have brought us not to lower global emissions, but to a world of record-high and rapidly-expanding fracked gas production far in excess of a 1.5º- or even 2º-compatible pathway.

It’s long past time we stop reproducing this bridge fuel fantasy.

Nick Gottlieb is a writer and a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University where his work focuses on the geopolitics and political economy of BC’s new LNG industry.

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