Academics and Lawmakers Slam an Industry-Funded Report by a Former Energy Secretary Promoting Natural Gas and LNG

With a pair of fossil-fuel friendly senators at his side, former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz on Tuesday released a favorable report on U.S. natural gas and liquified natural gas (LNG), funded by the natural gas industry.  

The report, “The Future of Natural Gas in a Low-Carbon World,” was written by the EFI Foundation, a nonprofit Moniz founded, and released at the U.S. Capitol. The report examined the role of natural gas in advancing energy security, energy equity and environmental sustainability in the United States, Europe and Asia.

The EFI report comes at a pivotal moment for the U.S natural gas and LNG export industry. The Biden Administration paused the approval of new LNG export capacity in January while the Energy Department considers the climate and financial impacts to U.S. gas consumers of additional LNG exports. The document seeks to broaden the discussion on U.S. LNG exports. 

“The study, as you’ll be hearing, examines the role of natural gas in addressing what is sometimes referred to as the ‘energy trilemma’: energy security, energy equity and environmental sustainability,” said Moniz, president of the EFI Foundation and chair of the advisory committee that oversaw the report. “Unfortunately, too often, the discussion around those three priorities tends to devolve into stovepipes, as opposed to recognizing that progress on all of them requires treating it as one conversation.”

One of the report’s specific recommendations was to include an “energy security determination” in evaluating future permits for additional U.S. LNG export capacity.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), the largest recipient of oil and gas money in Congress, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), representing a state that derives a significant share of its revenue from oil and gas, joined Moniz as “keynote” speakers at the event.

Murkowski spoke of the need for an “all of the above” energy policy, which was the U.S. energy policy during the Obama administration when Moniz was Secretary of Energy.

Manchin called for lifting the pause on approvals for new LNG export capacity.

The report referred repeatedly to the “essential” role of natural gas. 

The same day as the report’s release, Democrats in Congress released a report of their own, the culmination of a three-year investigation, concluding the oil and gas industry has misled Americans for decades about climate change.

“The fossil fuel industry engaged in an elaborate campaign of deception and doublespeak … as well as disinformation about the climate safety of natural gas and its role as a bridge fuel to a fossil-free future,” the Democrats’ report concluded.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who released the report as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said the oil and gas industry seeks academic partnerships to legitimize its reports. 

“Documents explicitly discuss leveraging ‘third party endorsements’ and partnerships with academic institutions to bolster Big Oil’s disinformation campaign,” Whitehouse said in a written statement to Inside Climate News.

Referring explicitly to the new Moniz report on natural gas, Whitehouse said “this report is yet another example of the industry deceiving the public about the compatibility of continued—or even expanded—production of natural gas with the scientific emission reduction targets we must achieve in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid the very worst effects of climate change.”

A spokeswoman for Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability added that industry’s disinformation campaign “continues to this day, including, as [Moniz’s] recent report shows, their portrayal of natural gas as a green and climate friendly fuel even though they have failed to address methane emissions associated with natural gas. We know that Big Oil is intent on entrenching natural gas into both the U.S. and global energy economies for the foreseeable future by any means necessary.”

Some climate researchers echoed her conclusion that the new report may be a continuation of industry-funded misinformation.  

“My concern is that Moniz is—and perhaps has been since his time in the administration—an advocate for polluters over people and the planet,” said Michael Mann, an earth and environmental science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. 

“It strains credulity to believe this is a coincidence,” Mann said of the report’s favorable view of natural gas, given its gas-industry funding. “Unfortunately, the old adage ‘follow the money’ seems quite relevant here.”

In addition to his role at EFI, Moniz is an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a “special advisor” to MIT president Sally Kornbluth.

The EFI Foundation declined to respond publicly to criticisms of the report, and MIT did not respond to a request for comment.

The United States is the world’s largest exporter of LNG. Additional projects already approved by the Energy Department and not subject to the ongoing pause would triple existing U.S. export capacity. 

The pause followed the pre-release of a study that is still undergoing peer review by Robert Howarth, a professor at Cornell University. Howarth’s study concluded the climate impact of LNG fuel is worse than burning coal.

