[INTERVIEW] Just don't ask Steven Hamburg about LNG

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Published: 01 Jun. 2022, 16:37 Updated: 01 Jun. 2022, 18:19

[INTERVIEW] Just don't ask Steven Hamburg about LNG

EDF chief scientist Steven Hamburg at Millennium Hilton Seoul Hotel, Seoul, on May 27. [LEE HO-JEONG]

Steven Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and executive manager at MethaneSAT, is no run-of-the-mill, sky-is-falling greenhouse gas alarmist.

Climate change is real, he assures us. But he doesn't stop there. Hamburg has an encyclopedic grasp of the knowns, and also what we don't know but need to know, about getting to net zero by 2050. And he has a plan, a very detailed plan.

For him, the way forward is all about achieving the right mix and precisely measuring the harm caused and the ultimate cost of every alternative. There is no silver bullet, he continues, but a comprehensive and layered strategy of introducing various options along the way, and slowly retiring them when better options become available.

Hamburg argues that some solutions work in some places and not in others and that pragmatism might force less-than-ideal choices in the short term.

Nuclear might be good, he says, for some economies. Hydrogen, he notes, is probably not the answer given the nature of the molecule and the damage it could potentially cause.

Methane must be measured. LNG just gets him agitated.

"We can't think of hydrogen as a carbon neutral fuel. It is not," he told the Korea JoongAng Daily. "It has climate impact."

New York-based EDF is one of the best funded and best connected environmental advocacy groups in the world, reporting operating expenses of $216 million in 2020.

Hamburg and EDF Senior Vice President Mark Brownstein visited Korea last week to attend the World Gas Conference in Daegu. During their visit, EDF signed an agreement with the Seoul National University Graduate School of Environmental Studies for the collection and sharing of data on methane gas emissions

Hamburg was an environmental studies professor at Brown University. He joined the EDF in 2008.

In 2020, the Korean government announced plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. LNG and hydrogen are central to the strategy, while nuclear energy has become a point of contention, with the last administration phasing it out and the new government opting to ramp it up again.

The following are excerpts from an interview with Korea JoongAng Daily

Q. Is there still a lot of debate about renewable energy?
A. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuel. You can deploy it in many situations for much cheaper than fossil fuel. Now, renewable energy can't solve all of our energy needs. But, it can solve a lot. And we need to do that. And then we need to look at the remaining needs and how we're going to do that. And for that, we have several possibilities.

We don't have to fully resolve them now, but we have to push each of them. So that could be CCUS [carbon capture utilization storage], that could be hydrogen, that could be nuclear, that could be bioenergy.

And in different places, the answer will differ in different situations. But everything we can electrify with renewable energy, we need to do that. And it is very cost effective. In the United States, there is a lot of evidence that shows that we can take the carbon out of the energy system with almost no additional cost to the customer.

You've got to do three things with the energy — you have to make sure people have enough energy to prosper and grow the economy; you have to make sure you have energy security, to make sure that it is there when you need it and; third, you have to make it sustainable for the environment so that it doesn't create negative impact. And we do all three well.

Is renewable energy reliable?
It is. We have to think of it as a system. It is not one thing. Renewable energy isn't going to be there every day of the year, year in and year out. But that doesn't mean it's not reliable. What it means is that it has to be paired with another energy source to create electricity when it's not there. And that's very doable.

So you don't need a lot of other energy, but it needs to be there. So when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, you have it, like batteries.

Korea is a real leader in battery technologies. The battery technology is so much better, so it can play an important part. And in the future it may play an even bigger role. That's one of the options. In the U.S. you can get rid of 80 percent of the fossil fuel and get 80 percent of the energy from renewable energy.

LNG? Being the one of the biggest contributors of methane gas that leads to carbon emissions. LNG is one of the biggest targets for the Korean government in achieving carbon neutrality.

LNG plays an important part in providing energy and security. In the near term, it can help reduce environmental impact, but not in the long term.

First, LNG has to be done really well. Which means you have to be able to produce the natural gas, create the LNG, ship the LNG and use the LNG without emitting methane along the way. Because LNG is methane. It's a powerful greenhouse gas.

So if we don't reduce methane emission to really low levels, and we have the technology to do it, then the LNG is not solving one of the key three parts that we've got to address. Over the long term we have to eliminate the CO2 as well. The LNG doesn't do that unless you put it together with CCS.

