Evaluating U.S. Natural Gas Environmental Performance
This work summarizes the U.S. Department of Energy National Energy Technology Laboratory's (NETL) modeling and analysis of natural gas environmental performance. Over the past year, NETL updated its U.S. natural gas supply chain life cycle baseline model to incorporate 2020 data, regionalize the transmission and distribution network into six regions, incorporate improved gathering and boosting stage and distribution stage emissions factors, and assign environmental burdens among the various co-products (i.e., crude oil, natural gas liquids, natural gas) of the natural gas supply chain. The updated natural gas model helps generate more comprehensive and regionalized natural gas profiles, mapping production basins to the relevant transmission and distribution regions downstream. The work incorporates data from multiple peer reviewed measurement-based studies to achieve the objective of providing a comprehensive understanding of emissions from the U.S. natural gas supply chain. This presentation also explores future work by NETL to develop a platform that enables stakeholders to customize key parameters within the natural gas LCA model and observe the corresponding effects on the carbon intensity of the overall supply chain. The platform aims to offer a convenient method for stakeholders to obtain relevant insights from the updated model, without diving deep into the intricacies of the NETL natural gas model with hundreds of parameters and linkages.