When burned, natural gas emits roughly half as much carbon dioxide as coal. However, methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a highly potent greenhouse gas, more than 80 times more effective at warming the planet than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. If even a small amount of methane is leaked, vented, or otherwise emitted into the atmosphere before the gas is burned—as it commonly is—the climate impact of natural gas can be worse than that of other fossil fuels.

Whitehouse challenged the energy security claims in the Moniz report.

“There is no energy security for American families and businesses when the price of energy is determined by geopolitical events outside our control and by an industry that frequently engages in cartel-pricing,” he said. “True energy security will be achieved when we fully transition to renewable energy sources, the ‘fuels’ for which—wind, sunlight, flowing water, the earth’s heat—are free and not controlled by any one country or cartel.”

Nonetheless, the European Commission’s executive vice president for the European Green Deal, Maroš Šefčovič, whose responsibilities include leading the European Commission’s work on becoming climate-neutral by 2050, praised the Moniz report in a video address shown at the release event.

“Natural gas has a role to play as a transitional fuel, something reflected in the COP28 conclusions,” Šefčovič said, referring to the 2023 U.N. climate conference in Dubai. “It will help ensure our energy security and energy equity as our economies decarbonize.” 

“So with Europe, having taken decisive action to reach net zero by 2050 including by accelerating the clean energy transition, we also recognize the importance of natural gas, notably in the medium term, and LNG in particular will continue to represent a significant source of gas for the EU,” Šefčovič added.   

Funders or “sponsors” of the report, which was not peer-reviewed, included Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest independent gas producers in the U.S, and U.S. LNG export companies Venture Global LNG and Tellurian. The American Petroleum Institute and three other gas industry organizations or industry PR groups also provided funding.

Additional money came from the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, named after the late George P. Mitchell, who is often referred to as the “father of fracking” for his role in developing the drilling technology known as hydraulic fracturing. The Institute of Energy Economics, a think tank in Japan, the world’s largest importer of LNG, also provided support.

The report states that the “EFI Foundation maintains editorial independence from its public and private sponsors.” However, more than half of the report’s “advisory committee” was comprised of individuals representing the report’s funders.

“EFI’s report reinforces more than a decade’s worth of independent and government-led research that has consistently shown the long-term role of natural gas in the global energy mix and its ability to accelerate global climate progress while strengthening global energy security,” API spokesperson Scott Lauermann said.

Joseph Romm, a researcher also at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, said the report’s “energy trilemma” framing that looks at energy security, equity and environmental sustainability downplays the importance of climate change.

“Climate is the overriding issue,” Romm said. “Not that the others aren’t important, but if you don’t do climate, the others don’t matter.”

Romm noted that in 2018, the International Energy Agency, a global energy watchdog, concluded that the world could not afford to build any new carbon dioxide emitting projects if the planet were to stay within 2 degrees Celsius of warming, when compared to pre-industrial times. 

Six years later, there is even less room for new fossil fuel developments, Romm said.

The EFI report states that carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) is an effective option for reducing CO2 emissions across the natural gas supply chain, even though to date such technology has never been successfully deployed at a commercial level. As the report notes, “there is no natural gas-fired power plant with CCUS in operation worldwide as of July 2023.”

The Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have provided tax incentives and billions of dollars for large-scale carbon sequestration projects.   

“You shouldn’t go around telling people that, ‘Oh, you’re going to solve whatever your natural gas problem is with carbon capture, utilization and storage’ when there isn’t a single one in operation,” Romm said. “One has to distinguish between reality and wishful thinking.”

The Moniz report also says that LNG shippers have started to offer their customers “carbon-neutral LNG cargo,” in which emissions from LNG production are offset through the purchasing of carbon credits. 

Carbon offsets have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years as offset projects have failed to live up to their emission reduction claims. Even if the projects offset the emissions of LNG production, there would still be significant emissions when the fuel is burned.

The report acknowledges the climate impact of methane emissions associated with natural gas and says “methane emissions reductions are also critical.” The report also notes that “the carbon footprint of natural gas, while lower than some alternatives, must be dramatically reduced further” and “overcoming these challenges will ultimately determine whether natural gas is indeed a transitional fuel or an integral part of the long-term global energy mix.”

