Enbridge Renewable Natural Gas A 1% Greenwashing Rounding Error – CleanTechnica

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One of the amusing side notes of my recent foray into the challenges that the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC) is having was the tone deaf and counterproductive social media responses of their board member from Enbridge, the biggest natural gas firm in North America.

When that board member first saw my initial assessment of their Brampton report, finding a $360 million swing in favor of a battery electric only fleet over a hydrogen-electric blended fleet, they asked about renewable natural gas for transit instead of the credibility-crippling $360 million.

When I published an open letter to CUTRIC’s Board after Michael Raynor’s analysis with me found another $1.1 billion in favor of battery electric only and CUTRIC hired a PR firm to respond, the CUTRIC Board member from Enbridge once again was defending renewable natural gas, a subject that was of much less materiality in guidance, being mentioned in sub-recommendations. This despite the open letter being clear guidance about how to respond to deep PR crises like this, literally text book guidance, as I discussed while laughing about it with a recovering PR professional in Brussels last week.

To summarize the PR guidance, by the way, it boils down to admit responsibility, apologize, identify and promise to fix the organizational faults that led to the failure at the heart of the crisis, and keep people informed as you fix them. Nitpicking at details, especially ones that aren’t even related to the topic of the existential crisis, is exactly the wrong response, yet that’s all the CUTRIC board member from Enbridge had to offer, including under the LinkedIn post saying it was exactly the wrong response. Implicit in all of this guidance was keeping control of communications, ensuring a united organizational front.

Further, while defending renewable natural gas might make sense in some contexts, they drew their own firm, Enbridge, the people who pay their salary, further into CUTRIC’s crisis by commenting, including by posting a link directly to an Enbridge webpage. One recommendation to CUTRIC was to review their governance procedures, as having an Enbridge salesperson on their board had the optics of impropriety, and the board member’s tone deaf responses certainly make it clearer that they aren’t interested in CUTRIC’s credibility.

Their responses certainly confirmed for me that they were unfit to be on CUTRIC’s board, as they made zero attempt to defend that organization except by deflection and posting distractions. It was a bravura display of what not to do, and of course, led to me writing this piece, on why renewable gas not only isn’t useful for transit decarbonization, it isn’t useful as an energy source at all. As noted, counterproductive.

And so, to renewable natural gas (RNG). It’s produced by capturing methane emissions from organic waste. Key sources of RNG include landfills, wastewater treatment plants, livestock manure, and food waste from agricultural and industrial operations. At each source, organic materials decompose and release biogas — a mix of methane and carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere. RNG facilities capture this biogas, treating and refining it to reach the quality of conventional natural gas.

As a reminder about natural gas, it’s mostly methane and methane is a very potent greenhouse gas that’s 30 to 90 times as bad as carbon dioxide. Further, our entire natural gas system from cradle to use leaks. I discussed that recently with Rob Jackson, director of the Global Carbon Project and a US expert on natural gas. I was facilitating a joint EU-Canada methane emissions abatement discussion for the oil and gas industry in Calgary earlier this year because I’ve spent so much time looking at the space and publishing on all aspects of methane emissions and solutions to them.

Jackson is a Stanford climate scientist who has flown over the Permian basin in lidar-equipped planes recording plumes of leaking methane from the oil and gas industry. He’s driven along streets in three major US cities with methane-sniffing equipment on a research vehicle to map urban distribution leakages. He’s taken methane and other gas detecting equipment into people’s homes across the USA to determine methane leakage and indoor air pollution from gas appliances. Leakage was high. He’s much more an expert on methane than I aspire to be, and we agree on virtually everything on the subject.

Renewable natural gas has a place. Capturing as much of the unavoidable anthropogenic emissions from our economic processes that are biomass-based as possible is eminently sensible. Displacing fossil gas feedstock from industrial processes that will persist with RNG is eminently sensible. There’s possibly a place for RNG in long duration strategic energy stores for 10 to 100 year, broad geography renewables lulls, dunkeflaute in the Germany term, certainly much more of a place than hydrogen.

But replacing natural gas for energy in day to day use? That’s just silly, and is greenwashing by firms like Enbridge and other CUTRIC members Fortis BC and Fortis Alberta. It enables them to pretend that they are decarbonizing without doing much of anything regarding decarbonization, giving them the social license to operate longer and lobby hard for more gas hookups instead of strategic shut down of gas utilities to avoid the utility death spiral that’s looming for them.

