Measuring Emissions from Liquefied Natural Gas, with Arvind Ravikumar

Notable quotes:

• The United States has pulled back on methane emissions regulations: “Federal methane policy right now can be best characterized as nonexistent. As you know, this Congress and this administration have been in a deregulatory push related to many environmental regulations, and methane emissions are no exception.” (1:51)
• Emissions from transporting liquefied natural gas are substantial: “We found about a six-times difference between the least emissions-intensive pathway and the most emissions-intensive pathway between the Appalachian Basin in Pennsylvania, all the way down to the Gulf Coast … We should be looking at specific pathways and specific supply chains and see what their emissions impacts are, and make decisions based on that.” (13:59)
• Electrification can significantly reduce emissions: “Just as electrification is going to reduce emissions from cars, electrification can also reduce emissions from oil and gas operations. Indeed, many operators, especially in the United States, have moved in that direction. They’re using electricity to eliminate emissions, not just reduce emissions.” (26:43)

Top of the Stack

• “Tracking U.S. Liquefied Natural Gas Supply Chain Greenhouse Gas Emissions Intensity through Direct Measurements” by Yuanrui Zhu, Greg Ross, Jenna Brown, Olga Khaliukova, William Daniels, Jiayang (Lyra) Wang, Selina Roman-White, Fiji George, Daniel Zimmerle, Dorit Hammerling, and Arvind Ravikumar
• “Probabilistic, Measurement-Informed Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Global Liquefied Natural Gas Supply Chains Reveal Wide Country-Level Variation” by Haoming Ma, Yuanrui Zhu, Wennan Long, Mohammad Masnadi, Garvin Heath, Paul Balcombe, Fiji George, Selina Roman-White, and Arvind Ravikumar
• “AI as Normal Technology” by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Arvind Ravikumar, assistant professor and co-director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Systems Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin.

Although the US federal government is pulling back from policies to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector, companies and importers around the world continue to focus on the greenhouse gas footprint of liquefied natural gas.

In today's episode, Arvind will help us understand how emissions vary across regions within the United States and around the world. As it turns out, where you get your natural gas from, and how it's transported across regions, has an enormous impact on the emissions intensity of that gas. To find out all the details, stay with us.

Arvind Ravikumar, welcome back to Resources Radio.

Arvind Ravikumar: Thanks for having me.

Daniel Raimi: I was looking back, and I think this is your third time on the show, which is maybe a record. So, I don't know, we should send you a medal, or a trophy, or something like that! Thank you so much for being generous with your time.

Each of the episodes we've had you on, we've talked about methane emissions from oil and gas systems, and that's what we're going to do again today. I think I'm just going to dive right into the discussion and start with some policy background.

During the Biden administration, Congress passed laws related to methane emissions from oil and gas systems, and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) implemented new regulations related to oil and gas methane emissions. I'm hoping you can give us an update about what has happened over the last nine months or so when it comes to those laws and regulations. Where are we now in the world of federal methane policy?

Arvind Ravikumar: Federal methane policy right now can be best characterized as nonexistent. As you know, this Congress and this administration have been in a deregulatory push related to many environmental regulations, and methane emissions are no exception.

A number of things that the administration has done recently were either to delay implementation of laws and regulations that were passed with the previous administration, or—with the help of Congress—completely rescind certain regulations that would've imposed additional fees on oil and gas operators. I will talk about two prominent examples.

One of them is the methane regulation that requires operators to take certain actions to reduce methane emissions from all of their oil and gas facilities. The EPA recently delayed implementation of the regulation, and it's going to be tied up in courts, is what I believe.

The other thing that happened in the past few months is that Congress instituted a methane fee as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. What that methane fee did was to set standards of methane emissions for all oil and gas operators. If it was found that they emitted, in a given year, above that standard, there would be a fee that would be levied on those emissions that were above that standard. And the fees—this is very similar to a carbon tax, but applied to methane emissions from oil and gas operations.

Recently, Congress rescinded that methane fee so that methane fees would not apply for oil and gas facilities for at least the next 10 years. What we have seen is various regulatory actions have either been delayed, or have been completely rescinded through actions of this Congress.

