Giving Thanks For Natural Gas
When something is always available, it’s hard to remember why you’re grateful for it. Thanks to the incredible resilience of natural gas, gas customers are rarely without it – only one in eight hundred households experience an unplanned outage per year. As Thanksgiving approaches, we want to highlight some of the wonderful things that natural gas provides and enables.
In much of the United States, temperatures can get well below freezing by Thanksgiving. If you’re one of the fifty-eight million households that use natural gas for direct home heating, you can thank the gas delivery system for the warmth in your home. If not, odds are the electricity you use for heating was also produced by natural gas, which contributes the largest percentage of electricity to the grid of any energy source. Because natural gas is expected to remain between a third and half the price of alternate heating energy sources through at least 2050, households that use natural gas can save money. Over the past decade, customers using natural gas saved over $640 billion dollars.
No Thanksgiving is complete without a Thanksgiving dinner. Modern agriculture depends on fertilizers that come from natural gas. Studies have shown that these modern fertilizers increase crop yields by 57 percent. Without them, feeding the world would be far harder, let alone a Thanksgiving feast.
Are you cooking your own Thanksgiving meal? Odds are that you will use a gas stove, a gas oven, or a gas-powered grill to turn that food into a feast. If you ordered your food from a restaurant, it was probably cooked on a gas appliance. Ninety-six percent of professional chefs prefer cooking with gas because it is easy to control, simple to clean, affordable to operate, and works with any type of pot or pan.
Planning on having a drink with dinner? Whether it was brewed or distilled, you can bet that natural gas was used to boil the ingredients.
Natural gas combusts for less than half the CO2 emissions of coal. Because of this, the widespread adoption of natural gas has helped to decrease CO2 emissions, putting the United States on a path toward greater sustainability. Renewable green hydrogen and renewable natural gas (RNG) are both becoming increasingly significant parts of the gas system, providing new opportunities to reduce emissions while still taking advantage of the advantages that gas has to offer.
It’s important to be thankful for what we have. As we prepare to enjoy delicious meals with loved ones in warm homes, we should spare a thought for our friends and allies overseas. Ukraine is engaged in a struggle for liberty with the support of the free world, and the American liquid natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe are helping Ukraine and the European Union stay strong. American LNG fuels the free world – something we should all be thankful for.