DC has committed to stop burning fossil fuels by 2050. Washington Gas has another plan.

In March, Washington Gas unveiled its “climate business plan” purporting to explain how the utility will comply with DC’s commitment of carbon neutrality by 2050. But instead of laying out a vision of renewable energy from sources like wind and solar, the utility’s plan calls for continued burning of fossil fuels.

Mayor Muriel Bowser committed DC to carbon neutrality nearly three years ago. The mayor’s Clean Energy DC plan states that achieving carbon neutrality “will require the District to eliminate fossil fuel use.”

The Washington Gas plan, though, says that in 2050 it will continue pumping gas into buildings, with 58% of the gas coming from what it calls “low-carbon fuels” and the other 42% coming from fossil fuels.

The Washington Gas plan, according to DC’s environmental agency and attorney general, “is incompatible with the District’s climate policy.”

What exactly is ‘low-carbon’ gas?

The “low-carbon fuel” Washington Gas refers to in its plan is methane gas. Fracked gas is methane gas as well. When burned, methane emits carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. When leaked directly into the atmosphere, methane is 84 to 87 times more powerful as a global warming agent than carbon.

So where do these “low-carbon fuels” come from? Animal manure, for one. Manure from cows and other animals emits methane, and the fracked gas industry is promoting extracting methane from manure for use alongside fracked gas.

Among the problems with manure gas: it is exceedingly expensive and there’s not enough of it.

A Minnesota gas utility sought approval for a manure gas pilot program last year, and the state’s attorney general found even with the “overly optimistic” assumptions from the utility, manure gas costs ten times more than fossil gas. Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission unanimously rejected the proposed manure gas plan.

Manure gas comes from factory farms with hundreds or thousands of cows, pigs, or other livestock. The manure is placed in a tank where it is heated so that the methane rises to the top and can be extracted. The methane must be upgraded into pipeline-grade gas so it does not corrode gas pipes. Then miles and miles of pipelines have to be built, because these huge factory farms are usually not located near major gas lines. The cost of all this infracture is $1.2 million to $3 million per manure gas site, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.

Like fracked gas, manure gas is methane, so when it is burned and when it leaks, it contributes to the climate crisis. The gas is not carbon neutral, as the gas industry suggests, and recent research shows that “low-carbon gases” in fact have a sizable global warming impact.

In addition to manure gas, the Washington Gas plan calls for piping hydrogen into DC’s buildings. When hydrogen is burned, it does not emit carbon. But producing hydrogen is energy-intensive and expensive.

Washington Gas states that the energy to produce the hydrogen will come from excess electricity from wind and solar that’s not going into the electric grid. The Washington Gas plan assumes there will be sufficient quantities of unneeded electricity from wind and solar, and the utility also assumes it will have access to this electricity for hydrogen production without competition from other users. Washington Gas has offered no evidence to support either assumption. Because hydrogen is highly explosive, it can be fed into the gas grid only in small quantities.

Hydrogen, manure gas and other “low-carbon” gases can replace only 3% to 7% of today’s fracked gas usage, according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council. So the best case scenario for these allegedly “low-carbon” sources is relying on fossil fuels for more than 90% of the gas supply.

But Washington Gas says it can source 58% of its gas from “low-carbon” sources. The DC Department of Energy and Environment found Washington Gas’s calculations are plagued with mathematical errors, and the plan in fact allows for only 43% of DC’s gas to come from these sources.

Still, the re-calculation of 43% and the Natural Resources Defense Council’s figures of 3% to 7% for “low-carbon” gas are far apart. Why the difference? The Washington Gas plan assumes it is operating in a vacuum, and one else is using “low-carbon” gas.

The Sierra Club commissioned an analysis of the plan from a climate scientist who found that Washington Gas assumes it “would have unfettered access to low-carbon gas” while “ignoring likely competition” from “more economically justified uses for these resources such as supporting electric system resiliency and low-carbon aviation fuel.”

The high cost of fossil fuel infrastructure

The Washington Gas vision of continued reliance on fossil fuels won’t come cheap. The utility has requested approval from regulators for a five-year, $374 million gas pipeline replacement program. The cost would be borne by ratepayers (people who pay gas utility bills). It’s part of a larger plan by the utility to replace and upgrade all of its pipes, which the DC Department of Energy and Environment estimates would cost from $3 billion to $4.5 billion.

Washington Gas mismanaged its previous pipeline replacement program, replacing less than half the pipes it claimed it would, according to the Office of People’s Counsel, which represents the interests of ratepayers.

The climate scientist commissioned by the Sierra Club found that instead of spending billions of dollars in fossil fuel infrastructure that DC has committed to stop using by 2050, moving from gas to electricity from renewable sources is “the least-cost path towards carbon neutrality.”

How do we replace gas?

Though it does business as Washington Gas, the company’s name is WGL Holdings. WGL stands for Washington Gas Light. When the company was founded in 1848, its business was providing fuel for gas streetlights. The company long ago evolved its business model from providing gas lighting to providing building heat.

The utility sees its business today as selling gas, and its business plan is designed to maximize its fossil fuel sales, despite the company’s pledge to do the opposite. But the product people are purchasing isn’t so much gas as it is heat – home heating in winter as well as water heating and heat for cooking and clothes drying.

As we wrote last year, those heating needs can be met by highly efficient heat pump technology powered by electricity from renewable sources.

On Earth Day this year, a coalition of environmental groups wrote the DC Council suggesting an alternative business model for Washington Gas based on clean energy:

1. Installing clean energy heat pumps that heat and cool homes, offices and other buildings.
2. Building and maintaining clean energy heating and cooling systems that carry hot water in the winter and cold water in the summer from central units which generate hot or cold water through geothermal energy, industrial-scale heat pumps, and wastewater heat extraction.

The Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington, whose members own many of the buildings that could be heated with efficient and renewable energy, filed comments with the Public Service Commission, which regulates the utilities, saying the environmental groups’ recommendations “should be investigated by the Commission to determine if their recommendations are a less costly alternative” than the gas plan, which the building owners group estimates would cost $4 billion.

DC’s climate commitments

The gas utility’s business plan was required under the 2018 merger of Washington Gas and the Canadian fracked gas supplier AltaGas. Under the merger agreement, the combined company agreed to develop “a long-term business plan on how it can evolve its business model to support and serve the District’s 2050 climate goals (e.g., providing innovative and new services and products instead of relying only on selling natural gas).”

Five members of the DC Council, all of whom either co-introduced or co-sponsored the Clean Energy DC Omnibus Act of 2018, wrote to the Public Service Commission noting that the 2018 law changed the commission’s mandate to require that it uphold “the conservation of natural resources, and the preservation of environmental quality, including effects on global climate change and the District’s public climate commitments.”

The councilmembers – Brianne Nadeau (Ward 1), Mary Cheh (Ward 3), Charles Allen (Ward 6), Vincent Gray (Ward 7), Robert White (at-large) and David Grosso (at-large) — told the commission that in assessing the plan, it “must meet its mandate to uphold DC’s public climate commitments.” The councilmembers ended their letter by telling the commission: “In 2018, the Council tasked the Commission with taking on the mantle of climate leadership.”

The initial round of comments to the Public Service Commission on the Washington Gas “climate business plan” were due June 26. The final round of comments are due August 25. After that, the DC Public Service Commission must decide whether it will hold Washington Gas accountable to the utility’s commitment of carbon neutrality by 2050.

The authors of this article co-chair the Sierra Club DC Chapter Beyond Gas Subcommittee.