So you want to use the LNG in places where you don't have alternatives, which is not most of your electricity. Back up, intense industrialization, makes sense. It's very hard to imagine how we would want to be using LNG at high rates 50 years from now.

What about hydrogen as clean energy?
Hydrogen is one of the options that has real potential. But like all of these, we have to make sure we get it right.

Hydrogen is also a potent indirect greenhouse gas. When we emit it and it goes into the atmosphere, we're making climate change worse. And it's the smallest molecule, and it is referred to as slippery. It is hard to hold on to.

It's a really small slippery molecule that wants to get out. And the physics says it wants to get out. It's going to leak more than methane. Per basic physics, it will leak more. How much, we don't now yet. In theory, three times as much. So we can't think of hydrogen, which is often said, as a carbon neutral fuel. It is not. It has climate impact.

But it is also a potentially very effective way of dealing with those parts of the economy where we can use electricity in the industrial sector. But when we do that, we need to make sure we have a tight system. Because if we leak a lot of hydrogen, we're causing the climate to warm as well.

Because it's an indirect greenhouse gas, if you look at the lists of greenhouse gases, hydrogen is not there. But if you look at the scientific literature, which has been around for two decades, it has been discovered that it is potent. But short lived.

It doesn't last long but the effect actually last longer, for a couple of decades. Like methane, it impacts for decades. And the problem is we can't measure hydrogen leakage out there. So if you have a hydrogen bus, as you have in Seoul, you can't measure the hydrogen coming off that. We don't have the instruments right now.

You can go into confined space and look for high levels. But there is a big difference between detecting that and zero. Right now we can't do that. So we don't know, nobody knows how much hydrogen is coming off in application. Even green hydrogen, it could well be better than fossil fuel, but it's not zero.

And how much leakage there is, is what determines how much better than fossil fuel it is.

So we need to use hydrogen in the system. It's a good thing to develop. What we need to figure out where it can really do an effective job. Industrial hubs. Green hydrogen in decarbonizing steel and cement is great. But if you do it in a concentrated way, control the leakage, you've got a winner. Putting it out and distributing across everything where it can leak lots, that's going to be really hard to do well.

So hydrogen cars are harmful?
It takes a lot of energy to produce hydrogen. If we have the same amount of renewable energy, zero carbon energy, and electrify it for cars, we can do that much more than if we produced hydrogen and put it into a hydrogen car and caused hydrogen leaks.

So, we'll be much better off electrifying cars, rather than using hydrogen. Because we pay an energy penalty with producing hydrogen. It takes a lot of energy to produce hydrogen. If we have green energy, we should use it directly because we can decarbonize more quickly that way and put it in cars.

Hydrogen needs to be used in places where we can't otherwise decarbonize through electricity. Hydrogen has a definite role, but we have to do it thoughtfully and we have to make sure we're using that hydrogen to the net advantage. It's not for light duty vehicles, for cars. It may be for heavy trucks. For industrial, it makes sense.

Nuclear energy has been the biggest issue in Korea. There is a debate on whether it is a green energy.
Choices will vary from place to place, by culture, by environment and what resources you have. I'm not going to weigh in on whether nuclear is good or bad for Korea.

What does have to happen is we have to decarbonize quickly.

In some places, it will include nuclear. I know in the U.S. right now, nuclear produces about 20 percent of our electricity. If we were to get rid of nuclear in the United States, we would increase our use of fossil fuel. Even if we built renewables as fast to replace nuclear, we're still using the same amount of fossil fuel.

We need to reduce the carbon intensity quickly. The track record for most areas for nuclear is pretty good.

Obviously Fukushima happened. It could happen somewhere else. But we know there are other things that could happen, like oil and gas blowouts like you saw in the United States in the Gulf of Mexico.

It does reduce the use of fossil fuel. That's a given. In Germany, they are looking at [using nuclear power] again. California, where they were getting rid of nuclear, they are now looking at it.

So societies have to make decisions about the risk, the reward and the bigger picture. My job isn't to tell Korea which is the right path. Except, the data is ambiguous.

Climate change is going to have a dramatic impact. That impact is not going to be good. And we've got to address it.

And in Asia, given the very large concentration of humanity, the number of people, the fact that many parts of Asia still need to grow their economies to bring people up to a high quality of life, it's even more acute. Because you need more energy and you need to do it in a responsible way. And we need to be thoughtful on the overall impact and not just look at the narrow impact.