Also, manufacturing a lot more methane with anaerobic digesters is a bad idea because intentionally making high global warming potential gases in a leaky supply chain guarantees higher emissions, not reduced emissions. The biomass, if aerated, would decompose aerobically to create carbon dioxide, with 30 to 90 times lower climate change impacts.

Let’s step through several use cases for natural gas today to see if there are clear alternatives to a high global warming potential gas, as well as ratios of RNG availability to fossil gas consumption.

Per the US Energy Information Administration, there are five major demand areas for natural gas: electric power, industrial, residential, commercial and transportation. It’s not clear why the EIA is being coy about another major use case, export as LNG, but that’s another 6.9 trillion cubic feet. Adding that gives us a table like this.

The EIA material is in trillion cubic feet (TCF), Canadians buy natural gas in gigajoules and the Global Carbon Project material uses teragrams (Tg), so I’ve fleshed out the material for completeness.

While these are US statistics, they are apt when it comes to discussing Enbridge as about 55% of its revenue comes from US operations including supplying LNG export terminals. It’s also a 30% owner of BC’s LNG export terminal. It’s the biggest natural gas distributor by volume in North America.

Looking at the teragrams, we can compare to the emissions of methane from natural sources that Enbridge and other gas utilities claim is going to supplant natural gas. Total global emissions from all biological anthropogenic sources of methane annually are around 250 teragrams a year. Just the USA’s extraction of and use of methane is 800 teragrams, over three times as much. While the USA is the world’s leading producer, consumer and exporter of natural gas, it’s only a fifth of global use. The actual teragrams from fossil fuels globally is in the range of 4,000 teragrams, around six times as much.

Further, there’s no way to capture 100% of anthropogenic emissions of methane to make RNG. A tremendous amount of methane emissions comes from agricultural and forestry waste in piles that has internal anaerobic decomposition. A huge amount is from rice fields. Neither is remotely susceptible to capturing the methane.

Only reasonably big point sources of anthropogenic biomethane can see partial capture. Industrial dairy barns where cow burps can see methane filtered out using cryogenic or membrane filtration. Landfills can be covered with plastic seals and the methane from decomposing food waste, paper and chopsticks can be captured, and is in many landfills today. Wastewater treatment plants are existing sources of methane in enclosed spaces suitable for capture.

Even with the numbers above, dairy cattle are only about 25% of cattle in North America, and there are also goats and sheep in the mix. That’s only about 8% of methane emissions that have the potential to be captured. About 55% of them are in dairy firms big enough for a methane capture system to be considered, so it’s down to 4%.

The first thing to do with those sources, of course, is to reduce emissions as much as possible. For dairy cows, seaweed-derived supplements can reduce enteric emissions by up to 80%. For landfills, diversion of biomass waste into more productive uses makes sense. Not much we can do about wastewater treatment plants. (Supplements for all ruminants and variable fill agriculture for rice reduce emissions there substantially, but that’s outside of capturable emissions.)

Generously, about 1% of total anthropogenic biomethane emissions could be captured, turning the percentage of fossil natural gas that could be displaced to one 1,600th of current global demand. The sheer scale of the fossil fuel industry vs the difficulty of capturing anthropogenic biomethane is missing from all discussions of it by organizations like CUTRIC out of ignorance, and by Enbridge and other fossil fuel firms with full knowledge and intent.

There are anaerobic biodigesters too. They are sealed chambers with the biomass added and oxygen removed. That means all of the biomass decomposes anaerobically into methane instead of into carbon dioxide. They leak. Studies find up to 15% of methane escapes from them, with a study of 23 finding an average of 4.6% leakage. This is a point I discussed with the biofuels lead of the Mærsk McKinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping a while ago. They have been proponents of biomethane as a shipping fuel, and I had to tell them that in my considered opinion, it was a bad idea. Intentionally turning biomass into methane in a leaky system and distributing it widely for more leakage is counterproductive from a climate perspective. Allowing it to decompose aerobically into carbon dioxide is much more sensible.

Enbridge gets most of its RNG from landfill methane to RNG facilities, about 5 billion cubic feet a year. Note the billion, not trillion. That’s about 0.1 teragrams a year. Enbridge’s natural gas transmission and midstream operation delivers 26.3 trillion cubic feet, about 533 teragrams a year. Their natural gas utilities deliver about 10 teragrams a year to commercial, residential and industrial customers. They’ve managed to source 1% of their total utility distribution natural gas from RNG after about 13 years of effort. They’ve managed to source 0.02% of their transmission of natural gas from RNG sources after 13 years of effort. That’s greenwashing.

