Natural gas has played the leading role in reducing U.S. power sector emissions in the past 15 years – a feat worthy of celebration on Earth Day 2022.

While the Energy Information Administration attributes lowered CO2 emissions to falling short-term energy demand due to the pandemic, there is a clear long-term trend of natural gas as the key fuel in lowering emissions in the power generation sector.

The EIA’s latest U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions report details the change in CO2 emissions over previous years.

Previous versions of EIA’s report described the power sector emissions reductions attributable to the switch from coal to natural gas and other non-carbon generation. While that data was not included in this year’s report, Energy In Depth was able to obtain it from EIA.

The Data

The EIA report provides electricity production data from 1990-2020, showing that natural gas generation increased by 28.3 percent and coal generation decreased by 33.4 percent. In 2020, natural gas electricity generation increased by 2.3 percent, while coal generation dropped by 4.2 percent, showing that natural gas continues to be a major replacement as coal plants retire across the country.

The increased use of natural gas for power generation has led to significant emissions reductions, as EIA’s data show.

In 2020 alone, the shift to natural gas provided an emissions reduction of 562 million metric tons of CO2 (MMT CO2). That’s the emissions equivalent of 150 coal-fired power plants operating for a year, according to EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalency Calculator.

In comparison to non-carbon generating forms of power which includes renewables and nuclear, natural gas slashed emissions by 182 MMT CO2e more in 2020.

Since 2005 the increased use of natural gas for power generation has led to emissions reductions of 3,871 MMT CO2, which is the same as removing more than 834 million gasoline-powered vehicles off the road. For comparison, there were about 262 million registered motor vehicles (cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, etc.) in the United States in 2020, according to Statista.

Since 2005, natural gas has cut emissions by 1,448 MMT CO2e more than non-carbon generating forms of power, nearly twice as much.