Fossil Fuels’ Forthright Defender

When Elizabeth Warren denounced energy CEOs, Toby Rice, the head of the largest U.S. natural gas producer wasn’t about to roll over

By Allysia Finley of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"He cites the Mountain Valley pipeline, which aims to deliver cheap gas from Appalachia to the Southeast. A three-member panel of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals keeps nitpicking the government’s environmental reviews, forcing the energy companies back to the permitting table. (The same three judges blocked the Atlantic Coast pipeline before the Supreme Court later reversed 7-2.)

The pipeline is more than 95% complete, and developers had aimed to bring it into service this summer. But litigation is delaying the final work and inflating costs. “They find themselves in a situation where that project cost was originally $3 billion budgeted. Now it’s $6 billion,” Mr. Rice says.

Meantime, the environment will suffer because of the delays. There will be more greenhouse-gas emissions, because the gas the pipelines transport would replace coal power on the electricity grid. 

Solar and wind power could fill some but not all of the gap, as they depend on daylight and weather. Fossil fuel is a necessary backup. “I don’t think residents in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Florida recognize that a pipeline is being challenged in West Virginia,” Mr. Rice says. “Their energy security is being challenged because of people attempting to block this pipeline.”

Matters are even worse in the Northeast, including Ms. Warren’s state of Massachusetts. Three large pipelines capable of transporting enough gas from Appalachia to serve more than 10 million households in the Northeast have been blocked. As a result, the region must import LNG from abroad at much higher prices to heat homes and power the grid in the winter. (The Jones Act of 1920, a protectionist regulation of maritime commerce, limits the ability to move American LNG from the Gulf Coast to Northern states.)

Natural-gas prices one weekend this January were eight times as high in New England as in Appalachia."

"an export ban would reduce the global LNG supply by roughly 22%, raising, not lowering, energy prices in New England and elsewhere."

"Annual emissions from coal are up 500 million tons over pre-pandemic 2019 levels: “To put that into perspective, that completely offsets all of the emission reductions we’ve done from solar and wind here in the United States in the last 15 years.”

When Russia slowed gas deliveries to Europe last fall, the Continent had few alternatives but to ramp up coal power. As gas prices surged amid a global supply shortage, Asian countries, especially China, burned more coal. Increased emissions from Chinese power and heating generation last year offset all emissions reductions in the rest of the world between 2019 and 2021. The world’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—barely three weeks after the senators wrote to Ms. Granholm—will further constrain fossil-fuel supply."