They’ve managed to source around 1.5% of their LNG export customer deliveries from RNG after 13 years of effort. That’s indicative of what’s going on. LNG shipments are higher margin than domestic delivery because North America’s natural gas is dirt cheap. That’s because 70% of it comes as a waste by product of shale oil and they are giving it away for the price of distribution. The spike in LNG shipments has caused the domestic market for natural gas to increase prices while at the same time governments are demanding and paying a premium for RNG.

The combination means that Enbridge makes money by selling more fossil natural gas internationally at higher global prices, getting higher domestic prices for RNG, downplaying completely the inability of RNG to scale to be a solution, and pretending the RNG is anything other than the pea in a shell game. What was that word again? Oh, yeah, greenwashing.

But back to use cases and alternatives.

Electrical generation doesn’t need more methane, it needs more wind and solar. Every GWh of electricity delivered from wind and solar farms knocks a GWh generated by fossil fuels off of the grid. Every GW of electricity storage capacity connected knocks a bunch of fossil fuels used for firming off of the grid. The only place for methane, whether fossil or renewable, is in increasingly constrained capacity factor peaker plants. That demand is heading down because renewables and storage are climbing rapidly. That’s why capacity factors at fossil fuel plants have been in decline in North America, Europe and China for years.

The only potential use case in the long run for RNG is in long-duration, strategic energy reserves for continent-scale lulls in wind combined with low solar input, the dunkelflaute. These only occur every 10 years on average in the small nation of the United Kingdom, and 50 to 100 years on more connected continents where it’s easier to build transmission to move sunshine and wind generated electrons long distances. This is a tiny amount, in the range of 0.01% to 0.1% of current annual demand, and within the range of capturing existing anthropogenic biomethane emissions.

So much for 33% of North American demand.

Industrial heat is going to electrify. 45% of it is under 200° Celsius, and we have heat pumps that do that now. Heat pumps are about three times as efficient as burning gas, so the economics strongly favor them. Further, wind turbines or solar panels to heat pumps have vastly lower emissions than burning methane gas from any source for heat, at a lower cost than RNG. Higher heat levels are also all going to electrify, with varying speeds in different geographies.

That’s something I’ve spent a lot of time on too, including extended time with modular chemical processing plant designer Paul Martin, and global providers of high-heat electrical solutions like the CTO of Kanthal. Since the Enbridge’s salesperson in question is a Canadian guy, Canada’s generally low carbon electricity and carbon price would wreak havoc with his annual bonuses, if he is eligible for any.

About two-thirds of industrial demand for natural gas is for heat. The third that’s for industrial feedstocks, for example methanol manufacturing, is going to be a market for RNG. Making methanol from anthropogenic biomethane, for example, is a good pathway. Methanol is a key industrial feedstock with a range of vital applications. Approximately 30-40% of methanol is used to produce formaldehyde, essential for making resins, adhesives, and construction materials like plywood. Another significant portion goes into acetic acid production, a building block for paints, adhesives, and textiles. Methanol also fuels the creation of olefins, such as ethylene and propylene, which form the basis of plastics and synthetic fibers. Additionally, it’s a component in biodiesel production and is commonly found in solvents and antifreeze.

However, in the set of feedstock use cases, there are ones that use methanol because it’s cheaper than alternatives. Biomethanol is always going to be more expensive than unabated fossil gas, so when carbon pricing forces the end users to reconsider their business cases, in some cases they’ll switch to alternatives instead.

Methanol is a big carbon bomb today, made from natural gas with emissions for manufacturing such that if it were burned as a fuel, it would be three times worse than burning diesel, as per the table above I worked up when considering it as a shipping fuel.

Displacing industrial feedstock methanol use of fossil gas with biogas makes sense. While volumes of biogas from even the biggest landfills are too low for a scaled biomethanol plant, it’s entirely possible to consider an industrial anaerobic digestion system tightly coupled to a methanol plant that also gets piped in landfill gas. In an industrial setting, methane emission control can be designed in, monitored and managed effectively. But that’s not burning the biogas, that’s turning it into a chemical feedstock for durable goods.

