Natural Gas Is the Big Gorilla at the Moment for Protecting Energy Security But We Need Coal and Nuclear, Too

Natural gas consumption keeps increasing as the power sector demands more gas to make electricity. It’s an easily lost bit of information in all the hype over solar and wind, but it’s hardly surprising as natural gas is a reliable source of fuel for making electricity. So is coal. So is nuclear energy. And, if AI data centers take off as expected we can expect further growth.

Today In Energy has the facts, which are summed up in this chart:

The righthand side of the chart is too hard to explain and not worth it but one can see from the left side that electricity generation is responsible for most of the grwoth in natural gas consumption over the last four years. Here are the details:

U.S. natural gas consumption grew by 1% to reach a new annual high of 89.4 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2023, according to our Natural Gas Annual, and continued growing in the first nine months of 2024. The 1% increase in natural gas consumption in 2023 was driven by a 6.7% (2.2 Bcf/d) increase in consumption in the electric power sector, the largest natural gas consuming sector. U.S. consumption of natural gas for power generation averaged 35.4 Bcf/d, or 40% of U.S. natural gas consumed in 2023…

The natural gas consumption trends observed in 2023 largely continued in 2024 through September. U.S. natural gas consumption through September 2024 averaged 89.8 Bcf/d according to our monthly data, up 1% from the same period in 2023. The increase was driven by a 4% (1.6 Bcf/d) increase in consumption in the electric power sector, which averaged 38.1 Bcf/d, or 42% of U.S. natural gas consumed in 2024 through September.

Natural gas, in other words, is the big gorilla when it comes to electricity generation and it’s getting bigger. It gained more than non-hydro renewables by a fairly large margin (179,273 thousand megawatt hours to 152,501 for 2020-2023) and the latter appears to have cut mostly into coal, nuclear, and hydro sources of power.

Renewables can only grow, in fact, if something not intermittent grows with them unless we plan to lose control of energy security. That something is natural gas, but the reality is that shouldn’t be discounting the importance of coal and nuclear either. All three fuel sources have their advantages over intermittent green energy and all three are needed. Indeed, we can only afford so much in renewables without emasculating energy security.

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