My name is Hunter Hartley. At Mines, I’m studying electrical engineering and am developing FPGA skills. I’m currently planning on specializing in communication systems. I’ve lived in Colorado my whole life and have never particularly wanted to live anywhere else. I enjoy biking, designing/assembling circuits, and developing novel concepts in shortwave radio hardware. I spend too much of my free time working on high-performance data acquisition and processing on FPGAs and GPUs. I’ve been lucky enough to participate on prototype and development projects outside of Mines related to radio-frequency hardware, particularly high-frequency linear power amplifiers and their supporting circuitry. I enjoy the methodical and experimental aspects of electronic design and testing, and my career goals are to make money doing so. I want to work to make life easier for people, even in unnoticeable ways.

The Viability of Natural Gas

Over a period of 17 days in December of 2021, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico vented 44,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere—the greenhouse gas equivalent of 3.36 million tons of carbon dioxide (Irakulis-Loitxate et al.). This is 200,000 times the yearly carbon footprint of an average American. To generate this amount of greenhouse gasses using power production, every household in America would have to leave one lightbulb turned on continuously for six months. This specific event is a small part of a larger story about the unforeseen consequences of natural gas production and use. Figures for natural gas lost to leaks and venting reach as high as 9% of total natural gas produced (Tollefson). Despite this, natural gas production and use continues to climb in the United States. Natural gas has snuck itself into a climate plan it directly contradicts. Decades ago, climate change was a concern. Now it is a climate crisis, and is bounding towards a climate catastrophe. A future exists in which the United States skirts catastrophe and successfully mitigates climate change over the coming decades—does this future involve natural gas?

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Methane (CH₄) makes up about 95% of natural gas. Methane burns quite cleanly, especially compared to fuels like coal. However, methane itself is a greenhouse gas. When released directly into the atmosphere, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂, but is not stable. Over time, it decays into CO₂, and therefore the effective greenhouse gas potency it has depends on the time interval being investigated (Ramón et al.). Over a 20-year period, the cumulative effect of methane as a greenhouse gas is 80 times that of the same weight in CO₂. Think of Earth’s climate like your body: a drop of hot wax onto skin cools too quickly to burn. Liquid iron glows like a candle flame, and will leave a scar long after the drop has cooled. Is natural gas a drop of wax, painful for a moment but lacking the punch to hurt in the long term? Or is natural gas a drop of liquid iron, bound to carve deep into our sustainability goals?

The “fracking revolution” occurred in the United States after 2008. The natural gas industry has been growing rapidly ever since. The most important benefit of this growth is the economic contributions of the industry. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) reports that, in 2019, the U.S. oil and natural gas industry directly employed 2.5 million people. This represents 1.2% of U.S. jobs. The report also found that the U.S. oil and natural gas industry contributed $319 billion and $763 billion to U.S. labor income and the U.S. GDP respectively, or 2.4% of the U.S. labor income and 3.6% of the U.S. GDP (“Impacts of the Oil and Natural Gas Industry”). These economic influences are far too significant to disregard in a discussion on the future of natural gas. The loss of 2.5 million jobs in the United States would be major, and the lost GDP would exacerbate ongoing economic strain. It is important to note that this report was prepared by PwC for the American Petroleum Institute, which will be discussed later.

The second group—Americans who prioritize mitigating climate change over the economic benefits of oil and natural gas—argue that the long-term consequences of natural gas use are too great to justify the short-term benefits. The 2015 Paris climate agreement seeks to limit the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5°C. The U.N. Environment Programme reports that global emissions must fall by 7.6% a year between 2020 and 2030 to meet this goal. In 2019, U.S. emissions fell by only 2.9%. The U.S. natural gas industry is growing so rapidly that its emissions are becoming the greatest adversary of climate change progress (Volcovici et al.). It is apparent to members of this group that the United States is not taking the necessary steps to mitigate climate change, and that the growth of the natural gas industry is contradictory to the prevention of disastrous climate change.

The third group—Americans who prioritize economic well-being and security—argue that the consequences of losing the oil and natural gas industry are too great to prioritize climate change. Members argue that the United States and its workers cannot afford to lose the job opportunity that the industry has provided them. Many of these members are discussing a matter of day-to-day survival in a difficult economy. These members argue that petroleum industry jobs are rarely directly transferrable to renewable energy jobs, and therefore, the replacement of natural gas infrastructure with renewable infrastructure would not easily provide jobs to those affected. Many of these members argue that there are alternative options to mitigate climate change. These options could be explored before endangering the financial security of millions of Americans.

Disregarding the opinions of the corporations involved, both groups discussed are concerned with the safety and security of many people. Neither side argues in favor of extravagant comfort or indulgence. These two sides of the argument are difficult to weigh directly, because one is concerned with the future and the other the present. How does one weigh the interests of future generations against the livelihoods of living people? Importantly for those against the use of natural gas, how does one ask workers providing for their families to sacrifice their wellbeing in the face of a global trend spanning decades?

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My argument which follows has been written in a comfortable chair, in a comfortable apartment, in a city with little job dependence on natural gas. I have not personally depended on the oil and natural gas industry the way that its laborers do. However, along with the other 98.8% of Americans not directly employed by the oil and natural gas industry, I live on Earth. More people than are alive now will live in a global climate determined by our choices now. Both me and the laborer within the oil and natural gas industry live in the United States, while those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change live in poorer, developing countries where the privilege of contributing to climate change is rarely afforded (“Social Dimensions”). It is true that I am unable to sufficiently represent the challenges faced by those my argument negatively impacts most in the United States, but neither party belongs to the groups most affected—those in less fortunate countries, and those who will be born into the world we create. We are both making decisions on behalf of billions of people that we are lucky not to be.

I argue that the climatic consequences of natural gas use are too great to justify its continued use. Swaths of research have shown that the use of natural gas is not nearly as clean as advertised—those vouching for its cleanliness neglect to mention the enormous emissions generated by leaks and vents in the supply chain. One can argue that such issues are anomalies in an otherwise beneficial system. Equivalently, one could argue that motor vehicle accidents are anomalies in an otherwise safe system. It is true in either case that individual events can be mitigated or outright prevented, but overall trends cannot be expected to suddenly disappear. No rational person thinks that humans will stop crashing cars, and no rational person expects natural gas infrastructure to suddenly become perfect. Improvements can be made, but the infrastructure grows every day, and the time needed for sufficient improvement is far greater than the time we have. A total revolution of the natural gas industry will not occur. Idealization does not justify the use of natural gas in our world.