Going back to the demand, so much for another 18% of it. Half of demand for Enbridge’s product is disappearing already, so you can understand why they are pushing hard for any use case for it they can.

Exporting LNG? There’s no margin in exporting RNG to Europe when they can export much cheaper fossil gas at a premium and sell the RNG at a premium domestically. Russia’s gas exports to Europe have been displaced in part by US LNG shipping out of Texas, but more by renewables and efficiency. China burns coal vastly more than it burns natural gas and all fossil fuel demand from China has peaked and will fall quickly due to structural reasons and long-standing governmental policy, as I pointed out in Brussels last week while sharing a stage with a European member of parliament and the Belgian energy minister. That’s another 18% of demand which is disappearing, so we’re down to about 30% of current demand to consider as potential for RNG in the future.

Residential heat? Heat pumps and district heating, anyone? It’s a faint hope to believe the technology which is sweeping the world will be more than delayed by greenwashing from firms like Enbridge. That’s another 11% of demand gone. Even Fortis has a heat pump installation program, as they also generate electricity from their fossil fuel of choice.

Commercial? That’s all low temperature heat as well, except for restaurant cooking. No need to put RNG into hot water boilers, gas furnaces or stoves when heat pumps and induction cooking exist. Even woks in Chinese restaurants have induction solutions that are low carbon and cheaper than RNG flames that don’t exist beyond 1% of the gas. That’s another 8% gone from the market. We’re down to 10% of current demand potentially serviceable by RNG in the future.

And then transportation. This is a place where the natural gas marketers have gone to town in domain after domain over the past 40 years. There were compressed natural gas fleet vehicles likes buses and cop cars. Now, not so much because they were a pain in the asphalt. Compressors kept failing, vehicles kept blowing up and CNG just didn’t penetrate that much despite people like the Enbridge sales person trying to force people to pick their product.

They managed to get a bunch of operators on the water liking their product. There were multiple factors in this. The first was that LNG tankers have lots of natural gas and some of it is boiling off from the cryogenic natural gas, so it’s better to use it than not. Burning methane in engines stinks less than burning bunker fuel, so cruise ship and ferry operators bought in big time. The natural gas salesman like the Enbridge person asserted mightily that it was a climate solution, and it was better, as long as you didn’t look to closely. The methane when burned turned into a bit less carbon dioxide than when burning bunker fuel, so there was that.

But as the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT)’s Fugitive Unburnt Methane Emissions from Shipping (FUMES) study showed a couple of years ago, burning methane in internal combustion engines results in a lot more unburnt methane leaking into the atmosphere than anybody thought. The studied ships had an average of almost double the methane slippage as industry assumptions. Even with the industry assumption, the high global warming potential of methane means that they aren’t a climate solution over 20 years, and are only somewhat better over 100 years. The world is moving to consider methane at 20 years very seriously, as avoiding methane emissions today has benefits in 20 years, not 100.

Transit buses aren’t magically different than ships or Shell’s power engines. They and the distribution system for RNG would leak, removing any benefit of the gas as a solution.

As Rob Jackson says, if we stopped emitting methane today, the excess we’ve shoved into the atmosphere would be gone in a generation, significantly reducing the heat increases in the near term.

When I was facilitating that methane emissions leakage reductions dialogue with industry, academic and governmental stakeholders, case study after case study by all stakeholders and researchers made it clear that burning methane to power oil and gas operations was resulting in significant methane slippage. The Shell representative openly shared that after spending a lot of time and money on detection of leaks, they realize that their methane burning engines were the worst problem and unironically said that they were electrifying everything as the solution.

Are there any alternatives to RNG in transportation? You know, like battery electric trucks and battery electric and biodiesel hybrid ships? Yes, yes there are, and they are all lower greenhouse gas emissions than burning RNG. So much for the last 3%.

That leaves 7% to 9% of total US demand — industrial feedstocks — where RNG would actually be useful. That’s about 64 teragrams or 3.1 trillion cubic feet. That’s about 315 times as much as Enbridge has managed to unlock so far after 13 years of promoting itself as a virtuous supplier of renewable natural gas.

You’d think that they’d be all over that instead of transit buses, the market the Enbridge sales person was defending. Every study I’ve participated in or assessed recently hasn’t even considered burning methane of any source in buses. It’s just not a serious option for decarbonization.

