“Renewable Natural Gas” Is the Ultimate Red Herring
There are three fossil fuels we must stop burning if we are to save our planet: coal, oil, and methane (aka “natural”) gas. Coal is declining precipitously. Scientists think we hit peak coal in 2013, and American use of coal has fallen by over 50% in the last 10 years (though, we need to quickly nail this coffin closed considering how dirty and polluting coal is). Oil is seeing the writing on the wall as major automakers commit to electric vehicles. Many think 2019 may have been the year we hit peak oil, and EVs are expected to make the internal combustion engine a “historical technology” by 2040. The faster we historicize petroleum, the better, so please buy that electric car or e-bike today.
Natural gas (aka methane) now comes into sight as the next fossil fuel we need to banish in the quest to rescue ourselves from the most catastrophic climate catastrophe. Burning methane is currently responsible for nearly 25% of all carbon emissions in the US, and its use is growing. Methane is also deeply embedded in many of our homes, and this will make it a challenge to extricate. We aren’t anywhere near hitting peak natural gas usage on our current trajectory.
But, as of recently, some American cities, mostly in California, have recognized the need to eliminate gas and slowly get us off the fossil sauce. In 2019, these leading cities did something that had never been done in the history of our species — they started banning future use of methane in new construction. The idea has been to stop digging a hole that we have to quickly climb out of, so they legislated that no new homes or buildings should be built with methane hookups. This will avoid costly retrofits later. The city-led ban began in California, has reached over 50 cities, and is spreading up the West Coast like a good kind of wildfire.
Enter “Renewable” Natural Gas
Any entrenched industry will fight with all its might not to disrupt revenue streams, regardless of the effects of their products on humanity (see: oxycontin and tobacco). So, it is to be expected that methane peddlers will spend the next crucial decades resisting efforts to ban their product. They’ll use lots of arguments to slow humanity’s inexorable push towards a fossil fuel future. The most ingenious/insidious one that we must quickly debunk is that their carbon polluting fuel is actually clean or has the potential to become so.
Enter, stage right, “renewable natural gas,” or RNG, a brilliant buzzword for a product that companies are counting on consumers to believe in, to continue with business mostly as usual. Renewable natural gas is methane that comes from biological sources like human and cow sewage or landfills. It differs from current methane, which is fracked from the earth’s interior, some of which escapes through pipes, while the rest is burned, adding to our dangerous warming blanket. RNG harnesses methane being created anyway and thus, doesn’t add new layers to our greenhouse problem. A group of nonprofits in my region just released an in-depth look at renewable natural gas and the numbers aren’t good.
How to Make Renewable Natural Gas — Anaerobic Digestion and Gasification
Before we can examine how much RNG our society will be able to realistically produce, let’s briefly talk about the two ways to make renewable natural gas. Even though, as we’ll shortly see, RNG won’t come remotely close to meeting our current gas demand, it still has the potential to be an important, lower-carbon tool in reducing the emissions of hard-to-decarbonize applications (like industry).
The first way to make RNG is through anaerobic digestion technology. This is a process where bacteria eat waste in an atmosphere that doesn’t contain oxygen (anaerobic). Sewage treatment plants and pig farms use this process. They gather fecal matter, bring bacteria to a specific temperature, do a lot of other magic in pipes, and out comes methane gas. Landfills are another source of this methane as wasted food and other fun stuff are eaten by bacteria underground and methane is created as a byproduct.
The second way to make RNG is through thermal gasification, which “uses energy to turn agriculture and commercial forest harvest residues” into something called Syngas. Syngas can then be converted to methane with more processing. According to a large survey by the State of Oregon, “There are currently no commercial-scale thermal gasification plants in the United States that convert biomass into methane. The existing plants produce syngas, which is burned and used to generate heat and electricity.” So thermal gasification is a potentially important, but unproven technology that should not make us believe that we can simply keep burning gas in our homes.
How Much Renewable Natural Gas Could We Conceivably Produce?
In the 2018 Oregon study cited above, (which had many gas industry officials involved in its writing) researchers looked at what we could optimistically hope for from RNG production. The numbers aren’t good. The potential for anaerobic digestion is 4.6% while the potential for thermal gasification is 17.5% of current natural gas usage in the state. So RNG could potentially cover 20% of the methane gas we use today, assuming significant investments in technology and distribution systems that do not exist today – in other words and not anytime soon.Think about it. We could work our tushies off over the next couple, crucial decades, to try to decarbonize natural gas pipes, while the planet is heating up and wildfire smoke is crossing our country coast to coast, and after crucial time and work, we’d still be using 80% fracked, fossil natural gas. If that’s not backing the wrong horse, then I don’t know what is.
