How Fossil Fuel Companies Benefit from the War in Ukraine

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, countless numbers have been forcibly taken to Russia, and nearly 1,600 Ukrainian cultural sites and churches have been purposefully destroyed. But there is another potentially catastrophic fallout from the war that is less talked about: In the past year, there has been a massive increase in exports of methane gas, with U.S. fossil fuel companies signing nearly three times the number of long-term contracts in 2022 than in the previous two years combined.

Methane is one of the most powerful gases accelerating climate change — with 80 times the warming power of carbon.

“Fossil fuel executives are exploiting the Russian invasion of Ukraine to justify contracts that commit the United States to keep exporting LNG [liquid natural gas] into the 2040s,” says a report out this week from the U.S.-based nonprofit groups Friends of the Earth, BailoutWatch, and Public Citizen. The contracts require the U.S. to build environmentally damaging export terminals. They also are a way to prop up the fossil fuel industry.

“The expansion of domestic LNG-export infrastructure, supported by the Biden administration, provides extractive industries with a lucrative lifeline to maintain their dominance,” the report authors write. “Yet it undermines efforts to protect communities, reduce carbon emissions, and combat the spiraling climate crisis.”

The authors allege that the contracts are “a permanent ‘solution’ for the short- term problem of European gas market volatility.”

Some of the findings in the report include:

• The fossil fuel industry finalized 45 long-term deals to send U.S.-produced LNG overseas in the past year, up from 14 in 2021 and three in 2020.
• LNG volumes set to be delivered under these contracts total 58.1 million metric tons a year, every single year — more than double the total volume contracted in the previous two years combined. It’s enough to cover more than half the gas burned for cooking and heating in U.S. homes in 2021.
• The new contracts represent 351 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year — equivalent to the yearly emissions of 94 coal plants or one-third of all U.S. households. LNG is nearly as dirty as coal after accounting for leakage and other emissions along its supply chain.

The authors also say that U.S. companies and government officials have made misleading claims— that the exports are good for Europe’s national security when, in actuality, three-quarters of the gas will be delivered to the Asia-Pacific region.

Hopefully, the war in Ukraine will end soon. The effects of these methane export contracts, inevitably, will be felt for millions of years.