Unless your only business is selling methane or some derivative, as is the case with the CUTRIC board member from Enbridge. In that case, you are pushing RNG like mad, knowing that you’ll just keep selling fossil gas and promising biologically sourced methane. Or you promise green hydrogen, knowing that you’ll just keep selling hydrogen made from natural gas. Regardless, every gigajoule of RNG sold to transit organizations is a high-priced gigajoule, part of the premium domestically and premium internationally strategy Enbridge and other natural gas firms are being allowed to follow.

There are a couple of possibilities for the CUTRIC board member from Enbridge. The first is that they are fully aware of all of the above, and are just really bad at their job, bringing negative attention to CUTRIC, Enbridge and themselves unnecessarily. They could really believe that RNG is a solution for transit, which would mean that they are rather dim and gullible, and would still mean that they are bad at their jobs, bringing unnecessary attention to CUTRIC, Enbridge and themselves. They could just not care, accepting whatever Enbridge tells them in order to get a salary, but they still remain incompetent at basic communications. The likelihood that they are just a salaried employee buying into whatever story Enbridge the corporation is pushing, and being defensive out of habit is quite likely. Never ascribe to malice what can better be ascribed to incompetence.

They certainly aren’t someone I’d put on the Board of an urban transit research consortium. Enbridge is a utility member I assume, and CUTRIC’s sliding scale fee structure means it, Fortis BC and Fortis Alberta are each paying the second highest level, about $18,000 Canadian each every year, although Fortis Alberta might be on the next tier down. They are also undoubtedly a major source of funding for projects that align with their priorities. Enbridge planted their sales guy on the CUTRIC Board to push things important to Enbridge, and to be the person who trots back to Enbridge for more money.

As a side note, Ballard Power, the BC-based hydrogen fuel cell manufacturer, is in the highest category, industrial with over 500 employees, and pays around $35,000 a year. This is part of their annual losses averaging $55 million every year since 2000. They don’t expect to make a profit and they keep finding new investors willing to throw good money after bad, so of course they are paying top dollar to lobby CUTRIC. They too have a board member in the organization, when no battery manufacturer is even a member.

CUTRIC’s membership descriptions make it clear why Enbridge, Fortis BC, Fortis Alberta and Ballard would pony up money.

• Utility Members can engage directly in CUTRIC commercial project proposals, funding activities and project development, including major initiatives like CUTRIC’s National Smart Vehicle (AV) shuttle project, it’s emerging “Phase Two” hydrogen fuel cell bus project and its new national ACES Data Trust initiative for transit data.

• Utility Members can engage in CUTRIC’s federal Five Point Plan for federal technology funding initiatives focused on the transit industry.

So that’s one mention of hydrogen. (Also, while pointing out grammatical errors on websites usually isn’t worth it, the lack of basic grammar checking by CUTRIC in this text is par for the course for its shoddy work, for example labeling a present value of costs chart as a net present value chart, as they did in their deeply flawed report for Brampton. They really need to up their quality control.)

What’s relevant from the federal five point plan?

2. Achieve price parity between green hydrogen and diesel. 

3. Identify renewable natural gas (RNG) as a potential “third solution” for zero-emissions transit.

Yup, more of CUTRIC being completely in the wrong place, likely due to firms like Enbridge lobbying heavily for their preferred dead end solutions. Two of the five points are about stuff that helps the fossil fuel industry, not urban transit organizations. As noted, after 13 years of effort, Enbridge’s RNG is a rounding error. That they are pushing ‘clean’ hydrogen as every other fossil fuel firm is, intending to bait and switch actually green hydrogen with blue and even unabated gray hydrogen goes without saying. That was covered in the Brampton and Mississauga hydrogen bus assessments I published earlier, so I’m not going to rehash that dead end.

As I said in my open letter to CUTRIC in the section on strategy:

The correct policy is that battery electric buses are the right answer and CUTRIC will focus its attention on addressing the comparatively minor issues of overcoming operational and fiscal challenges with them.

And so, the end of this deep dive on why renewable natural gas only has a couple of use cases that make sense, and neither of them is transit. Capturing as much of the anthropogenic biomethane we can’t avoid as possible makes sense. Likely using anaerobic digesters in carefully controlled industrial settings where the methane is used directly as an industrial feedstock, exactly as 85% of hydrogen today is manufactured and used, makes sense.

CUTRIC intentionally promoting RNG for transit doesn’t pass the sniff tests of empirical reality so they should stop doing that. And they should remove the Enbridge and Ballard members from their board.