Biden hits pause on natural gas projects amid plans for carbon ‘mega bombs’

Pause on pending export permits is hailed by environmental groups, and could imperil projects along Gulf of Mexico coast

Joe Biden’s administration has hit the brakes on the US’s surging exports of gas, effectively pausing a string of planned projects that have been decried by environmentalists as carbon “mega bombs” that risk pushing the world further towards climate breakdown.

On Friday, the White House announced that it was pausing all pending export permits for liquified natural gas (LNG) until the Department of Energy could come up with an updated criteria for approvals that consider the impact of climate change.

The pause, which will likely last beyond November’s presidential election, could imperil the future of more than a dozen gas export terminals that have been planned for the Gulf of Mexico coast. According to one analysis, if all proposed LNG projects go ahead and ship gas overseas, it will result in 3.2bn tons of greenhouse gases – equivalent to the entire emissions of the European Union.

A vigorous campaign by climate activists and local residents has pressed Biden to curb the rapid growth of LNG exports, pointing to its contribution to global heating and the direct pollution suffered by surrounding communities.

The US president said the pause will allow his administration to “take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security, and our environment”.

“This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is - the existential threat of our time,” Biden said, adding that Republicans who support ever-expanding fossil fuel infrastructure “wilfully deny the urgency of the climate crisis”.

The halt on permits isn’t absolute – the White House said exceptions would be made for “unanticipated and immediate national security emergencies” and that its allies in Europe will continue to receive the gas they need to help reduce dependence upon Russia, following its invasion of Ukraine.

But activists hailed the decision as a landmark victory that showed the climate crisis will no longer be ignored in previously routine decisions to allow oil and gas projects to proceed. “This announcement from the Biden administration is truly monumental for our communities,” said Roishetta Ozane, an activist in Louisiana, where much of the LNG buildout is happening.

“It is a powerful statement that we can no longer allow these industries to continue operating without considering the health and safety of the people living in these areas.”

Others vowed to continue pushing the Biden administration to go further. “This is a bold and important step from President Biden, but the fight is just beginning,” said Lukas Ross, climate and energy deputy director at Friends of the Earth. “The climate movement is in this fight for the long haul until the LNG boom is stopped dead in its tracks.”

The US started exporting gas only in 2016 but is now the largest such exporter in the world, with a boom of new export terminals and pipelines sprouting up on the Gulf of Mexico coast. A planned facility in Louisiana, called Calcasieu Pass 2 (or CP2), would be one of the largest in the world, shipping 24m tons of gas a year once built.

Supporters of the industry – including Donald Trump, who has vowed to “drill, baby drill” if elected again as president – contend the exports aid countries in Europe, create jobs and help displace coal, a dirtier fuel, as an energy source overseas. A coalition of oil and gas industry groups has written to the Biden administration to complain a pause would “only bolster Russian influence” and risk American jobs.

However, various analyses have shown much of the gas is not bound for European allies and that the surging exports have pushed up domestic gas prices for Americans. By some measure LNG can be seen as an even bigger carbon polluter than coal, a recent scientific paper argued, when leaking emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from the drilling, transport and shipping of the commodity are taken into account.

Natural Hydrogen: A Potential Clean Energy Source Beneath Our Feet

By: FRED PEARCE - YaleEnvironment360

As studies show far more natural hydrogen underground than believed, well-funded efforts to drill for the gas are underway around the globe. Boosters see a plentiful green replacement for fossil fuels, but skeptics say its large-scale use may not be practical or cost-effective.

A remote community of mud huts and corrugated iron roofs in the arid savannah of West Africa could be a trailblazer for a new form of carbon-free energy. The residents of Bourakebougou in Mali are the only people in the world who get their electricity by burning natural hydrogen. First identified bubbling from the depths through a village water well in 1987, the gas contains no carbon and, when burned, produces only water.

But the Malian pioneers could soon lose their unique status. Geologists who once dismissed out of hand the idea that the Earth’s crust was widely impregnated with stores of hydrogen, now say there could be trillions of tons of it lying unnoticed beneath the planet’s surface, with more being generated all the time.