Right now, we do not have any new methane federal regulations. However, that does not mean methane mitigation has stopped. A number of companies, as well as states, have taken up their efforts to address methane emissions from oil and gas operations within their jurisdictions.

Daniel Raimi: Right. And that gets to the next thing I wanted to ask you about, which is: I imagine some people, when they hear about federal regulations and policies being rolled back or eliminated, they might wonder, “Okay, why do we still need to worry about measuring methane, precisely when we don't have these kind of federal policies in place?

Can you help us understand, both from a policy but also from a business perspective—why is it still important that we monitor and measure methane emissions from the oil and gas system?

Arvind Ravikumar: This is where you really see sort of differentiation across the industry. For companies, administrations come and go; policies change regularly. But a lot of our oil and gas industries are interested in a long-term future of producing oil and natural gas.

One example is what's in the news prominently right now, which is liquefied natural gas, or LNG, that we export mainly to Europe, Japan, South Korea, and others. Many of the contracts that US LNG exporters have with major buyers around the world are long-term contracts. These are contracts for 10 years, 15 years, and 20 years. So, what happens within the four years of a single administration is somewhat irrelevant to long-term strategies for these companies on how they think about exports of liquefied natural gas to other countries.

If you look at what's happening around the world outside the United States, they're not limiting or stopping what they've been doing toward addressing greenhouse gas emissions.

The European Union, for example, recently passed the EU Methane Regulation, which imposes requirements for measurement, reporting, and verification of greenhouse gas emissions of all natural gas that gets delivered to the European Union.

Similarly, Japan and South Korea have developed what's called a CLEAN [Coalition for LNG Emission Abatement toward Net-zero] initiative that's more voluntary. It's less regulatory than the European Union rules, but very much in the spirit of addressing greenhouse gas emissions of the LNG that they're importing.

If you look at these regulations and what companies are doing right now, it's not just the LNG exporters—it's everyone that is in that ecosystem. That includes the pipeline companies that send gas to the LNG liquefaction facilities—as well as the producers of natural gas that send gas through the pipelines to liquefaction terminals for export—that are concerned about complying with international regulations, wherever they may be.

To address those concerns, many of these companies have continued working on addressing their methane emissions. There are publicly available reports of these companies participating in various domestic and international voluntary initiatives, and that has not stopped. In fact, many of the companies that we work with have enhanced their efforts to monitor and mitigate methane emissions from their operations in anticipation of upcoming EU regulations.

There's a huge chunk of the industry that really cares about addressing methane emissions, and it just makes sense. Gas prices are increasing, and we know that there's huge demand for gas coming from increasing exports of LNG, as well as growing demand for electricity from data centers and the AI revolution.

If you're going to be using more gas, it makes a lot of sense to not waste it away. You can see that in gas prices; prices are increasing. So, every ton of methane that you don't lose by leaking is a ton of methane that can be used in a power center for electricity generation or for exports. And businesses understand this.

Daniel Raimi: One thing that I always think about with the oil and gas industry is the distinction between the sort of “big” oil and gas companies—what people sometimes refer to as Big Oil—and then the literally thousands of small operators around the country that I like to think of as “Little Oil.” I'm wondering if you see a distinction in the approach that Big Oil takes relative to Little Oil when it comes to sort of caring about methane emissions.

Arvind Ravikumar: That is a really good point, because what we are seeing right now is a bifurcation in the industry. It's very easy within the public sphere to talk about the oil and gas industry as a monolith, but it's not.

There are these large companies, producers, pipeline operators, and LNG exporters that are very much exposed to energy and climate policy that's outside of the United States. For them, it's less about what the Trump administration or this Congress might be doing to methane emissions regulation, and it's more about the long-term signals coming from their biggest customers. And their biggest customers are in Europe, or in Japan, or in South Korea. So, when methane regulations go away, from the domestic perspective, these companies are looking at what their customers are wanting, and they're still wanting natural gas that has low emissions.

What has happened is, at the same time with smaller operators and smaller producers, there has been less interest in proactively addressing methane emissions for good reason. There are no major regulations to limit methane emissions from their operations. And their customers, the people they sell their gas or oil to, are not demanding lower methane emissions.

