WGC: Gas Must Displace Coal and NS2 is Needed, says Engie

WASHINGTON, DC – Today's big battle today is to replace coal with gas in the power sector and we need Russian gas through a diversity of routes, Engie vice-president Didier Holleaux, told NGW at the World Gas Conference here June 28. "Every coal-fired plant is eating up the remaining carbon budget, and it is essential to fight this," he said.

"Ideally the partnership of gas and renewables will manage the contribution of the power sector for climate change. But for now this means methane, as an urgent replacement for coal. This is why we support Nord Stream 2 (NS2). Between now and 2050 when all gas has been replaced by biogas, we need additional methane if only to get coal out of Europe and replace the worst fossil fuel with the best fossil fuel," he said.

By their opposition to NS2 on the grounds that it means locking Europe into burning fossil fuels for decades to come, protesters are shooting themselves in the foot, he said. The amount of energy that is needed early in the working day in northern Europe cannot be supplied by renewable energy and nuclear, he said.

"The capacity of energy storage is not enough to meet peak demand without gas. You can manage the odd day but not recurrent peaks in a short period. Batteries have a short life and they are expensive. Storage needs molecules. This can be methane, hydrogen, biogas and methanation," he said.

Non-governmental organisations cannot do the calculations to justify their conclusions about abandoning gas, he said; and it is not possible to get locked into a pipeline that only costs a few billion dollars. "On the other hand we do not want NS2 to be used as a weapon against Ukraine. Engie is selling gas to Ukraine and working with Ukraine on gas storage studies. We are very keen to find a compromise: we want the additional capacity but we do not see any point in killing off the existing transit system," he said.