Is British gas and oil really 4x as good for the environment as imported fuel?

The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, recently declared that he’s going to enable a huge expansion of North Sea gas and oil extraction.

There is a lot to criticise about this plan to say the least. But here I will endeavor to restrict myself to digging into one of his more surprising claims about this move. He tells us that expanding fossil fuel extraction is actually an environmentally friendly policy, perfectly compatible with Britain’s supposed “net zero emissions” target for the year 2050.

A lot of what he and has minions have been touting as evidence towards this intuitively extraordinary claim is that British oil and gas is much better for the environment than that nasty foreign stuff.

From one Sunak interview :

Even when we reach net zero in 2050, a quarter of our energy needs will still come from oil and gas and domestic gas production has about a quarter or a third of the carbon footprint of imported gas.

My first reaction upon seeing the latter half of that sentence was some uncharitable curiosity as to whether Sunak thinks that we import oil by putting it into small bottles and hand delivering it via 1-passenger private jets or something along those lines. But honestly I had basically no knowledge about the emissions dynamics of fuel production so before assuming it’s another misleading obfuscation designed to trick us into believing something other than the worst of this Brave New Policy, I figured I should see if there’s any data supporting the claim.

The intent seems to be to have us believe that getting new gas (or gas and oil, depending on which of quote one believes) out of the North Sea will be only a quarter as damaging to the environment as continuing our current imports. Can that be true?

Now in more detail:

First, to state the fairly obvious, the gas and oil that comes from the seas around Britain is not so chemically different to everyone else’s gas and oil once extracted. It’s not “better” oil and gas that magically doesn’t pollute the atmosphere when its consumed to produce energy. It’s functionally the same. So if there are such huge differences to its impact on the environment then they must come from either how it is extracted from the earth or how it’s transported.

The most intuitive reading of the quote above to me is that it refers exclusively to the former. It is of course a time-honoured approach to misleading people without exactly lying by quoting statistics about a part of a process without putting it into the context of the full process. But that aside, is Britain so amazing at extracting oil and gas from the ground that it has only a quarter of the impact of doing so elsewhere?

So let’s start off with the emissions produced by the process of extracting gas and oil.

In their fact check, Carbon Brief find that the estimated emissions from the end-to-end UK oil and gas process might actually end up being a little lower than the global average.

This information seems to originate from a report from the Climate Change Committee (CCC). The orange parts of the chart below highlight the magnitude of the differences in emissions between UK gas and oil and the global average. Smaller bars reflect lower emissions.

The differences are there but relatively small. This is because only a small fraction of the emissions associated with oil or gas are related to its extraction and transport. That’s the lighter purple part of the bars on the chart. The large majority of the end-to-end gas and oil emissions emanate from the actual combustion of the fuel, its usage, represented by the dark part of the bars.

There’s no plausible way to cut the impact of oil and gas emissions to a quarter of what they’d otherwise be by fiddling with production methods when the vast majority of the emissions come from the use of the resulting product. At best we can say that the small light purple bar for the UK is a tiny bit smaller in absolute terms than the small light purple bar for the global average.

Sure, it’s a lot smaller in relative terms, maybe even 1/3 – 1/4 of the size in the case of gas. But the environmental impact is of course dependent on the absolute volume of greenhouse gases in this context.

Any reduction is of course a good thing; smaller is always better here, but it’s not exactly the sentiment I imagine we’re supposed to take from Sunak’s enthusiastic proclamations.

Besides the CCC report itself states that there’s considerable amount of uncertainty with these figures. So much so that:

…it is therefore not possible to conclude with confidence the net effect of new North Sea production on global emissions.

They just don’t know. There may be no effect at all.

And not that Sunak claimed otherwise, but in any case:

The scale of production from potential new North Sea fields is unlikely to be
meaningful in the context of global emissions.

Worse yet, even if the UK could produce cleaner fossil fuels, any net emissions reduction necessarily comes from the assumption that extracting oil and gas from the North Sea stops it being extracted from elsewhere.

But unless opening up these relatively tiny volumes of fuel somehow exceeds the world’s desire for energy, why would that follow? Aren’t we just net adding to the volume of oil and gas extracted worldwide and hence net increasing the damaging effects of these fuels’ combustion? The CCC agrees with that being a risk.

Extra gas and oil production could lead to higher overall global consumption.

