LNG producers must expand efforts to tackle emissions, says Petronas

LNG producers must expand their efforts to reduce global emissions between now and 2050, the chief sustainability officer for Malaysia’s Petronas said on July 14 at the recent LNG2023 conference in Vancouver.

Natural gas will play a role well into the future – more so than oil, Charlotte Wolff-Bye said at a conference session. But gas could get “regulated out” before LNG achieves its growth potential.

“That’s why we must clean up our act,” she said during a panel discussion on LNG and nationally determined contributions (NDCs). “I think it's very clear: We can do more and we must do more.”

NDCs refer to emissions that countries are allowed to generate under long-term reduction goals as part of the Paris Agreement. Wolff-Bye noted that several Asian countries have NDCs and are Paris Agreement signatories. Nine Southeast Asian countries have net-zero carbon emission goals and pledges, and “a big chunk” of those nations have also signed up to reduce methane emissions by 2030.

Wolff-Bye said the natural gas industry must prove its worth in a net-zero framework. Petronas has been pushing the whole Asian region and Southeast Asia to clean up at the source and work with customers to ensure that they are not just shipping emissions back and forth as LNG is exported and imported, she said.

“I think we need to have a different perspective and move from more of a commodities perspective to a customer-focused perspective so we deliver what the customers actually want up to their specification,” she said. 

Petronas is developing carbon capture and storage systems in the Malaysian basin and is also working with Far East customers to take carbon dioxide back for sequestration in Malaysia.

“This is an area that we work on very closely and we hope to bring to the fore in the next few years,” she said.

LNG project developers must also repurpose existing infrastructure to help keep emission-reduction costs in line, she added.

“If we’re going to build a whole new LNG system, we will burst the carbon budget very quickly,” she said. “The embodied carbon is already there in our system, so we need to repurpose it, especially in the OECD countries, North America and so on.”

She contended that the industry needs to think more about the energy trilemma of security, affordability and sustainability. 

“It’s not a trade-off,” she said. “We need to respond to all three areas.”

Sometimes the industry gets quite comfortable because it knows that LNG is a good product, she contended. But that attitude does not play out so well with customers. Moving from a commodities focus to a customer focus will allow for a broader and more diversified energy mix.

“We need to have a much more targeted approach,” she said, adding that natural-gas emissions account for about 20% of the global total.

“If we don’t abate the emissions, we actually won’t meet the NDCs or anything that’s set out by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.]”

Methane emissions will also become a big issue in the future, hampering the industry’s efforts to explain the benefits of natural gas and LNG, she claimed.

“If we, as an industry, don’t curb methane emissions now, we’re going to lose the argument [about the benefits of natural gas] altogether,” she said.