LNG is a super-polluter that the UK imports to prop up dwindling North Sea gas

Hidden menace of LNG

What is LNG?

LNG is Liquefied Natural Gas - natural gas, compressed into a liquid that can be carried by ship. Imports into the UK are rising rapidly to fill the gap in supply as North Sea Gas runs out. The problem is that it has a much higher carbon footprint than North Sea gas due to the way it is produced and transported. Worse, official monitoring fails to acknowledge the emissions and effects that scientists are seeing, so governments turn a blind eye to protect their emissions targets.

Methane emissions from LNG are 2-3 times higher than officially reported

Authorities rely on oil and gas producers to self-report their emissions, including CO₂ and methane (CH₄). However, independent researchers consistently find leaked methane levels 2-3 times higher than the self-reported numbers used by governments, whether measuring it on the ground, from the air or from space. And there's another problem...

Methane potency 3 times higher than benchmark figures suggest

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, that traps 120x as much heat as CO₂. However, the GWP of methane gets smaller over decades as methane breaks down. Early climate experts adopted the GWP100 standard to study methane's effects over 100 years, which ignores the short term impact. Now that methane is a huge problem, many scientists argue that GWP100 hides methane's dangerous spike in short-term heating potential, and call for a switch to the GWP20 to reflect actual observations. (GWP100 = 28x, GWP20 = 84x)

LNG produces 7kg of emissions in the short term, not just 2.75kg

Burning 1kg methane produces 2.75kg of CO₂, but the real footprint is much higher - over 7kg for LNG if considering the effects of methane over 20 year period instead of 100 years:

LNG's DOUBLE carbon footprint

Producing & transporting LNG doubles carbon footprint of Natural Gas

Over half of the UK's LNG now comes from USA. It is produced by hydraulic 'fracking' in the Permian basin in Texas, piped to an LNG Export facility such as Sabine Pass or Corpus Christie to be compressed into liquid, and then shipped.

Fracking is an energy intensive process, with high CO₂ emissions and methane leakage rates as high as 2% of output, with a further 0.3% lost from pipelines, according to aerial surveys . The total emissions for each kg of US gas delivered to UK end users - from production - amount to 2.32kg CO_{2 eq} of methane, plus a further 0.6kg of CO₂ from fuelling machinery - before the gas is even liquefied!

Compressing the gas into LNG is also an energy intensive process, producing a further 0.35kg of CO₂ per kg LNG, and 0.3kg of CO_{2 eq} of methane

Shipping produces emissions from burning fuel and leaking methane - most LNG tankers use LNG for fuel. Modern LNG tankers typically burn 120 tonnes of methane each day, taking 21,4 days for a round trip to the UK with a 68,000 tonne LNG cargo. The trip burns 2311 of the 68,000 tonne LNG capacity, roughly 4% of its cargo. That's 35g methane used as fuel, from each kg gas delivered. That produces 0.1kg of CO₂ per kg LNG, and 1.5g of unburned fuel (0.3kg of CO_{2 eq} of methane)

Based upon a paper by R. Howarth (2024) - The greenhouse gas footprint of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exported from the United States

Newer data on fugitive emissions from wells in the Permian Basin from MethaneSAT