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U.S. LNG exporters are working hard to cut carbon emissions from new facilities because they want to keep new multi-billion-dollar projects up and running despite increasing climate pressures.
America has become a LNG export In recent years, due to the explosive growth of the country’s shale oil and gas fields, the United States has become bolder in its claims of energy independence and provided Washington with a useful new tool to counter geopolitical enemies such as Russia.
But for the few companies competing to build new projects to boost the country’s exports, the global blow to emissions and great concern Methane pollution Oil from U.S. oil and gas fields threatened to undermine their plans.
European efforts to implement a carbon border adjustment tax — which may impose a fee on higher-emission imports — are particularly worrying for US LNG companies that compete with Russia, Qatar, and other continental European countries.
U.S. LNG project developers have sought to counter this threat by introducing plans to install expensive equipment to capture carbon from their facilities, as well as other measures, such as promising to obtain natural gas only from producers that monitor their own emissions.
Venture Global, the developer of the liquefied natural gas project, said last week that it plans to install carbon capture and storage equipment that will eventually benefit from a new $5.8 billion export plant it built on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and another plant it hopes will The capture of up to 1 million tons of carbon dioxide will be approved this year.
Prior to this, the project developer NextDecade issued a similar statement in March. The company stated that it has increased plans to capture and store approximately 90% of its proposed US$8 billion export base in Rio Grande, Texas. % Of carbon dioxide emissions. It hopes to make a final investment decision on the project this year.
Carbon capture and storage, where carbon dioxide is captured on site and piped to natural reservoirs deep underground for storage, is often touted by the oil and gas industry as a way to continue to extract fossil fuels even when the global economy is decarbonized .
But carbon capture is still costly and has not been widely deployed, making the US LNG proposal a key test for the technology.
NextDecade said it will use federal tax credits, called 45Q, Can be used for carbon capture projects to help fund development, believing that tax credits will only slightly increase the production cost of the facility.
The International Energy Agency recently highlighted the pressures facing the natural gas industry report It is believed that meeting the government’s net-zero target will mean that many LNG facilities under construction will not be needed, as the demand for fuel will peak later this decade, much earlier than previously predicted.
S&P Global Platts LNG analyst Ross Wyeno said that, unlike the past, any new U.S. LNG export project that is expected to be completed “needs to formulate clear-cut regulations around carbon and methane emissions. strategy”.
US natural gas executives insist that natural gas, especially with the support of emission reductions, can play a role in the transition to cleaner fuels. The carbon dioxide emitted when natural gas is burned is about half that of coal.
“If you want to achieve the greatest emission reductions, you go to coal production and use natural gas to do this… You can achieve large-scale emission reductions,” said Mike Sabel, CEO of Venture Global LNG Said in the Financial Times event last week.
However, the soaring emissions of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) in US oil and natural gas fields and the rampant burning of natural gas have weakened the green certificate of this fuel.
Last year, the French government intervened to cancel a potential long-term LNG deal worth about $7 billion between Engie and NextDecade in France, at least in part because of concerns about methane pollution from natural gas produced in the United States.
Wyeno said: “This is one of the first truly verifiable signs that this is not just empty talk, but that many of these projects do need to address emissions.
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