Again, it’s hard to be certain exactly what part of any new extraction would replace rather than add to existing sources. But with fossil fuel companies currently making unspeakable and unprecedented profits, it is hard to imagine they’ll ever stop leveraging every opportunity they have to gulp up more, more, more.

The model the CCC uses suggests that only a small additive effect would be needed to outweigh any possible emissions we’d save by the use of UK fuel as opposed to the global average import.

The net impact on global emissions of production from any new UK fields – including unabated combustion of these fossil fuels – would be upwards if the resultant increase in global consumption is more than 14% of new gas production and 3% of new oil production respectively.

Also, note that the comparisons we’re making above are the UK vs the global average. But some countries are able to extract their fuel in more “environmentally friendly” ways than others. An analysis from S&P Global Commodity Insights found that Norway manages to extract its North Sea oil with far fewer emissions than the UK does:

The analysis found that, on average, UK production in the North Sea was nearly 3 times more GHG intensive (23 kgCO2e/boe) than Norwegian production (8 kgCO2e/boe)

So there’s a nice 3x headline figure one could dazzle and confuse people with, the only issue being that it’s is evidence towards the opposite conclusion to what Sunak wants. So perhaps if we really want to invest in environmentally-friendly fossil fuel extraction – my brain breaks a little at the thought of that sentence given the product we’re talking about here but anyway – Sunak should be suggesting heavy investment in the Norwegian fossil fuel industry.

Furthermore, these numbers are not fixed in time. Several countries have already committed to emissions-reducing improvements in their extraction process. From the CCC report:

…the UK advantage may weaken over time as other countries decarbonise their extraction. Indeed, the Global Methane Pledge that countries like Norway, the United States and Saudi Arabia have joined should contribute to reducing methane emissions from oil and gas production in the next decade.

If those plans come to fruition, the UK is also going to have to up its game in order to keep any advantage it has over the global average at present.

So a slightly shorter bar does not really tie up with Sunak’s 3-4x specific reduced emissions figure. Where does that come from? A further quote by him changes the focus and provides a clue:

[Sunak] said domestic oil and gas saves “two, three, four times the amount of carbon emissions” than “shipping it from halfway around the world”.

Shipping here is the clue, albeit specifically the shipping of gas as opposed to oil. It seems like the “3-4x better” probably comes from research by the North Sea Transition Authority which does indeed appear to back one very limited version of his claim.

The research shows that domestically produced gas is on average almost four times cleaner than importing gas in LNG form. This is because of both the way the gas is transferred and, in some cases, the methods of extraction.

We’ve covered the issues around “methods of extraction” above. So let’s turn to the way the gas is transferred to our country now.

The real emissions-increasing differentiator seems to be the process of converting gas to liquid form. This is what LNG in the above refers to: liquified natural gas. When transported via for instance a ship, the extracted gas is cooled down to -162 degrees centigrade so it is liquid and no more than 1.25x the surrounding atmospheric pressure. The liquid then has to be converted back to gas at the receiving end for our consumption.

Converting gas to liquid and back again in this way is indeed energy intensive, hence the 3-4x extra emissions figure. All things being equal, if we swapped gas that had to be transported via LNG to gas that could be directly used then yes, we’d do a lot better on emissions, but only emission related to the transport process.

Even Norway’s far cleaner and more advanced extraction process isn’t enough to compensate for the LNG penalty – although it’s a lot better than some of its competitors and nowhere near as bad as Sunak’s figure implies (33 kg CO2/boe, compared to an average of 79 kg, and a UK “local gas” rate of around 21kg). So buying more from Norway might be a nice short term way of reducing the emissions if it was possible and, critically, didn’t add to the overall market for gas. This latter point needs hammering home repeatedly. Most of the emissions from oil and gas usage come from the oil and gas usage itself, not their production or transport. Anything that increases the net size of the gas or oil market is almost certainly going to release more of these harmful gases.

So importing the global average LNG probably does create 3-4x the emissions of gas that didn’t need to be converted to liquid. That I suppose is the cherry that Sunak decided to pick off the statistics tree. But there’s a lot of context to bear in mind.

• The 3-4x figure is only relevant to gas. The North Sea initiative involves hundreds of new licenses for both oil and gas. The oil component is not affected at all by the emissions that the LNG process generates.
• The 3-4x figure is only relevant to imported gas that has been through the LNG process. Gas imported via pipelines does not need the LNG process. And according to the same NSTA report the figure came from, most of Britain’s imported gas does in fact come via pipelines: 187mmboe via pipeline vs 156mmboe from LNG. mmboe is the unit these things are measured in; it stands for “million barrels of oil equivalent“. The Office of National Statistics also confirms that “Most of the gas we import comes through pipelines laid underneath the sea bed”.
• As relatively high as the emissions due to the LNG process are compared to not doing it, it’s still only a small fraction of the emissions that emanate from the end-usage of the gas produced. Channel 4 shares a figure that burning the gas itself produces around 320kg of emissions. This is much more than the whole “delivery via LNG” process, which we saw above averages at 79kg (vs a local gas transport impact of 21kg).

So there’s nothing one could possibly do to the transport side of things that could make local gas 4x as generally clean as even the worst type of imported gas generated by the dirtiest extraction process and shipped in the least efficient manner, because only a small part of the emissions are related to its transport.

So at best in support of Sunak’s claim we could say that:

• in the unlikely event that piping gas from the North Sea stopped the same amount of gas being produced elsewhere for import
• then for the minority of imported gas that is today delivered as LNG
• the fraction of total emissions that are attributable to its transport could well be 3-4x lower.

Admittedly that’s a less concise soundbite than those Sunak et al go with, but it also gives a much more realistic view of the real impact.

However, as we already discussed above, it’s unlikely to be a direct substitute. It may well not even substitute locally. The North Sea is adjacent to the UK, but that doesn’t mean the UK gets everything that’s extracted from it. Sunak is not proposing any kind of nationalisation strategy. Most of the companies likely to drill there are foreign-owned and will be selling their wares to whoever will pay the most for them.

All emissions reductions are of course good, but nothing they can fiddle about in the process of extracting and using gas and oil can improve the environmental bona fides of energy production by anything remotely like as much as the most obvious alternative would do. Certain politicians may love a false dichotomy, but in reality there are more choices than simply “buy fossil fuel from Putin” vs “encourage people to extract extra fossil fuel from the North Sea”.

It doesn’t take an expert to figure out some alternative strategies, but let’s quote one anyway. Oxfam’s climate advisor spells out the most obvious alternative:

Extracting more fossil fuels from the North Sea will send a wrecking ball through the UK’s climate commitments at a time when we should be investing in a just transition to a low-carbon economy and our own abundant renewables.

Renewables. Electricity generated via wind, solar or nuclear energy results in far, far lower levels of greenhouse gas emission than that generated by the cleanest of oil or gas sources.

It’s certainly not zero. Wind turbines do need to be built, maintained and disposed of. But it turns out that the slightly tedious attempt at a gotcha question one comes across all over the place along the lines of “well yes, sure, solar energy is clean once everything’s in place but once you factor in building the panels then what do you think the effect will be?” has, of course, already been tackled by researchers.

And the answer is that it is still far cleaner. There’s plenty of uncertainty and variance in the estimates produced by the hundreds of papers that use various methods to model this topic out. But when the NREL put together a review of all those it could put its hands on, they found:

The data showed that life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from technologies powered by renewable resources are generally less than from those powered by fossil fuel-based resources. The central tendencies of all renewable technologies are between 400 and 1,000 g CO2eq/kWh lower than their fossil-fueled counterparts without carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

This chart shows lets us visualise the averages and ranges that resulted from this exercise.

No part of those pesky non-renewable estimates, wide as they are, is lower than most of the alternative sources, and the central tendencies are universally way higher.

If graph interpretation isn’t your thing, one of their scientists was quoted as part of a fact checking exercise summarising the results:

To be more exact, wind energy produces around 11 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated, Garvin A. Heath, a senior scientist at NREL, and colleagues concluded after reviewing the scientific literature. That’s compared with about 980 g CO2/kWh for coal and roughly 465 g CO2/kWh for natural gas, Heath found.

Even taking into account the entire lifecycle of the renewable energy process – manufacture of the necessary equipment, maintenance and so on – the best estimate from this study is that wind energy emits 1/90th as much carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour as coal, and 1/40th as much as gas.

In fact another study suggested that the amount of energy “wasted” in the construction and running of the means of renewable energy generation is even proportionally substantially less than that necessary to construct and run fossil fuel plants.

…11% of the energy generated by a coal-fired power station is offset by energy needed to build the plant and supply the fuel, as the chart below shows. This is equivalent to saying that one unit of energy invested in coal power yields nine units of electricity.

Nuclear power is twice as good as coal, with the energy embedded in the power plant and fuel offsetting 5% of its output…Wind and solar perform even better, at 2% and 4% respectively…