Heating Oil vs. natural gas

Originally published November, 2015

Why Heating Oil Is Better for the Environment in Massachusetts Than Natural Gas

I was interested to find a small graph in the front section of the recent National Geographic (November 2015 issue) that showed the amount of natural gas lost from leaking pipes in the Boston area. You can find it toward the front (no page number) in a section titled, “Cities.” This graph and accompanying text are very helpful in understanding the negative impact that natural gas can have on the environment.
 
The text reads, “An alarming amount of natural gas never reaches the homes it was intended to heat because it seeps out of old pipes. Utilities repair life-endangering leaks but often miss others, which can still cause trouble: The main component of natural gas is methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Fixing the pipes fixes the problem. After Indianapolis upgraded its pipes to noncorrosive materials, a methane-mapping project discovered only five leaks in the city.”

Just how potent of a greenhouse gas is natural gas (also known as methane)? To answer that question I will include the following sentence from the page: “Methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long as CO2, but its impact on climate change over 100 years is 28 times greater.”

For those of you who don’t know, burning heating oil produces mostly CO2 (carbon dioxide), and burning natural gas produces mostly CO (carbon monoxide). After enduring years of utility ads extolling the green virtues of natural gas, it is refreshing to see some truth about the real impact on the environment of transporting it. Certainly there is a fix for the 2,320 leaks detected in Boston, but what is the likelihood that our local utilities will do what Indianapolis has done any time soon? It makes me wonder what a graph of Central Massachusetts gas leaks would reveal.

My reason for writing this blog was not to slam the natural gas utilities. They are an important part of our energy sources for Massachusetts, and I truly wish them well. The reason I wrote this blog is to highlight the fact that burning heating oil is not as harmful to the environment when compared to natural gas, which has been indelibly etched into energy consumers’ brains from years of negative advertising.

I know that people working in the natural gas industry have been doing the best that they can to address their problems with gas leaks and to offer their customers the most efficient products, but we in the heating oil industry have been working just as hard. It is rare to hear about heating oil leaking into the ground or waterways because of strict laws requiring containment and protected supply lines. We have also been installing new heating systems that are, on average, in the 87-percent range.

Crowley Fuel and most other heating- oil dealers in Massachusetts have been making a difference on the environmental impact of the oil that we sell by blending biofuel and reducing sulfur in each gallon that we sell. This does not make us green, but it does make us proud to be doing our share in the important work of keeping our climate cool.

​Bob

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