Natural Gas Company Said It Was Going Green but Still Sells as Much Fossil Fuel | Hacker News Reader

Natural Gas Company Said It Was Going Green but Still Sells as Much Fossil Fuel

propublica.org

31 pointsPaulHoule32 comments

For the record, I love propublica reporting.

And, here is something I wish all articles posted: "as reporters, we also tried to look at other utilities, and only 37% of them reported data."

I think these news articles are often skewed by what data is available. And, so many agencies just don't report, so they are exempted from this kind of reporting.

Given my political and environmental leanings I should be picking up a pitchfork now as the article intends, but the entire article is built on lying with statistics.

> NW Natural has more retail gas customers than ever. It supplies them little, if any, renewable natural gas. It sells them as much fossil natural gas in an average year as it did before. And it wages steady battles in the courts and in local city halls to keep the gas flowing.

If I have more customers I would be selling more natural gas, not the same amount. I read a lot more of this article than I wanted to and at no point that I saw did they say how much recovered methane they are selling to customers. That should have been in this paragraph, if they weren’t so busy grandstanding. How “little, if any”? Numbers. Not rhetoric.

I am so tired of people misrepresenting numbers in general, and politically motivated is the worst. If you can’t win without lying then it’s not really winning.

At the very end:

> After years of fanfare about renewable natural gas, what’s its share of NW Natural’s gas supply today?

> Less than 1%.

The article, indeed, cites precious few actual statistics to lie with at all, but this suggests that the phrase "as much" means the same proportion, not the same absolute amount. So in your words, yes, they're selling "more natural gas" from fossil sources.

The NW Natural website says they spun up their first biogas (I guess we are calling it Renewable Natural Gas or RNG now?) in 2022 and they had a partially completed second facility at the time. That’s not a lot of time to shift your fuel mix.

It is concerning that NWN hasn’t updated their environmental report since December 2022. But it looks like they’ve focused on carbon intensity in other ways, like finding more efficient producers and reducing venting during maintenance. It’s a start but it does sound a lot like foot dragging.

Yeah the only actual numbers (and the most damning) in the article say that they promised 5% and delivered less than 1%.

That said, it really would have been nice if they'd linked directly to the reports and documents they used as sources. They list their sources as: The NW Natural 2023 Annual Renewable Natural Gas Compliance Report, Oregon Senate Bill 98 (2019), and the 2022 NW Natural Integrated Resource Plan.

NWN’s website says their first facility went online in 2022 so the 2019 report would tell them nothing and the 2022 report next to nothing.

They also partnered with BP (wearing a disguise called Archaea, because Deepwater Horizon ruined their name) but they only have one facility listed in Oregon so far, and a few in Washington.

> If you can’t win without lying then it’s not really winning.

I agree with this, but I don't think you've established that they're lying. In the sentence you quote we don't know whether "It sells them as much fossil natural gas in an average year as it did before" means they sell as much gas in total (your reading) or as much per capita. Given that this sentence was in the introduction of the article, where one lays out one's thesis before presenting evidence, I think you jumped the gun a bit. There are more numbers later in the article.

The only mention of volume of natural gas I read or found by searching the article is reporting on the wide range of speculative numbers on recoverable natural gas. 10-50 million cubic feet.

If you saw other numbers then by all means.

> I saw did they say how much recovered methane they are selling to customers... misrepresenting numbers...

Is the only valid journalism conducted like a war crimes commission?

Providing concrete numbers directly to support your conclusions is not a war crimes commission. It just means you might have accidentally read some Tufte at some point.

What concrete numbers would persuade you one way or another? You are probably not going to “just” answer that question, which should illuminate for you why the only place your brand of skepticism gets air time is among people who have made up their minds about everything. Even though I think you are being sincere, the thing you are advocating for is co-opted by people who are not.

Companies grow in volume all the time. It’s a common way to vilify companies by ignoring their mix of good and bad and just focus on them doing the same volume of bad, despite doing more volume overall. I already suspected from the headline that’s exactly what they were doing, and they didn’t exceed my low expectations.

I don't know. Something something, "why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" This is my feedback to you. All you have to do is say a number that should go into that spot that would be the smallest one that would convince you that the thrust of what they are saying is true. If you're saying there is no number, then I was mistaken for being charitable in my assessment of your sincerity.

You know this article is casting aspersions right? How hypocritical do you have to be?

I’d want to know what their goal was, what their velocity is, and what evidence we have that they intend to sandbag forever instead of just being 18 months behind schedule. This is generally how we’ve berated other fossil fuel giants in the past. So they were aiming for 5% and got 1% with a whole plant nearly done but not running. That could still go either way and there’s 18 months of subsequent data out there somewhere that would tell us which. Without that data there’s no scoop, no story. It’ll be news in January when their reports come out.