In releasing the report, Moniz said the gas industry “can do a lot more in terms of having the pause be a pause by taking care of some of the homework that needs to be done,” such as on methane emissions reductions. 

However, the report focuses less on methane emissions and more on the carbon dioxide emissions reductions that can be achieved by switching from coal to gas.

Whitehouse said the focus on carbon dioxide emissions over methane emissions is misleading, intentional and not new.

“Internal documents obtained in our recent investigation demonstrate that fossil fuel companies knew methane leaks made natural gas just as harmful to the climate as coal but sought to discredit the scientific evidence and paint natural gas as a clean fuel and a crucial part of the energy mix,” Whitehouse said.

One such document obtained through the Congressional investigation was an August 2016 email from Amory Lovins, the cofounder and, at the time, chief scientist for the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean energy and sustainability research organization now known as RMI. The email was addressed to Rex Tillerson, then the chief executive of ExxonMobil.

Tillerson had just been appointed the chair of the National Petroleum Council, a federal advisory committee to the Secretary of Energy, a position then held by Moniz.

Lovins, who served as an environmental representative on the council, warned Tillerson of increasing methane emissions monitoring by “citizen activists.” He urged Tillerson, the country’s leading oil and gas executive, and his industry to “get ahead of that emerging movement” and “fix the leaks” before the “sloppy operators further damage the good firms’ reputation.”

Another record obtained through the Congressional investigation is a document from Chevron marked “classified,” which includes a presentation Lovins gave to the oil and gas company’s board of directors at a meeting in Pebble Beach, California, in 2018.

In the presentation, Lovins notes that the “#1 threat to gas” is “methane ‘slip,’” or emissions. Lovins added that “2.3% of US gas output is now lost” as emissions, making gas “little/no” better for the climate than burning coal. Lovins added that LNG is “worse” for the climate than coal.  

LNG has higher greenhouse gas emissions than natural gas due to the energy it takes to liquify and then regasify natural gas, not counting the additional methane emissions that occur during the transport of LNG in ships.

“RMI experts routinely share their independent analysis and research with a variety of stakeholders, and in this case, we presented our understanding of the climate risks of methane to the oil and gas industry, in the hopes that the facts would lead to solutions,” Lovins said in an email. “The facts presented then and subsequent research from RMI and peers have confirmed that leaks of methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, even at small amounts, make it as bad as or worse than coal for the climate and not necessarily the cleaner alternative it was once thought to be.”

Peer-reviewed studies published since 2018 suggest the climate impact of natural gas is worse than previously thought. A study published last month in Nature found that 2.95 percent of U.S. gas output is emitted rather than the 2.3 percent figure Lovins used in 2018. For the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, where much of the natural gas that is exported from the U.S. as LNG originates, emissions are far higher—9.6 percent—according to the Nature study.

Other factors, such as the use of a 20-year rather than 100-year timeframe for measuring the climate impact of methane, can result in an even smaller leak rate, making natural gas worse than coal. A study published last year in Environmental Research Letters by RMI researchers found a “methane leakage rate as low as 0.2 percent brings a gas system’s climate risk on par with coal.”

For Howarth, the Cornell professor, recent events elicit a sense of déjà vu. In 2011, Howarth published one of the first studies suggesting the climate impact of natural gas may be worse than coal. 

The same year, Moniz, then the director of the MIT Energy Initiative, was co-chair of a non-peer-reviewed Energy Initiative report funded largely by industry, “The Future of Natural Gas,” a title nearly identical to the EFI report Moniz and colleagues published this week.

The 2011 report led by Moniz downplayed Howarth’s findings and called for federal policies that “encourage the development of a [global liquid natural gas] market.”

“It feels familiar,” Howarth said of the new “Future of Natural Gas” report. “Shale gas is clearly as bad or worse than coal, no matter what industry funded people want to spin.” 

“And even if I were wrong,” Howarth added, “It’s just not the time to be promoting any fossil fuels.”