Oregon’s numbers are similar to national numbers. Another study found that, nationally, we could hope for about 16% renewable natural gas, and again, this is far in the future and only if we invest heavily in RNG.
Compare that to electricity as a fuel, and you’ll see a stark difference. Right now, the national electric grid gets 20% of its power from renewables and 20% from nuclear, making electricity 40% carbon free. Biden wants to get to 100% by 2035. Oregon recently passed a law to get to 80% clean electricity by 2030 and 100% by 2040. Wind and solar are carbon neutral and are the cheapest and most installed forms of new energy generation. We have the roadmap and the tools to completely decarbonize electricity over the next 10–20 years and are doing so faster than anyone expected. Clean electricity is real, proven, happening and the horse we should be backing.
Electrifying our house and capping our natural gas pipe was one of the best things my family has done for the climate.
Other problems with renewable natural gas
There are other significant problems with renewable natural gas which are highlighted in depth in this brilliant article by Laura Feinstein and Eric de Place. Renewable natural gas isn’t even zero carbon. It is true that it often comes from existing sources of methane, but often those sources of methane could be avoided. Take landfills for example. When we toss food scraps into landfills it creates methane. We could capture that methane to make renewable natural gas or we could compost the food scraps like many cities and nations do, and avoid making that methane in the first place and get the benefits of richer, healthier soil in our communities. Relying on renewable natural gas could thus lock us into wasteful, inefficient practices when other options exist.
Another significant problem is that RNG costs a lot to make. A million BTUs of methane gas currently costs $3. The median cost for the equivalent amount of RNG is about 6 times that, at $18. Yipes! Imagine telling consumers that their gas bills are going to sextuple, and you’ll start to see how viable RNG is as a long term solution.
Scratch the surface, and it’s easy to see how RNG meets the classic definition of a red herring; “something that misleads and distracts us from a relevant or important question.” There won’t be very much of it, and it’s going to be very expensive. Let’s not get sidetracked from real climate solutions. When our local methane suppliers use the word “renewable” to keep pumping fossils into our homes, we need to understand that this is at best a stalling tactic and a greenwash to distract from the dangers of methane gas. Let’s stay focused on more realistic solutions for heating our homes and addressing the climate crisis like electrification.
I’ll be co-hosting a free webinar with Electrify Now on “The Future of Natural Gas” on Wednesday, September 22. Register and get more information here
Check out this in-depth report on methane gas released by a coalition of 62 organizations recently.
Related: Natural Gas Leaks Deadly For Trees (Video)
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Global renewable developer and energy giant RWE has halted its US offshore wind operations “for the time being” because of the “political environment” the Trump administration has created.
RWE, Germany’s biggest electricity producer, said in March that it had dialed back its US offshore wind activities. But now, CEO Marcus Krebber said in a speech transcript, which he’ll deliver at the company’s Annual General Meeting in Essen on April 30, that its US offshore wind business is now closed (but it wasn’t all bad news):
In the US, where we have stopped our offshore activities for the time being, our business in onshore wind, solar energy, and battery storage has so far been developing very dynamically. At the start of this year, we reached an important milestone when our US generation capacity hit the 10 gigawatt mark. The construction of a further 4 gigawatts is secured.
He went on to say that renewables have created regional value and jobs, but that the company remains “cautious given the political developments.” RWE has introduced more stringent requirements for future US investments:
All necessary federal permits must be in place. Tax credits must be safe harbored and all relevant tariff risks mitigated. In addition, onshore wind and solar projects must have secured offtake at the time of the investment decision. Only if these conditions are met will further investments be possible, given the political environment.
About half of RWE’s installed renewable capacity is in the US, where it’s the third-largest renewable energy company through its subsidiary, RWE Clean Energy. RWE holds the rights to develop US offshore wind projects in New York, Louisiana, and California.
RWE paid $1.1 billion for the New York lease area in 2022, where it’s meant to develop the 3 gigawatt (GW) Community Offshore Wind with the UK’s National Grid. Community Offshore Wind was projected to come online in the early 2030s and expected to power more than a million homes.