We are seeing these two different segments of the oil and gas industry where one segment (mostly the large companies, but also some smaller companies) have really low methane emissions—much, much lower than the targets that Congress set as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. And these other companies—the small ones that are not exposed to either investor pressure, that are not exposed to international demand for low-emissions gas, that do not have to comply with any state-level regulations—continue to operate as is. Those emissions are higher compared to these big operators.

So, the reason we need regulations is not for ExxonMobil or Chevron to reduce their methane emissions. The reason we need regulations is so that some of these smaller operators, that do not have external incentives to address methane, will also be able to work on their methane emissions. With the federal regulations going away, that's not going to happen.

Daniel Raimi: Really interesting. Yeah, that's consistent with what I had sort of been seeing out in the world, so I'm not surprised to hear that you're seeing something similar.

Let's talk now about a couple of really fascinating studies that you and your research group have put together that are both at the preprint stage—which is to say they haven't gone through peer review yet, but they are in the process, I think, of going through peer review. They're such fascinating studies, I wanted to talk about them as soon as we could.

Both of these studies focus on methane emissions from the LNG supply chain. One of them is focused on the United States, the other is focused on comparing global LNG suppliers. I think we can start in the United States.

When you look around the United States and measure methane emissions from LNG supply chains, I think you do this for three parts of the country. Tell us what some of your major findings were, and what maybe was a surprise in those findings.

Arvind Ravikumar: Sure. This is the culmination of three years of effort that we had done with Cheniere. Cheniere, for those who don't know, is the largest liquefied natural gas exporter in the United States. And what they wanted to do was go out and directly measure greenhouse gas emissions from their supply chains, wherever they get their gas from.

So, these are the gas producers in the Marcellus Shale Basin in Pennsylvania and Ohio. We had the Haynesville Basin in Louisiana and East Texas, as well as the Permian Basin in West Texas and New Mexico. We went out to these regions and measured emissions from the facilities that produce the gas that ultimately become LNG. Then, we worked with pipeline companies that transport the gas from these locations all the way to Gulf Coast liquefaction terminals. And then we went to the liquefaction terminals themselves, to go out and measure what their greenhouse gas emissions are.

There are a couple of surprising things that we find. I think one thing that the public is well aware of is that our measurements of methane emissions consistently show that our emissions are much higher than what official inventories suggest. I think this has been proven across the United States and across the world, and we have known this for a few years now.

But what we found in doing this analysis of that—even though that is true, even though measured methane emissions and measured greenhouse gas emissions are higher than reported inventories—how much higher they are depends very much on where you get your gas from and how the gas moves from the location where it's produced to the location where it's turned into liquefied natural gas and put on a ship.

This is really important, because there's a lot of argument about whether natural gas is good for the environment—whether natural gas is better or worse than coal. But the right question to be asking here is, Where is the natural gas coming from? Because if you get your natural gas from a place like the Marcellus Shale Basin in Pennsylvania, it has been shown multiple times that it's one of the lowest greenhouse gas–emitting regions that produce natural gas in the country, and even around the world. You are going to be much better off by using natural gas from that region compared to other regions in the country. So, where you source your gas matters.

The other interesting thing that we found is that not only where you source your gas matters—it also really matters what pathway that the gas takes from where it's produced to where it's consumed.

If you look at gas that's produced in Pennsylvania and gas that comes down to Louisiana for export as LNG, there are literally hundreds of pathways that gas can take through various pipelines between Pennsylvania and Louisiana. And depending on which pipeline you go through, you can have very different emissions. In fact, we found about a six-times difference between the least emissions-intensive pathway and the most emissions-intensive pathway between the Appalachian Basin in Pennsylvania, all the way down to the Gulf Coast. That's really important.

The reason this is important is we should stop talking in terms of generalities—whether natural gas is better than coal, or whether we should continue exporting natural gas. We should be looking at specific pathways and specific supply chains and see what their emissions impacts are, and make decisions based on that.