In recent months, prospectors have been rushing to find it — drilling for hydrogen in northeast France, Australia, Spain, Morocco, Brazil, and, in the United States, in Nebraska, Arizona, and Kansas. Even Bill Gates has joined the hydrogen rush, making a major investment in a company that is exploring for hydrogen in the Midwest.

Proponents are bullish. “Even if we could extract 1 percent of what I believe is down there, we could supply all our hydrogen needs for hundreds of years,” says Viacheslav Zgonnik, a Ukraine-born geochemist who has conducted the most detailed review of the scattered scientific literature on hydrogen finds and is pioneering hydrogen exploration in the U.S. with his Denver-based start-up Natural Hydrogen Energy.

But are such claims well-founded? Will tapping the hydrogen be economic? And is there an environmental downside?

Hydrogen is increasingly seen as a potential substitute for conventional fossil fuels, especially in energy-intensive processes that cannot easily be fueled by electricity, such as blast furnaces, cement works, and industrial heating, and long-distance aviation and shipping. U.S. energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has called it a “game changer [for] delivering a net-zero economy by 2050.”

But until now hydrogen has had to be manufactured, usually by separating it from methane, which requires lots of energy. That means it is only as clean as the sources of energy needed to make it. Most of the 70 million tons of hydrogen currently used globally each year by industry is derived from fossil fuels, giving it a large carbon footprint.

Hopes for making greener hydrogen have rested on using renewable electricity from wind or solar farms, or hydroelectric dams, to split water into its oxygen and hydrogen atoms. This process, called electrolysis, is currently more expensive than dirtier methods, however.

But if the manufacture of hydrogen was unnecessary – because there were almost unlimited amounts of naturally generated gas underground just waiting to be tapped using conventional oil-drilling technologies — that could change everything. And there is growing excitement among boosters that the world may be sitting on just such a resource.

Extracting the hydrogen should be easy, say engineers. The gas seeps to the surface whenever it has a chance, so drilling to provide a route may be all that is needed. No fracking is required, though the hydrogen may require purification if it is mixed with other gases.

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Why cleantech is mission critical for Singapore

Singapore’s ability to adapt to the changing global economic and geopolitical landscape has been a hallmark of its development. Having made its name in basic manufacturing in the 1970s and precision components in the 1980s, Singapore is now a regional services hub, central to international flows of trade, investment, finance and talent.

To continue that success into the future, Singapore will need to evolve again – this time to respond to the urgent and complex challenges posed by climate change.

As daunting as that sounds, this also presents an opportunity for the country to play to two of its core strengths: innovation, to design the clean technology that will help the world decarbonise, and finance, to deliver that technology at scale.

Singapore is the most innovative economy in Asia, according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Global Innovation Index, published in September 2023. And the country recently entered the top 10 in a global ranking of start-up ecosystems by US research company Startup Genome, rising to eighth from 18th and overtaking Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo in the process.

Singapore’s status as a finance and capital hub has also grown in recent years. It now manages around $5 trillion of assets, with more than three-quarters coming from overseas investors.

With this combination of expertise and financial clout, Singapore is well placed to become a global centre for excellence in cleantech. As the world searches for solutions to the climate crisis, that would be an invaluable next step in the city’s ongoing evolution.

Incentives to act

Accelerating cleantech investment will be critical to Singapore’s future in more ways than one.

Singapore is one of the lowest-lying nations in the world, with an average elevation of only 15m above sea level, so it is particularly vulnerable to flooding from rising sea levels. It faces constraints due to its small size and lack of natural resources. Labour costs are high, and access to clean energy is limited by the lack of available land for solar or wind farms.

On top of all this, Singapore needs to find new ways to create high-quality, future-proofed jobs for citizens at a time when the costs of living and property prices are rising.

Cleantech helps to solve this development conundrum. It does not require vast amounts of natural resources or low-cost labour. But it can help to position Singapore’s economy for long-term growth by leveraging its strengths as a hub for talent, academic research and investment.

Developing and embracing new technologies for the energy transition – such as those that can make construction, shipping or aviation less carbon-intensive – creates an opportunity for Singapore’s economy to evolve once again. Supporting and commercialising innovation in these fields will allow the country to maintain a leading position in high-value global supply chains as they decarbonise.

Leading from the top

The Government has recognised the importance of the green economy and has made cleantech innovation a core component of the nationwide Green Plan. It is supporting research into sustainable technologies through agencies such as the National Environment Agency and the Economic Development Board (EDB), and is promoting itself as a regional hub for new, technology-enabled business models such as carbon trading. The EDB has estimated that carbon trading services could add up to US$5.6 billion (S$7.5 billion) of value to the economy by 2050.

What’s more, initiatives like the Singapore Government-backed Sustainable Development Open Innovation Challenge provide invaluable funding and mentorship to start-ups. And the city’s world-class research institutions, such as the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, have centres dedicated to sustainability and cleantech.

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Hot? Hungry? Step inside these food forests.

In cities like Tucson, Arizona, neighbors are planting trees to provide shade — and food.

Below the red-tile roofs of the Catalina Foothills, an affluent area on the north end of Tucson, Arizona, lies a blanket of desert green: spiky cacti, sword-shaped yucca leaves, and the spindly limbs of palo verde and mesquite trees. Head south into the city, and the vegetation thins. Trees are especially scarce on the south side of town, where shops and schools and housing complexes sprawl across a land encrusted in concrete. 

On hot summer days, you don’t just see but feel the difference. Tucson’s shadeless neighborhoods, which are predominantly low-income and Latino, soak up the heat. They swelter at summer temperatures that eclipse the city average by 8 degrees Fahrenheit and the Catalina Foothills by 12 degrees. That disparity can be deadly in a city that experienced 40 straight days above 100 degrees last year — heat that’s sure to get worse with climate change. 

The good news is there’s a simple way to cool things down: Plant trees. “You’re easily 10 degrees cooler stepping under the shade of a tree,” said Brad Lancaster, an urban forester in Tucson. “It’s dramatically cooler.”

A movement is underway to populate the city’s street corners and vacant lots with groves of trees. Tucson’s city government, which has pledged to plant 1 million trees by 2030, recently got $5 million from the Biden administration to spur the effort — a portion of the $1 billion that the U.S. Forest Service committed last fall to urban and small-scale forestry projects across the United States, aiming to make communities more resilient to climate change and extreme heat. 

But in Tucson and many other cities, tree-planting initiatives can tackle a lot more than scorching temperatures. What if Tucson’s million new trees — and the rest of the country’s — didn’t just keep sidewalks cool? What if they helped feed people, too? 

That’s what Brandon Merchant hopes will happen on the shadeless south side of Tucson, a city where about one-fifth of the population lives more than a mile from a grocery store. He’s working on a project to plant velvet mesquite trees that thrive in the dry Sonoran Desert and have been used for centuries as a food source. The mesquite trees’ seed pods can be ground into a sweet, protein-rich flour used to make bread, cookies, and pancakes. Merchant, who works at the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, sees cultivating mesquite around the city and surrounding areas as an opportunity to ease both heat and hunger. The outcome could be a network of  “food forests,” community spaces where volunteers tend fruit trees and other edible plants for neighbors to forage. 

“Thinking about the root causes of hunger and the root causes of health issues, there are all these things that tie together: lack of green spaces, lack of biodiversity,” Merchant said. (The food bank received half a million dollars from the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act.)

Merchant’s initiative fits into a national trend of combining forestry — and Forest Service funding — with efforts to feed people. Volunteers, school teachers, and urban farmers in cities across the country are planting fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other edible plants in public spaces to create shade, provide access to green space, and supply neighbors with free and healthy food. These food forests, forest gardens, and edible parks have sprouted up at churches, schools, empty lots, and street corners in numerous cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, and Miami. 

“It’s definitely growing in popularity,” said Cara Rockwell, who researches agroforestry and sustainable food systems at Florida International University. “Food security is one of the huge benefits.” 

There are also numerous environmental benefits: Trees improve air quality, suck carbon from the atmosphere, and create habitat for wildlife, said Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, an urban forestry expert at James Madison University in Virginia. “I think food forests are gaining popularity alongside other urban green space efforts, community gardens, green rooftops,” she added. “All of those efforts, I think, are moving us in a positive direction.”

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