Natural gas is a dirty fossil fuel like the rest of them.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Natural gas is a feedstock in basically every industrial process.
Natural gas is better distributed than any other fuel in the United States. It's down every street and up every alley. There's a pipeline.
Natural gas obviously brings with it a number of quality-of-life environmental benefits because it is a relatively clean-burning fuel. It has a CO2 footprint, but it has no particulates. It has none of the other emissions elements that are of concern to public health that other forms of power-generation fuels do have: coal, fuel oil, others.
Natural gas is the one fuel that we have that's affordable, it's scaleable, it can replace coal over time, it can replace imported oil, can create American jobs.
We see natural gas as an important part of the electricity generation mix for many decades to come.
We've recognized that natural gas would be the fastest-growing of the conventional fuels: oil, natural gas, coal. And so, we see the important role that natural gas will play globally and, more importantly, the important role it will play in the U.S. in terms of meeting future energy demand.
Natural gas emits only half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned, but if methane leaks when oil companies extract it from the ground in a sloppy manner - methane is far more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - it can wipe out all the advantages of natural gas over coal.
Natural gas is the future. It is here.
Natural gas is a better transportation fuel than gasoline, so if that's the case, it's cheaper, it's cleaner and it's a domestic resource.
Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it's filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas.