Gassy business

In the beginning, there was flatulence. There was flatulence of cosmic proportions because the explosion of a whole universe into existence must have involved inordinate amounts of gas, possibly gases. To date, the most abundant elements in the universe are gases. That’s good for us because we’ve put some of these most abundant gases to good use. But there’s one gas that makes headlines like no other — the one gas that invokes emotions like no other gas can. One gas to trump them all, as it were.

Methane is what natural gas is mostly composed of. Methane is what comes out of oceans, rivers, and possibly lakes, as well as out of wetlands and other ecosystems. Of course, methane also comes out of farm animals and fields. Landfills are another source of that fascinating substance as are, I imagine, your garbage bins and mine.

Methane has recently started to partially displace carbon dioxide as the ultimate villain in the global climate fairy tale because, let’s hear it, it has a much stronger greenhouse effect than CO2 (although this effect is also much more short-lived but that’s obviously beside the point).

Methane is now the target of new legislation out of the bureaucratic heaven of Brussels and it is also the target of increasingly aggressive attacks by people who just want to see all hydrocarbons gone from human civilisation and will stop at nothing short of a decline in their lifestyles to achieve that goal.

According to NASA, human activity, including oil and gas production, farming, and waste decomposition, accounts for 60% of global methane emissions. The rest comes from natural sources such as rivers and thawing permafrost. Human activity also uses a lot of methane to power turbines and produce electricity, to manufacture everyday products, and to heat stoves in five-star restaurants. But that’s beside the point, obviously.

We are being told by people demonstrating admirable persistence that soon we won’t need natural gas because we’d be powering everything with electricity derived from the sun and the wind, and life will be wonderful and clean. And then comes the IEA, everyone’s go-to source of factual and unbiased information, and ruins everything by telling us we’re using more natural gas than we’re producing. And it’s not even omitting the natural part that tends to make certain people with sensitive ears gassy.

The world is heading for a natural gas shortage because supply is growing more slowly than demand all while tireless climate warriors warn us that we must give up natural gas in favour of anything else because natural gas is bad, nay, worse than coal when it’s produced in the U.S. shale patch and exported to Europe. Guess what savvy traders are doing.