Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared at Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
More than three-quarters of new gas pipeline capacity currently under development in the U.S. would feed additional liquefied natural gas exports rather than supporting domestic energy needs, a new report concludes.
Greenhouse gas emissions tied to that new capacity would be far larger than the current climate pollution from all coal-fired power plants nationwide, according to the report, published Monday by the Center for Energy & Environmental Analysis. CEEA is a recently formed think tank based in Arlington, Virginia, that focuses on energy and environmental policy.
“The money flowing to gas pipeline infrastructure is not slowing and is intended to push US gas production even higher from its current record levels,” Jeremy Symons, president of the CEEA and a former federal climate policy advisor, said in a written statement. “This buildout will extend our dependency on natural gas for decades to come, slowing the transition to cleaner, more affordable alternatives.”
Planned natural gas transmission pipelines would add 99 billion cubic feet per day of additional capacity, a figure just below the total volume of U.S. natural gas production in 2024, according to the report. The 10 largest planned pipelines across the country—and 80 percent of total capacity of active pipeline projects—are intended to export gas overseas as LNG, based on the authors’ assessment of federal data and other public records.
The additional gas shipments would have significant implications for climate change. If all of the pipelines are built and run at full capacity, carbon dioxide emissions from burning this additional gas would be two and half times greater than the CO2 currently released from all U.S. coal-fired power plants, the report found.
This doesn’t include emissions of methane, a climate super pollutant and the primary component of natural gas. Methane emissions occur at every step of the natural gas supply chain—from wellheads and pipelines to LNG vessels and end users—as the gas leaks or is intentionally vented.
Methane emissions from the additional pipelines would pack a climate punch nearly twice that of CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants over a 20-year period, according to the report.
The amount of gas leaks from the oil and gas sector will likely increase as the Trump administration rolls back the industry’s methane regulations, the report noted.
“We know from hundreds of thousands of aerial and satellite measurements that methane leaks from oil and gas production are far worse than we previously realized, which makes the climate footprint of natural gas as bad as coal in many regions of the country,” said Danny Richter, a senior fellow with CEEA and the report’s lead author. “We had a clear path to clean up the methane problem, including the methane emissions reduction program enacted by Congress in 2022 as well as EPA regulations for the oil and gas industry. But that pathway has been shut down by the current administration.”
A fee on excessive methane emissions from oil and gas producers implemented under the Biden administration was rescinded by the Trump administration on May 12.
“It is clear from the beginning of this ‘report’ that it was created with the outcome already determined and no desire to provide facts,” an EPA spokesperson told Inside Climate News. “U.S. methane emissions have been falling for decades thanks to American innovation, not heavy-handed government regulations, while domestic production of oil and gas has exponentially increased. According to EPA, methane emissions in the United States decreased by 19% between 1990 and 2022.”
Measurements in the field have repeatedly shown that reported methane emissions far understate actual releases.
The American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry group, did not respond to a request for comment.
The report is based on U.S. Department of Energy data on 104 pipeline projects currently under development. It is unclear whether all of the planned pipelines will be built. Fifty-four of the projects, slightly more than half of all pipelines under development, have either not yet been approved or are on hold.
This includes one of the largest proposed pipelines, the $45 billion Alaska Nikiski LNG project. The pipe, which proponents have sought for decades, would transport gas 805 miles from Alaska’s North Slope to an LNG export terminal in southern Alaska. Completing the proposed export terminal, a retrofit of an existing import terminal, is included in the project’s projected cost.
The developer, the Alaska Gasline Development Corp, has applied for permits for the pipeline, many of which were approved during the last Trump administration, but still requires more.
President Donald Trump has directed agencies to speed up permitting and roll back environmental protections. He touted the Alaska Nikiski LNG project in an address to Congress earlier this year as “truly spectacular” and said “the permitting is gotten.”
Arvind Ravikumar, co-director of the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, cautioned that the report included figures for carbon dioxide emissions of gas burned by end users in other countries that import the LNG.
“The way international carbon accounting works in this space is that you count only those emissions that happen within your national border,” Ravikumar said.
However, David Lyon, a senior methane scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, said including emissions from burning the gas, wherever it occurs, made sense.
“Climate change is global,” Lyon said. “If we are just exporting our emissions to other countries, that’s still going to cause climate change and have impact.”
However, Lyon noted that in some cases, building gas pipelines could actually help reduce emissions. For example, in the Permian basin of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico—the largest oil and gas producing region in the country—gas is often flared, or vented, due to a lack of sufficient pipeline capacity.
In such cases, additional pipelines could help reduce flaring and its associated emissions. But it would be better to avoid drilling new wells in areas that lack sufficient pipeline capacity in the first place, Lyon added.
In comparing greenhouse gas emissions associated with the planned pipelines to those of coal-power plants, the report only compares CO2 emissions between the two fuel sources. Elsewhere, the report discusses methane emissions from the gas supply chain, but does not consider methane emissions from coal mines that feed coal-fired power plants. A recent peer-reviewed study comparing the greenhouse gas emissions of LNG and coal found methane emissions from coal mines were relatively modest compared to coal’s CO2 emissions.
In addition to permitting issues, economic forces could also limit the number of pipeline projects that get built in the coming years, or the extent to which completed pipelines operate at full capacity.
China, the world’s largest importer of LNG, stopped taking U.S. gas entirely in March in response to U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods.
Symons said the ongoing pipeline buildout could commit the U.S. to significantly larger LNG exports for decades to come.
“This locks in more fossil fuel dependency that future presidents won’t be able to make go away,” he said. “Policies like tax incentives come and go, but pipelines are forever.”
The post The Massive U.S. Pipeline Buildout Is Mostly for Gas Going Overseas appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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