The developer paid $5.6 billion for the Louisiana lease in the Gulf of Mexico in 2023 as the lone bidder for development rights, and the Canopy Offshore Wind project off Northern California was not expected to be completed for another decade.
Read more: Trump admin halts $5 billion NY offshore wind project mid-build
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It’s that time of year again, time for events across the country to show off electric vehicles at Drive Electric Earth Month.
Drive Electric Earth Month is an offshoot of Drive Electric Week, a long-running annual tradition hosting meetups mostly in the US, but also occasionally in other countries. It started as Drive Electric Earth Day, but since not every event can happen on the same day, they went ahead and extended it to encompass “Earth Month” events that happen across the month of April. It’s all organized by Plug In America, the Sierra Club, the Electric Vehicle Association, EV Hybrid Noire, and Drive Electric USA.
Events consist of general Earth Day-style community celebrations, EV Ride & Drives where you can test drive several EVs in one place, and opportunities to talk to EV owners and ask them questions about what it’s like to live with an EV, away from the pressure of a dealership.
This month, there are 158 events registered across the US and 1 in Mexico (including one online webinar about things to consider when purchasing an EV).
Events have been happening all month, but the biggest weekend is this upcoming one, APril 26-27.
One really neat event was the Asheville event, which showcased the resiliency of EVs in an area devastated by Hurricane Helene, which was made more severe by climate change. That event was attended by the Rivian R1T which famously got dragged 100 feet submerged in mud and came out running fine.
But the bulk of the events happened on the weekends surrounding Earth Day, April 22, so there were several last weekend and will be even more this upcoming weekend.
There are plenty of events in the big cities where you’d expect, but Plug In America wanted to highlight a few of the events in smaller places around the country. Here’s a sampling of upcoming events:
- Big Island EV – Cruise and Picnic in Waimea, HI on April 26, 10am-1pm – EV drivers will congregate in various places around the Big Island (Kona, Waimea, Waikoloa and Hilo), then drive up Saddle Road to the Gil Kahele Recreation Area on Mauna Kea for a potluck and a chance to talk about the experience of owning EVs on the Big Island.
- Santa Barbara Earth Day 2025 and Green Car Show in Santa Barbara, CA on April 26-27, 11am-8pm – This is part of Santa Barbara’s Earth Day celebration, which routinely attracts 30,000 participants and is one of the longest-running Earth Day celebrations on the planet. The Green Car Show includes ride & drives and an “Owners Corner” where owners can showcase their EVs and attendees can check them out and ask questions.
- Earth Day’25 – EV’s role in a sustainable future in Queretaro City, Mexico on April 26, 9am-4pm – The sole Mexican event, this is a combined in-person/online seminar at the Querétaro Institute of Technology.
- Norman Earth Day Festival in Norman, OK on April 27, 12-5pm – Another municipal Earth Day festival, with hands-on activities for kids to learn about the environment. A portion of the parking lot reserved for an EV car show for EV owners who pre-register to show off their vehicles.
- Oregon Electric Vehicle Association Test Drive & Information Expo in Portland, OR on April 27, 10am-4pm – This one is at Daimler Truck’s North American HQ, and will have several EVs for test drives, owner displays (including DIY gas-to-EV conversions), and keynote presentations by EV experts. They’ll even have a 1914 Detroit Electric EV available for test rides!
- And, we at Electrek want to give a shoutout to Rove’s EV Drive Days in Santa Ana 10am-3pm April 28 – ROVE is the company behind the “full-service” EV charging concept that we’ve talked about several times here on Electrek, and we like what they’re doing for EV charging. They’ve hosted a few community events, and this is their contribution to Earth Month.
Each event has a different assortment of activities (e.g. test drives won’t be available at every event, generally just the larger ones attended by local dealerships), so be sure to check the events page to see what the plan is for your local event.
These events have offered a great way to connect with owners and see the newest electric vehicle tech, and even get a chance to do test rides and drives in person. Attendees got to hear unfiltered information from actual owners about the benefits and trials of owning EVs, allowing for longer and more genuine (and often more knowledgeable) conversations than one might normally encounter at a dealership.
And if you’re an owner – you can show off your car and answer those questions for interested onlookers.
To view all the events and see what’s happening in your area, you can check out the list of events or the events map. You can also sign up to volunteer at your local events, and if you plan to show off your electric car, you can RSVP on each event page and list the vehicle that you plan to show (or see what other vehicles have already registered).
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