Daniel Raimi: It's really fascinating. I'm looking at some of your results for this study, and one of the things that stands out to me—and correct me if I'm misinterpreting this—is, as you said earlier, the Marcellus gas production has a very low methane-emissions footprint on the production side of things. It's actually significantly lower than you see in, for example, the Permian Basin.

This is something we've known for a while, but because of the distance it has to go to get to Louisiana—and because of the specific types of pipelines that it's flowing through—I suppose the transportation or transmission and storage emissions are really significant. Then, overall, the Marcellus methane footprint is actually higher than the Permian methane footprint because of all these intermediate steps. Am I interpreting that correctly?

Arvind Ravikumar: That's exactly right. The challenge with the transportation is that gas has to be compressed for it to be able to move from one location to another. So, the longer the distance, the more compression you need to have. Typically, in the United States, you have a compressor station every 60 or 70 miles. So, you can do the math for 2,000 miles between production and where it gets used—you're going to have a lot of compressors in between to push the gas down.

When you have to do that, you also increase your emissions footprint. So, if you pair a very low-emissions basin with very long supply chains, then you're going to end up with an overall higher emissions intensity. And this is a really important result because—if you have been following some of the recent European Union regulations—one of the arguments that some European officials, as well as some nongovernmental organizations, have made is that you can just use satellites to look at these vast production basins around the world. And based on what the numbers are in those production basins, you can decide whether the gas you bought had low methane emissions or had high methane emissions.

What our study showed is that it's not enough to just look at the production basin. You also have to look at the supply chain that the gas takes to get to your destination. Very long supply chains will result in much higher emissions that will compensate for any low-emissions production you might be able to identify using your satellites. That's something we've been talking about, not just in the context of LNG, but also for domestic use of gas, with growing interest in data center power generation, and some of it being met through natural gas power plants.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's such a powerful and important finding from this work that really is an important part of the story that we should start incorporating.

As I mentioned, you also have a really fascinating study that looks not just at the United States and supply chains here, but also at supplies coming from other countries that are moving out onto the LNG market. Can you tell us a little bit about the variation that you found across countries in your study? What do you think some of the factors are that explain the variation from one country to the next?

Arvind Ravikumar: Right. So when we finished this study on US LNG exports specifically, we wanted to take a look at what's happening around the world. There are other major suppliers of LNG, including Australia, Qatar, Norway, Nigeria, and Algeria. How are their methane emissions looking? The reason we were interested in this question is because there's a lot of public information around methane emissions being high in the United States, but a large part of the reason is because a lot of the measurements that have happened in the past decade have happened in the United States. Very few measurements have occurred outside the United States.

That has started to change over the past few years. There's been a number of recent studies using satellites and other technology that went out and measured methane emissions from other major gas-producing regions around the world. So, we wanted to take stock of what we know about other global LNG supply chains, and we built what's traditionally called as a life-cycle assessment.

Life-cycle assessment is a very common tool that's used to understand the environmental impact of the supply chains of commodities or various products. Several state regulations in the United States—including, for example, California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard—use life-cycle assessment models that have been developed by national labs around the country to estimate the greenhouse gas intensity of various energy commodities that go into California.

We used a similar model, but we made two specific changes when developing this model. The first change we made is that, instead of just using data that governments have made available, we use direct-measurement information from recent studies. We looked at what satellite data is telling us about emissions from various countries, and we use that information because we know that government estimates of emissions are underestimated.

The second big change we did is—normally, life-cycle assessments are done in a very deterministic way. They give you a single number: What is the carbon intensity of crude oil in California? That's one number. What is the carbon intensity of LNG from the United States? That's another number, but it is still a single number.

We wanted to get away from the paradigm of using deterministic estimates of carbon intensity because we know that there's a lot of uncertainty in this space. There's a lot of variation, as well. Gas from the Permian Basin is not the same as gas from the Appalachian Basin. Gas from the United States looks very different from gas that's produced in Nigeria or in Australia. We wanted to take a probabilistic approach to greenhouse gas–emissions intensity of LNG … We created distributions of carbon intensity of LNG from various parts around the world.

