Role of biomethane to offset natural gas

Abstract

The use of biomethane, produced through anaerobic digestion of organic waste, holds promise as an energy source for mitigating climate change. This study quantifies the technical potential of biomethane, considering neither socio-economic nor political constraints, and then compares it to worldwide natural gas use and imports. Furthermore, it calculates the potential emission reduction achieved by substituting natural gas with biomethane. We find that biomethane can offset 29% of natural gas use and two-thirds of natural gas net-imports worldwide. Considering the European energy crisis arising from the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, we analyze the potential for each European country to generate enough biomethane to decrease their reliance on imported Russian natural gas. Our estimates indicate that almost one-third of European countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, Romania, Greece, Sweden, and Portugal, have the potential to completely replace their natural gas imports from Russia by utilizing domestic biomethane production. Our study also evaluates how biomethane can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by substituting fossil natural gas, while considering methane leaks in both biomethane and natural gas supply chains and carbon emissions from fossil natural gas combustion. Our results indicate that replacing fossil natural gas with biomethane will decrease emissions from natural gas systems by 11%, equivalent to 1.1 Gt CO2-eq per year. These findings illustrate the potential of biomethane in reducing our dependence on fossil natural gas and mitigating its emissions.