This commentary was written by Stuart Blood of Thetford, a retired software engineer.
Vermont Gas Systems is seeking approval from the Public Utility Commission for a contract that will allow it to sell fracked gas, yet claim it as renewable. The “renewable natural gas” is produced at the notorious Seneca Meadows Landfill in Waterloo, New York, and although Vermont Gas claims that the contract aligns with the requirements of Vermont’s Global Warming Solutions Act, at the same time, it acknowledges that the amount of renewable natural gas delivered to customers from the landfill will be negligible.
“Voluntary customers” — those willing to pay a premium for this virtual renewable natural gas — will get fossil gas, mostly fracked, but it will be sold as renewable because Vermont Gas will possess the “environmental attributes” from the landfill’s gas. Those attributes, mere abstractions that come into existence when gas is produced, can and will be disassociated from the actual renewable natural gas, which will be burned somewhere else, and reattached to fossil gas burned in Vermont.
Vermont Gas Systems acknowledges that none, or almost none, of the renewable natural gas produced at the Seneca Meadows Landfill will “physically flow” to Vermont. The renewable natural gas from the landfill will travel westward, away from Vermont, and according to the contract, Vermont Gas will take ownership of a volume of gas at Enbridge’s Dawn Hub in Ontario, one of the largest gas storage and transfer facilities in the world.
Any renewable natural gas from the Seneca Meadows landfill that has actually made it to that point will be comingled with fracked gas from western Canada and the Marcellus shale fields of the eastern U.S. At this point, it will be almost entirely fossil gas but it will carry the attributes that were stripped from the renewable natural gas produced at Seneca Meadows.
From the Dawn Hub, gas flows past Toronto, then into the TransCanada Pipeline to the north, which will take it all the way to the Québec-Vermont border.
Renewable natural gas and fossil gas are both almost entirely methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. Both contribute to warming through leaks into the atmosphere from transmission pipelines. Emissions due to leakage of any renewable natural gas from Seneca Meadows that could have made its way through more than 1,000 miles of existing pipeline would be the same as for the fossil gas that the system transports.
Expert testimony has been submitted by University of Notre Dame associate professor of sustainable energy policy Emily Grubert to the Public Utility Commission for its review of the contract. Prof. Grubert has authored 60 peer-reviewed journal papers and previously served as the deputy assistant secretary for carbon management at the U.S. Department of Energy. She noted that greenhouse gas emissions due to renewable natural gas “are typically dominated by methane emissions over the life cycle,” but that there are additional emissions due to production, processing and transportation, such as the compression of renewable natural gas for pipeline transport.
Prof. Grubert pointed out that while Vermont’s Global Warming Solutions Act requires absolute emissions reductions — 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 and 80% by 2050 — substituting renewable natural gas from Seneca Meadows cannot achieve reductions commensurate with those requirements. Moreover, Vermont Gas Systems has not compared the substitution of renewable natural gas for fossil gas to any measures that would actually achieve the mandated reductions nor did they identify any such measures.
If the goal is zero net greenhouse gas emissions from an energy system, then an investment that does not have a path to that goal is a dead end. The business plan that Vermont Gas proposes depends on the continued use of fossil gas infrastructure. And that’s a serious problem because, as Prof. Gruber notes, “The principal risk of expanding the renewable natural gas market is committing funding and infrastructure to a system that fundamentally cannot provide services without (greenhouse gas) emissions.”
Renewable natural gas is much more expensive than fossil gas and a 2019 study by the American Gas Foundation cited by Vermont Gas Systems projects that the cost of renewable natural gas produced from landfills will rise steeply as the supply is increased, which is the opposite of an economy of scale.
To work around that inconvenience, at least for the short term, Vermont Gas has concocted a novel scheme to claim that renewable natural gas is cost-effective. The terms of the contract allow Vermont Gas to sell some of the virtual renewable natural gas into the unregulated transportation market, where it will fetch a higher price than it would if it were sold to Vermont ratepayers. The revenue generated by transportation sales is supposed to keep those rates artificially low.
However, as Prof. Grubert cogently noted when questioned about the cost-effectiveness of supplying renewable natural gas as a pathway for meeting the requirements set in Vermont law, “an approach that does not reach a goal is not a cost effective means of reaching that goal even if it is cheaper than approaches that do meet the goal.”
The Public Utility Commission has ample reason for rejecting this greenwashing contract. Not only is it more expensive, but renewable natural gas is also a dead-end pathway because it will always depend on the methane-leaking fossil gas delivery system. No matter how many gimmicks Vermont Gas Systems uses in its shell game, renewable natural gas will never be carbon neutral.