The first thing we found is that there's a huge variation in carbon intensity between the lowest-emitting supplier in the world and the highest-emitting supplier in the world. This makes sense, because production is different, the physical infrastructure looks very different, and the supply chains look different. So we do expect a difference, but that it was a five-times difference was pretty shocking to us when we first looked at it.

The more interesting finding that we saw is that, when you look at the distributions of greenhouse gas intensity, there was a very long tail toward high-emissions-intensity supply chains. What this means is, for example, the United States has an average greenhouse gas intensity of about 22 grams carbon dioxide equivalent per megajoule of LNG delivered (and that's just the average number for all of the United States). But the range is much, much larger than that. The range for that 22 average went from as low as 15 to as high as 35 … Because we used measurements, we found these superemitters (that we always talk about in methane emissions) impact what the carbon intensity of our LNG is.

And so, there is always a small but nonzero probability that the supply chain of LNG from a single country can be very high carbon intensity. What we said was we shouldn't be talking about what is the carbon intensity of a specific LNG supply from a country, because there's no way we can get to a very deterministic or accurate number. What we need is to be thinking through the risks of high-carbon-intensity supply chains.

The question we wanted to ask is, What are the odds that the carbon intensity of LNG from various countries exceeds a certain threshold? Let's say the threshold is 30. What we found was that the probability that any cargo of LNG from the United States exceeded that value is only about 10 percent.

But if you look at other countries, like Nigeria and Algeria, the probability that LNG cargo from Nigeria that goes to Europe exceeds that 30 value is 40 percent (fairly high), so roughly a 50 percent chance that it has a very high carbon intensity. That's really important for policymakers as well as investors.

It's less about what is the exact number for this shipment of LNG. I think you'll never get that number because of various uncertainties, but you can know what is your risk that this shipment is more than a certain threshold. That's really important because you are going to see this not just in LNG, but in any supply chain that has fossil fuels as a key feedstock item.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Really interesting. And you mentioned a couple of the sort of really high-emitting (on average) places. I just want to note a couple of the lower-emitting (on average) places, which are—if I'm interpreting the results correctly—Qatar, Norway, United Arab Emirates, and then the United States sort of in fourth place on average.

Arvind Ravikumar: That's correct. In fact, this was something that was surprising to us, because the rhetoric has been that US methane emissions are higher than almost any other place in the world. And they are high—measurements do show that. But when you compare all countries on a consistent basis, the paradigm was that we will compare US emissions, where we have more robust information through measurements, to other countries that did not have any measurements.

Now, when you start including measurement data from all the other countries, the United States is actually on the lower end as an average. And this was just the US average number, so the United States came fourth. But if you look at specific basins in the United States, like we did with the US study, you will have basins that are among the lowest-emitting greenhouse gas intensity for LNG in the world. And so that's really important.

Going forward, we really have to start using some of these new technologies and tools to ensure what the carbon intensity of various supply chains are. And that applies not just to natural gas and LNG, it's also going to apply to hydrogen and other commodities that might become important in a net-zero future. Then, look at the risks of high-carbon-intensity supply chains. I think that's where we need to do a lot more work on trying to reduce those tail risks and how policies can help some of these countries with high-intensity supply chains reduce their emissions, as well.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, really interesting. Really good points. One thing that you hear a lot if you spend time in this world—you spend much more time in it than I do, but I occasionally dip my toe in the water—when you talk to people about methane emissions, there's often an argument that methane emissions reduction should be a low-hanging fruit because companies have an incentive to capture more gas so they can sell more gas.

When you look across the global landscape and you think about where these methane emissions are coming from, how much low-hanging fruit do you see? Are there easy fixes to some of these problems, or are they more difficult in some cases? I'm thinking about tightening well heads at a production facility versus trying to measure and reduce emissions from pipelines that might stretch over hundreds, or even thousands, of miles.

Arvind Ravikumar: That's a great question, because I think the answer to how much low-hanging fruit there is will vary a lot by country.

One of the things we have to realize is that the technological maturity and access to resources vary greatly across countries. Something that is cost-effective and possible in the United States might not even be an option in a place like Nigeria, because the technology's not available, the financial resources are not available to implement those solutions, or—under those tropical conditions where facilities are constricted—it might not be a feasible solution at all.

