Certified Gas Is the Same Old Gas

Gas certification is currently a voluntary market in which third-party certifiers — the big three being MiQ, Project Canary, and Equitable Origin — are hired by oil and gas companies to assess the amount of methane leaking or released from their upstream production sites and grade their methane intensity. (Gas giant Cheniere is one exception, as it came up with its own opaque certification protocol.)

Naturally, the gas producers who do the most methane flaring and venting aren’t interested in paying for certification on their dirtiest wells, as they’d get bad grades. The data backs this up: 78 percent of the sites analyzed by MiQ are awarded As, and none have yet received the worst grades — Ds, Es, or Fs.

The certifiers all have their own processes and allowed technologies, and none of them publicly disclose their data, making it impossible in most cases to independently verify their conclusions. Certification is effectively an extra credit opportunity for gas producers who want a reputational boost (and a chance to charge premiums) for claiming to do what recently finalized federal methane regulations would optimally push all gas producers to do: reduce methane leaks and releases.

The gas industry’s use of certification schemes to paper over concerns about the methane intensity of liquefied natural gas is fairly recent. In 2020, the French government asked French energy giant Engie to hold off on purchasing liquefied natural gas from Cheniere over concerns about its environmental footprint, sending US gas producers scrambling for a way to rebrand their gas as less polluting.

Engie has since returned to the table, buying gas that Cheniere has internally certified as “lower carbon.” Cheniere is also apparently employing its internal certification program at its liquefied natural gas terminals at Sabine Pass and Corpus Christi in Texas — although, as of 2023, it told the Energy Department that its “technical findings are not yet complete” and that “liquefaction terminals are large, complex facilities with thousands of individual components that process gas.”

Ultimately, these certification strategies are designed to help operators keep extracting and producing gas, despite the unequivocal fact that even so-called “low emissions” gas production must substantially drop in the coming decades in order to avoid the worst climate outcomes. Further damning is that these companies’ emissions reduction claims are likely inaccurate.

In an effort to verify certifiers’ emissions reduction claims, Earthworks, an environmental nonprofit, sent surveyors with optical gas imaging cameras to drilling sites around Colorado monitored by third-party certifier Project Canary. This kind of cross-checking is only feasible in Colorado because it is one of the few states that requires oil and gas producers to monitor and report their upstream emissions.

The Earthworks surveyors observed twenty-two significant pollution events, such as plumes of uncombusted gas rising up from drilling pads, across seventy-seven surveys conducted between May and November 2022. But none of these events appeared on the operators’ on-site continuous emissions monitors, according to what the drilling companies reported to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

Based on these and other findings, in February Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) led a group of senators urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the emissions-reduction claims that certified gas producers are making and to publish information on what constitutes greenwashing in oil and gas marketing claims in the next edition of the agency’s environmental marketing guidelines.

It’s also not clear what, if any, impact gas certification is having on reducing emissions in US gas production. According to analysis of energy-sector data from environmental research and advocacy organization Oil Change International, “Data reveals that US oil and gas sector methane emissions are rising in lockstep with rising gas production, contradicting the industry’s own reports that methane intensity is decreasing, and revealing companies may underreport by as much as 95 percent.”

Though some gas industry players like to make claims about American liquefied natural gas being the cleanest in the world, to the limited extent that scientists can assess the matter, the nation’s oil and gas industry is in the middle of the pack for cleaning up its supply-chain emissions, ranking behind eighteen other countries for the proportion of gas that’s leaked.

The Energy Department’s Dalliance With Certification

On January 26, the Energy Department announced that it would pause reviewing applications to export gas while it worked to update the economic and environmental analyses it uses to determine whether gas exports are in the public interest.

The Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, which regulates US gas imports and exports, is working in tandem with two national laboratories to update the public-interest evaluation. The analysis will look at how liquefied natural gas exports impact domestic gas prices, communities living beside liquefaction sites, greenhouse gas emissions, and global energy security. Industry outrage toward the pause has been vocal and amplified by its allies in Congress through a rash of oversight hearings, letters, and op-eds.

The Fossil Energy and Carbon Management Office has also been evaluating natural gas certification programs. Last year, as part of a request for information from the liquefied natural gas industry on ways to reduce emissions, the department asked what role gas certification could play in the process — and the industry’s answers are illuminating.

The American Petroleum Institute, the powerful oil and gas lobbying group that unsuccessfully petitioned the Energy Department to lift the gas export permitting pause, told the department that it supported the development of voluntary certified gas programs to “inform markets” for gas exports but opposed “prematurely imposing shortsighted requirements on US producers.”

Two major exporters, Commonwealth LNG and Golden Pass LNG, indicated that they planned to purchase certified gas themselves. Gas producer Williams Companies and for-profit gas certifier Project Canary both argued that gas certification programs would help the United States gain a competitive advantage in international markets and facilitate long-term export contracts.

Nonprofit gas certifier MiQ listed several “fatal flaws” of current emissions accounting frameworks, such as relying on inaccurate estimates that undercount methane emissions, using black-box metrics that third parties can’t verify, and employing verifiers with financial or reputational interests in the outcome of their verification.

But MiQ still urged the Energy Department to endorse certification programs that “encompass life cycle certification, uses independent third-party operational auditors, uses a digital registry, and certifies on a facility-basis.” MiQ recently unveiled its own framework for certifying the gas export supply chain.

Just weeks before the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management issued this request for information, its head, Brad Crabtree, met with several gas industry players at the annual oil and gas industry summit to discuss a possible federal endorsement of a certified gas standard.

Shortly afterward, Crabtree indicated that his department wasn’t going to endorse a gas certification standard at that time.

He instead elevated the efforts of the international working group he is leading, which intends to create a “credible framework” among countries that import and export gas to “help provide suppliers, buyers, investors, and policymakers the information they need to help drive continuous reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over time across the international natural gas supply chain.”

The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management did not respond to a request for comment.

Crabtree has a long history of credulity toward carbon capture technologies — which, despite decades and billions of dollars in investment, have failed to become effective or scalable. Now Crabtree will consider the efforts of lawmakers like Costa who seek to secure a lifeline for the polluting gas industry by spinning it as “cleaner.”

Meanwhile, US gas export capacity tripled in the past six years, and is set to double again by 2030, even if the contested pause on new export terminals were made permanent. Last week, the UN secretary-general said that global emissions must drop 9 percent each year by 2030 in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.