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Gas production in Russia: There is little data on methane leaks.
Photo: Vostok / Getty Images
The cold gas war is running right through Germany: on the Baltic Sea coast in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, even more Russian gas is soon to flow through the second Baltic Sea pipeline.
On the other hand, liquefied gas tankers from the USA could soon be landing on a large scale on the North Sea coast of Lower Saxony.
Both federal states are governed by the SPD.
Both prime ministers advertise natural gas.
Both praise the contribution of fossil fuel to climate protection.
But what is natural gas hype really about?
Due to its location, Germany has become a geostrategic plaything between the USA and Russia.
Both superpowers want to use the East and North Sea coasts as gateways for their gas exports to Europe.
At two locations it is currently being decided which role natural gas will play in the coming decades:
The Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline is about to be completed.
The Russian gas giant Gazprom has created facts in recent years.
The pipes were laid, although there was resistance to the project in many neighboring countries and also in the EU.
The US has been threatening sanctions for years.
The US government also wants to export gas to Europe.
The infrastructure for this is currently being created: a total of three liquid gas terminals are planned in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein to receive shipments from the USA.
A terminal in Wilhelmshaven is currently on the brink.
Not only Nord Stream 2 is controversial
In addition to Nord Stream 2, the next step to be approved in Lower Saxony is the liquefied gas terminal in Stade.
According to their own information, the operators are already looking for customers in the USA.
The plans for a large-scale commercial import of LNG are less well known.
From a climate and environmental protection perspective, these are at least as questionable.
This is also evident from an expert report by Deutsche Umwelthilfe, which SPIEGEL has received.
The liquefied gas from exporting countries such as the USA would be transported in huge tankers that are up to 350 meters long.
In future, several of these mega tankers would land in Stade every week.
For this, the Elbe would have to be dredged further.
The cargo on the ships is also highly explosive and there is a huge Dow Chemical plant in the port of the terminal.
A nuclear waste storage facility is also planned nearby.
In addition, a nature reserve borders the harbor.
In addition, the planning documents for the terminal construction lacked the consequences for the climate, according to the report.
How many emissions would result from gas imports would be completely hidden.
Methane: Anything but a climate protector
Natural gas is often sold as a climate protector.
PR agencies of the gas lobby have been working on this message for years.
The establishment of the "Foundation for Climate and Environmental Protection MV" by Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania's Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig (SPD) shows that this lobbyism is bearing fruit.
The foundation will be gold plated with 20 million euros from Nord Stream 2 AG, which according to the statutes may also provide the managing director.
There was mainly criticism because the company belongs to the Russian state-owned company Gazprom.
The goal of the »Climate Foundation« is the rapid completion of a pipeline.
But the government of Lower Saxony also supports natural gas interests with all its might - only from countries like the USA or Qatar.
Prime Minister Stephan Weil, also an SPD, likes to emphasize that gas is important "on the way to a climate-neutral society".
Lower Saxony has also had its own "natural gas agency" for around a year: the LNG agency was founded to advertise liquid gas.
The taxpayer has to pay the lobby agency three quarters of a million a year.
The fact is: Both countries are selling their natural gas policies as climate protection.
However, methane, the main component of natural gas, is anything but a climate protector.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the gas is responsible for around a quarter of man-made global warming.
The methane concentration in the atmosphere has increased extremely quickly over the past 20 years, according to a recent article in the specialist magazine "Nature".
In fact, so far there are only a few studies on how good or bad liquefied petroleum or pipeline gas is really for the climate.
It depends on where and how the natural gas is extracted, the route over which it is transported by ship or pipeline and how it is then processed.
According to experts, the biggest climate problem is methane leaks in pipes and drilling sites.
Which has the better carbon footprint: gas from the USA or from Russia?
Most of the US gas is extracted from deep rock layers using a fracking process.
This so-called shale gas is located in deep clay layers and is extracted using fracking technology, in which water and chemicals are pressed into deep rock layers under high pressure.
This has led to significant environmental damage, for example chemicals have poisoned water.
The extent to which the possible methane losses from gas fracking are harmful to the climate has only been poorly investigated.
Researchers suspect that previous estimates of the size of these leaks are dramatically underestimated.
According to a study that appeared in the journal Science in 2018, the officially reported gas leaks in the USA were 60 percent higher than the US environmental protection agency stated.
According to measurements by the US environmental organization Environmental Defense Fund, 1.4 million tons of gas escape from production sites in the USA alone.
A lot of additional energy is required to transport liquid gas across the world's oceans.
The gas is cooled down to minus 163 degrees Celsius until it becomes liquid and only has six hundredths of its original volume.
It then has to be converted back into pipeline gas or "regasified".
In the case of Russian gas, it is even less known how much methane escapes during production and then during transport.
In general, pipeline gas has a slightly better carbon footprint than liquid gas, according to a study by the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research on the carbon footprint of liquid gas.
The authors write that this is due to the lower upstream chain emissions.
However, as the transport distance increases, the climate balance of pipeline gas also deteriorates.
As a reminder: the Baltic Sea pipelines Nord Stream I and II alone are over 1200 kilometers long.
Land routes in Russia and Europe not yet included.
How much natural gas does Europe really need?
The gas advocates in Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania justify the new pipelines and terminals with an allegedly increasing demand.
But how much natural gas the EU needs is also a question of how quickly the countries want to get out of fossil fuels.
The European Court of Auditors criticized as early as 2015: "The need has been overestimated for years because the EU does not make its own calculations, but relies on external forecasts."
The Agora Energiewende think tank estimates a slight increase in the need for imports in Germany over the next ten years - although this “could very probably also be mapped with the existing import and storage infrastructure”.
It is clear that the EU will not be allowed to burn any fossil fuels at all by 2050 - including natural gas.
To what extent the pipelines and terminals built today would still be needed is at least questionable, explains Frank Peter from Agora Energiewende.
In any case, one-to-one recycling for hydrogen is unrealistic.
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