But when you look at the United States, a majority of the emissions are now low-hanging fruits. The reason for this is that there are always going to be emissions that will happen because of safety considerations, the design of facilities, and so on. But there's no reason that we should have any more routine methane emissions.

One of the most interesting things with reducing greenhouse gas emissions of oil and gas production is that the solution that we commonly think of in other sectors, such as road transportation or industrial operations, is electrification. Just as electrification is going to reduce emissions from cars, electrification can also reduce emissions from oil and gas operations. Indeed, many operators, especially in the United States, have moved in that direction. They're using electricity to eliminate emissions, not just reduce emissions.

In fact, one of the things that I'm working on with a colleague here, Dr. Michael Webber, is looking at how the history of electrification in West Texas has actually avoided a lot of emissions that could have happened from the growth of the oil and gas industry in the Permian Basin. So, electrification has a very direct connection to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas operations.

And when you look at some of the big players in the United States right now that are reporting very low methane emissions, part of the reason they've been able to do that is through electrification and changes in equipment that just eliminate methane emissions rather than just reduce them. Once you do all of this, all that you are left with are wear-and-tear emissions that come from abnormal operations, or when things break because they're old, or whatever reason—you need to monitor for them because you don't know when they're going to happen. And they're mostly rare.

So, we can get to a point where the only methane emissions are methane emissions that are not designed for that you need to keep a lookout for. You need to monitor regularly to be able to identify and fix them as they happen. But almost all routine emissions can be eliminated.

Daniel Raimi: That is really interesting. Yeah, it makes me think of how, if you ever go drive out to an oil and gas field, most of them have lots and lots of power lines that are snaking around to the various well sites. But if you go out to a rural oil and gas–producing region where the wells are far apart, and maybe there aren't so many of them, they're often powered by these very clunky little motors that sit on site and sort of belch out smoke as they consume diesel fuel. So that's really interesting.

Arvind, this has been a fascinating conversation. I've learned a ton, and I know our audience has, too. We could talk about this for hours to come, but I'd love to ask you now the last question that we ask all of our guests, which is to recommend something that you've read, that you've watched on TV, or that you've heard on another podcast that's related to the environment that you think is really great and that you think our audience would enjoy. So, what's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

Arvind Ravikumar: One of the things I've been really fascinated by recently is the future of natural gas in the United States. If you look at what's happening right now, there's a number of new LNG exports that are coming online in the next 18 months.

In parallel, there's been a lot of statements around the need for electricity to power data centers. And if you look at estimates provided by various utilities or think tanks, those numbers are just unimaginably large. So the question is, Where are we going to get energy for all of these end uses?

And there's been a discussion around how we have to expand natural gas production because, even with the fastest-growing solar and wind deployment in the country, you are still going to need more power than what zero-carbon energy sources provide. So, I've been thinking about how much of this is real and how much of this is not.

Along those lines, I've been listening to a lot of podcasts and reading up on articles about what people are thinking and coming to a consensus related to power demand for AI.

One thing that I recently read that has completely shifted my thinking on AI was an article called “AI as Normal Technology.” This was an article written by a professor from Princeton University (my alma mater), Professor Arvind Narayanan, and his graduate student Sayash Kapoor.

They talked about how AI is going to diffuse into major companies and operations in the context of other technology diffusion that has happened in the past 50 years. And their thesis is that it's not going to be as fast as chips or technology improves, but it's going to be at the pace that new technology diffuses into organizations, which takes a much longer time frame.

So, I've been very fascinated by that. I recommend everyone to go read that article. And, of course, professor Narayanan also has a Substack where he talks about advances and implications of AI growth on our energy. That's something I've been reading a lot on.

Daniel Raimi: That sounds fascinating. Yeah, excellent suggestion. And it's a “double Arvind,” so we've got an Arvind recommended by Arvind.

Arvind Ravikumar: That's right.

Daniel Raimi: There's got to be points for that, too.

Well, one more time, Arvind Ravikumar from UT Austin, thanks so much for coming onto the show again and sharing your expertise about methane emissions and everything else. We really appreciate it.

Arvind Ravikumar: Thank you for having me.

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