So for LNG, it helps us, but it is not the end. LNG does not solve all problems. It can help us along the road. So we have to think about how much do we need, how do we produce it cleanly, and as I said, otherwise we're not addressing the reduction of emission of greenhouse gases, and how do we move past LNG.

How do we insure that we're not creating those same emissions 20 years from now?  That's our challenge because to get to net zero in 2050, which is really essential, we need to be limiting the burning of fossil fuels as quickly as we can.

So LNG substituting for coal, makes sense, if done well. LNG backfilling because of Ukraine and other places, issues of supply so we have security, that all makes sense. But not thinking of it as that's the end. That's just one step in the journey that has to happen very quickly.

EDF Senior Vice President for Energy Transition Mark Brownstein, third from left front row, and EDF Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President Steven Hamburg, third from left, second row, along with SNU’s Son Yong-hoon, vice dean of the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, fourth from right, front row, and Professor Jeong Su-jong of the SNU Graduate School of Environmental Studies, second from right, front row. [EDF]

Can you tell us more on the MOU with Seoul National University?
We work with partners around the world and work on methane emissions with hundreds of scientists, and the key is we need to have a diversity of people looking at the problem. People from each of the different places creating really good data that every country and community accepts that help us understand the nature of the challenge and then help track the path of the future.

So we look for partners like SNU, a high quality university with lots of talent, to work with them, to develop the science and the data to say, "okay here's what's happening."

Science is a team sport. We only get it done by working together. We need Korean scientists to be making measurements, to know your system, understanding them, how do they vary and not just guessing what's going on.

We need high-quality data.

We also work closely with the UN Environment programme. My team helps support developing international studies through the UNEP International Methane Observatory. We're basically asking four questions — what's being emitted, where it's being emitted, how much is being emitted and how it is changing overtime.

We need to able to answer those questions across the globe, and then we understand the problem. Because you never address what you don't measure.

Korea has a strong scientific capacity. It's a regional leader. We're working with scientists, who already have capacity. It's about collaboration, working together and sharing. And building a network around the world and that creates clarity that can help us form decisions. Korea needs its own data to make its own decisions that work for Korea and the global community.

Can you tell us about your satellite program?
So what we realized, we started working on making these measurements on methane emission from oil and gas industry in the supply chain over a decade ago.

We needed data constantly answering the four questions. The best way to do it is from space. So after we started collecting data, we asked the question, what kind of data do we need to get from a satellite to be able to effectively characterize those emissions?

The real goal is to collect data around the world and near real time. We can't instantly get it down, but in a very short period of time. It allows us to understand how those emissions vary across the globe and how they vary over time and how well different countries and different companies are able to reduce those emissions.

Right now, we don't have that data. We have in parts and places but not for everywhere. That was our vision. And we wanted to do it quickly. What the satellite can detect is the concentration of methane near the surface of the earth.

We need to translate through scientific analysis into how much methane is concentrated. Nobody has automated that process, so we do it, but is very labor intensive.

We're building this first data analysis system where all of the data is turned into what I call policy-relevant data. How much is being emitted and where. That's our data plan. It's going to be the first of its kind in the world. And that will allow us then to just basically, make everything transparent. We will now know what the quantity of emissions are.

It's just not our satellite. There are other satellites going up but do slightly different things. And together we'll create a very clear picture.

The satellite will be launched next year. The instrument is already built. It will be the most precise greenhouse gas sensing satellite in the world. It has the greatest precision.

All of the data will be publicly available. We're trying to make it very accessible, highly relevant data that is useful and ubiquitous around the world.

What has changed from the World Gas Conference held previously five years ago in Washington DC?
We're hearing a lot more about LNG. A lot more about methane. We started to hear about it five years ago, but we're hearing more of it. Every company is saying we need to deal with methane.

And I just gave a talk in which I said there is a revolution happening. In the next meeting, in Beijing, methane emissions are going to be known around the world. No longer speculating.

The data will still be new, but we'll start to see it. They are now more aware on the damage. You're spending more energy to liquefy it so that you can ship it to another place. You couldn't take it to another place as a gas.

The supply chain and how tight that supply chain is. Of course when you burn it, it still produces CO2. It's also the end use.

BY LEE HO-JEONG [lee.hojeong@joongang.co.kr]