Where did gas go wrong? Part 1
I’ve called this part 1, but to be honest, I don’t know how many parts we’re going to need to work through this. This could take a while, and it may feel like you are bearing witness to me organising my thoughts. It possibly also qualifies as 20/20 hindsight - but if we’re trying to do better in the future then we must understand the past.
Back when I started in this industry in the UK in 2001, it felt to me like oil and gas were more or less a singularity. People said it almost as one word - oilandgas - are rarely was there any need to differentiate the two. As I moved through different parts of the business (I worked for ExxonMobil in those days), technicalities changed but it felt pretty seamless.
(I appreciate that this may be a British-ism - certainly, the way the North Sea evolved from being an oil producer who reinjected gas before repurposing platforms to become a significant gas producer contributed to this.)
Sure, oilandgas have upstream synergies, so from a producer perspective this made sense. The skills for one are, to a reasonable extent, transferable. But what about from a consumer perspective? What’s the correlation between the stuff that heats your home, and the truly mind-blowing array of oil derivative products - pharmaceuticals to fabrics, plastics to jet fuel?
And then we come to coal. I grew up in the north east of England at the end of the coal era. Newcastle, Australia is named after my home town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne due to the prevalence of coal. The backdrop to my childhood was the aftermath of the death of coal mining in the UK, and the cleansing of the country that came with the transition from coal- to gas-fired power.
Those of you old enough, check your memory banks; if you’re not, talk to your parents and grandparents. This experience wasn’t unique to the UK, and is happening in many parts of the world right now, with China being perhaps the most prominent example. It was real then, it’s real now and it matters. It’s a story that has been forgotten by many in the west, and it’s a story that still needs to play out in the developing world.
Yet, somehow, oilandgas and coal became amalgamated in the unholy alliance of ‘fossil fuels’. It’s quoted by the media as a single, homogenous, evil entity that is coming to eat your lunch, steal your daughters and scatter small pieces of lego on the floor for you to stand on at night.
But… and I understand that some may consider this a facetious argument… what does that ‘fossil’ even mean? Yes, it’s true that coal and oil both contain fossils. But methane, the primary component of natural gas, is simply the product of the anaerobic decomposition of organic material. That’s why gas, unlike, coal and oil, is in continuous formation. That’s why renewable natural gas is a (good) thing. That’s why bovine flatulence occasionally makes the news.
Sure, some of the reservoirs we access are old - I’d say that’s also a good thing because it means that there is enough in one place to make extraction for the benefit of the people worthwhile. My kids consider me to be a fossil, so maybe all things are indeed relative. But coagulating coaloilandgas into a single category is like equating light beer to cocaine.
Definitions like this matter. There is a spectrum, and demonising the whole spectrum in the way our current political class and media does* is lazy, unhelpful, and distracts from the task at hand - which I’d define as meeting the needs of the world and alleviating poverty through the provision of clean, affordable energy. If we can’t be honest with ourselves, how will we ever find truth?
As I’ve said here before, gas remains the best current energy solution we have when all factors - including scale and speed of deployment - are considered.
Where did gas go wrong, part 1: by allowing itself to become indistinguishable from coal in the minds of many voters.
AB
* Think how all 74 million Americans who voted for Trump are now ‘white supremacists’. Consider vaccine mandates an overreach, even though you’ve had both shots? You’re an antivaxxer, right up there with the crazies of the Byron Shire. And don’t start me on Trudeau’s smearing of the truckers… it doesn’t matter on which side of these debates you sit, what matters is that we should be smart enough to not brand large groups by their most extreme elements.