Methane emissions from oil and gas are enormously variable depending on what kind of upstream production facilities you have. Norway's methane emissions from oil and gas are negligible, and a couple of orders of magnitude better than the worst offenders, which are Russia and the US.
Why the US? Shale gas is based on an enormous number of gas wells with a short lifetime each. It's not economical to provide power and compressed air at each of these shale gas wells, so they use the pressure of the natural gas as the energy source to actuate their valves and pump liquids. That means the gas is vented to the atmosphere. And any liquids storage is in tanks which have no blanketing, so any evaporation and associated gas goes straight to the atmosphere.
US shale gas has incredibly high methane intensity. Not quite as bad as Russia, but worse than the rest of the world, including Saudia Arabia.
LNG plants themselves tend to have fairly low methane emissions. If you go to Qatar or Australia, the other two leading LNG exporters, their CO2 emissions will be high, but due to their upstream facilities they will have a tiny fraction of the methane emissions of US production.
But it's cheaper and easier to just engage in finger-wagging, pledges and vague ESG-inspired aspirations that to pay more for less-GHG-intensive LNG, so nothing will change in the short term.
And then US tight oil is also suspect of being basically a scam : AFAIK this industry has had maybe a couple of quarters in the green, so, like with corn biofuel, the resulting energy is likely to end up negative (not even counting the pollution!) - basically Wall Street using cheap Quantitative Easing money, while leaving someone else will the bill once the music stops pumping ?
Why the US? Shale gas is based on an enormous number of gas wells with a short lifetime each. It's not economical to provide power and compressed air at each of these shale gas wells, so they use the pressure of the natural gas as the energy source to actuate their valves and pump liquids. That means the gas is vented to the atmosphere. And any liquids storage is in tanks which have no blanketing, so any evaporation and associated gas goes straight to the atmosphere.
US shale gas has incredibly high methane intensity. Not quite as bad as Russia, but worse than the rest of the world, including Saudia Arabia.
LNG plants themselves tend to have fairly low methane emissions. If you go to Qatar or Australia, the other two leading LNG exporters, their CO2 emissions will be high, but due to their upstream facilities they will have a tiny fraction of the methane emissions of US production.
But it's cheaper and easier to just engage in finger-wagging, pledges and vague ESG-inspired aspirations that to pay more for less-GHG-intensive LNG, so nothing will change in the short term.