IMAP Lunch Seminar: Does Exporting Liquefied Natural Gas from the United States Increase or Decrease Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

The United States is the world’s largest producer of natural gas and the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the form in which gas is increasingly traded internationally.  Conflicts in Ukraine (2022) and in the Persian Gulf (2026), which have interrupted normal flows of gas to Europe and Asia, respectively, have amplified the importance of the U.S. as a supplier of this increasingly important energy commodity.

Natural gas is the least polluting of the fossil fuels and is associated with the lowest emissions of carbon dioxide per unit of useful energy, resulting from the combustion of those fuels.  However, natural gas supply chains are associated with vented and fugitive emissions of methane, which is also a potent greenhouse gas (GHG).  It is not settled whether increasing global supplies of natural gas increase global net GHG emissions (by out-competing renewable forms of energy) or decrease those emissions (by displacing coal from industrial and electric power sectors).  This question is best settled by greenhouse gas life cycle analysis (LCA), which is practiced in two forms: consequential and attributional.  In this presentation I describe these two methods and show how they have both fallen short when applied to the international trade of LNG.

Robert Kleinberg, IMAP Senior Fellow, will present.

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