Natural Gas industry criticizes Trump Administration over coal, nuclear relief plan

The Interstate Natural Gas Association of America (INGAA) criticized what they labeled a fundamentally flawed rationale laid out by a National Security Council report this week, which provoked controversy by demanding the bailout of coal and nuclear plants.

The INGAA calls it an administrative plan to punish natural gas by making them a scapegoat. This runs contrary, they said, to the economic boost natural gas has provided, as well as the jobs, cost savings and lower carbon emissions it has allowed as an alternative to coal.

“There is absolutely no justification for the extreme intervention in energy markets suggested in the draft National Security Council memo,” Don Santa, INGAA president and CEO, said. “Such a move would be bad public policy, costly to American consumers and the economy, and legally questionable.”

Santa agreed on one point from the report — that there are indeed natural gas delivery system threats — but noted that those threats are being addressed. The fact that the report focused on those threats while ignoring threats to other sectors of the nation’s energy infrastructure, deserves serious consideration. Natural gas, he said, comes with a record of resilience and quick response, and labeled it a fuel-secure resource for electricity.

It is not a label he would apply to its counterparts equally.

“The expansiveness of the natural gas pipeline network is a strength, not a weakness,” Santa said. “The network’s ability to access diverse sources of supply and storage across the US and Canada makes the system resilient and significantly reduces the risk to gas-fired electric generators by providing the ability, in most cases, to reroute natural gas in the rare event of a disruption. It’s also important to point out that unlike the power grid, pipeline incidents do not result in cascading outages and widespread losses of service. There is no natural gas equivalent to a rolling blackout.”