The impact of Expanding Projects of Liquefied Natural Gas

Big companies dealing with natural gas do not mention to the lay people around the world that natural gas is in a way poison to them and to the air and climate around them. Liquefied Natural Gas is, in reality, fracked gas. Fracking is hydraulic fracturing. It is a technique to recover gas and oil from shale rock. It involves drilling into the earth’s core and injecting a high pressure mixture of water, chemicals and sand at the layers of a rock to have the gas, that is within, to be released. Hydraulic fracturing or fracking is a technique for recovering gas and oil from shale rock. It involves drilling into the earth and directing a high-pressure mixture of water, sand and chemicals at a rock layer to release the gas inside. This fracked gas is cooled at approximately (-) 160°C and condensed into a liquid in coastal or offshore terminals. This liquefied natural gas is then shipped, converted back to gas and burnt all over Planet Earth. Big banks and their corporate heads, along with their fossil fuel clients love to present LNG as a kind of `bridge fuel’. They fail to mention that the main component that is being dealt with is methane. This is eighty times more dangerous to the climate than carbon. LNG has become the fastest growing fossil fuel sector now. It is expanding fast with many new projects and all this is happening at a time when scientists are telling us that we cannot afford new fossil fuel expansion projects. To give a clear idea, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs are the leading five LNG banks, right in the midst of USA. They are not going to advocate the non-expansion of LNG projects. Let us understand that new and fracked gas terminals are going to cost anywhere from ten to twenty billion dollars and they will take anywhere from three to four years. All it says is that we are going to be locked into many more decades of dependence on LNG and fossil fuels. International Energy Agency is warning that there is no room for new natural gas fields to achieve Net Zero emissions. This does not seem possible with LNG liquefaction facilities that are under construction or at the planning stage. There is news that new LNG export terminals are being made ready for the Gulf Coast and the communities there are being overburdened with destructive climate impact and toxic pollution. This article is meant to convince people that LNG is going to be a major contributor to the emergency status of our climate on Earth. If the banks defunded this climate chaos, it would be an advisable move for energy transition. All fossil fuel expansion projects need to have their funding cut off. There is complacency around such a warning but people have not realised that certain disasters in the recent past are a direct result of big banks funding the fossil fuel bigwigs. The heat wave that affected California last summer around Fall is one example and thousands that got killed with millions displaced due to extreme flooding in Pakistan is another example. No one talks about the fires that are ravaging in the Amazon jungles in South America.