Australia’s gas industry has launched a major public relations campaign to convince the public of three things: their product is clean, indispensable to our lives and crucial in getting the country to net zero.
With soft, seductive and reassuring voiceovers, a TV ad shows images of hospitals, farms and city lights with the tagline “Natural gas: keeping the country running.”
Running the campaign is the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (Appea), whose chief executive, Samantha McCulloch, said the idea was to raise the public’s awareness of the “critical role of gas”.
On the campaign website, there are “facts” – lots of them – several of which are only partly true, cherrypicked or ignore the role of fossil gas in loading the atmosphere with methane and CO2 in the middle of a climate crisis that will only get worse with more fossil fuels.
So let’s do what any self-respecting factcheck column would do and go and do some factchecking.
Gas for electricity
“As Australia shuts down coal, gas is picking up the load,” the gas industry says in the advert.
“It will help keep Australia running as we transition to a cleaner future,” the ad claims.
In a fact sheet, Appea says the “share of gas-fired power generation in Australia’s electricity mix more than doubled between 2000-01 and 2020-21”.
The source for that statistic is the government’s Australian Energy Update 2022 report, and taken across two decades, the data agrees with Appea.
But in the most recent decade, the same report says gas-fired generation has grown by just 0.2%.
The report says: “Natural gas-fired generation in 2020–21 fell nationally to the lowest level in a decade, and in the southern and eastern states which constitute the National Electricity Market, fell to the lowest level seen since the early 2000s.”
That is not a story of surging gas-fired power as the Appea campaign suggests, but a flatlining – and remember, too, that more than 80% of the gas produced in Australia is not consumed by Australians at all, but is used for the export of LNG.
A main source?
In Appea’s television advert, a voiceover says gas is “one of Australia’s main sources for generating electricity”.
A fact sheet asks: “What makes that electricity powering Australian homes?” and then says “about a fifth of the electricity we use” comes from burning gas.
Right now, about 18% of the electricity generated in Australia comes from gas, according to government statistics.
But this figure is heavily skewed by Western Australia, which accounts for half of all gas-fired power generation despite having only 10% of the country’s population.
Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, says in the National Electricity Market (covering 90% of the population, that is, everywhere except Western Australia and the Northern Territory) gas generation has fallen about 45% since 2014.
In this current financial year so far, gas has been responsible for only 5.6% of electricity generation in the NEM – less than coal, wind, solar and hydro.
So if you live anywhere but WA or the NT, then gas doesn’t account for “about a fifth” of the electricity you use, but more like “an eighteenth” – which isn’t quite as impressive.
Mark Ogge, a principal adviser at The Australia Institute, says the amount of gas-fired electricity used by Australians in their homes is likely even less, because “gas industry uses around one-fifth of the electricity generated in Australia to run its LNG export terminals”.
“So really, [Appea] is claiming electricity generation has increased largely because the gas industry is using more electricity to export Australia’s gas.”
Future role for gas
The Appea advert says gas “will help keep Australia running as we transition to a cleaner future”.
The Australian Energy Market Operator’s main plan to decarbonise the NEM does say gas will have an important role as a standby in case of shortages in solar, wind, hydro power and battery storage.
The plan says that by 2050, there will be about the same amount of gas-fired capacity then as there is now. But the word “capacity” should not be confused with how much gas will actually be used.
Dr Dylan McConnell, an energy systems analyst at the University of New South Wakes, says the most recent forecast from AEMO says that by 2040, the actual amount of gas being used for power generation will be about one-third of what it was in 2015.
Gas is cleaner … than what?
One of the central facts in Appea’s campaign is that gas is “50% cleaner” than coal (which, as McConnell says, would be great if we only needed to reduce emissions by 50%).
Appea says the source for this fact is an International Energy Agency report on gas and a 2017 report on the future of the electricity market from former chief scientist Dr Alan Finkel.
Hare says more up-to-date data from the NEM shows gas has 61% of the emissions of coal for each unit of power generated, not 50%.
But there are other issues here.
Comparing the emissions of gas to coal is moot because Australia has very likely built its last coal-fired power plant. Those coal plants still running are being turned off.
Tristan Edis, an energy analyst at Green Energy Markets, says it is renewables that are replacing coal, not gas.
He said: “How is it possible that gas is replacing coal, when gas is declining? It’s a logical impossibility. The only thing that’s increasing is wind and solar generation.”
So the most pertinent comparison to the emissions of gas should be to renewables.
McConnell points to industry data used by Aemo for new gas-fired power that might come into the system, showing the cleanest plants would emit about 377kg of CO2 for every unit of power produced (not counting emissions from extraction, transportation and any leaks of methane along the way).
That compares with essentially zero for renewables (again, not counting for energy used to make and transport the turbines or solar panels).
Indispensable gas?
Appea’s campaign might leave the average viewer with the idea that gas is indispensable.
The campaign has a laundry list of products and processes that currently use gas – everything from producing fabrics to powering hospitals and providing hot showers (many of which can be done without the need for burning fossil gas).
In one fact sheet, the campaign uses a quote from Prof Michael Brear, director of the Melbourne Energy Institute, that says an “all technology hands on deck approach” will be needed for Australia to reach net zero, and this will include doubling the capacity of gas-fired electricity generation to support renewables.
The quote was taken from a media release about the results of a major effort to model a net zero future for Australia which includes all energy use in the country – not just for generating electricity.
So what does that report say about gas? All five of the net zero scenarios show gas use declining in Australia.
When it comes to energy exported, only one scenario shows a growth in gas exports.
But that scenario assumes a domestic carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry will emerge, and will have the capacity to store 1100Mt of CO2 every year.
Is that a lot? For context, that is more than 25 times the amount of CCS storage that is currently operational around the globe.
Hare says: “Appea makes strong and hyperbolic claims as to the importance of gas for economic activities but does not at all discuss the potential for replacement of gas through efficiency and electrification.
“All sectors have opportunities to replace gas, including those that are most carbon-intensive, through improved efficiency, changes in processes and electrification with renewable power.”
