

When Less Bad is Good
Not all fossil fuels are created equal
We need to acknowledge that fossil fuels have brought significant benefits to society by powering industries, transportation, and heating our homes. Even today, many communities and economies rely heavily on fossil fuels.
A net zero emission world would be great but let’s not kid ourselves, fossil fuels will continue to play a role in the future energy mix. The goal is to gradually reduce fossil fuels share and increase the contribution of renewable energy sources.
When Less Bad is Good
Long time readers know that we here at Mangrove classify fossil fuels in three categories:
Really Bad: Coal, heavy fuel oil
Bad: Fuel oil, diesel, gasoline, kerosene, etc.
Less Bad: Natural Gas (methane)
If you are nerdy, it comes down to two things: the length of the carbon chains and the impurities. For the really bad fuels, it’s about impurities.
The Really Bad
For example, coal forms from burying entire swamps. So, you get all sorts of inclusions, from metals like mercury and lots of sulfur. It’s impossible to economically remove them.
For centuries, we just burnt the coal and didn’t worry about the small amounts of contaminants per ton.
But now, we have “non-point-source” mercury contamination in our tuna. And we can’t eat fish from our lakes all over the U.S.
That’s the really bad kind of pollution.
The Bad
But it doesn’t let the liquid hydrocarbons off the hook. There’s a reason we need to use expensive catalytic converters on our vehicles. Cars and trucks do a particularly bad job of combusting fuel.
We end up with large amounts of harmful stuff like volatile organic compounds, micro-particulates, sulfur and nitrogen oxides.
All this stuff is bad for your health. This is the stuff that can kill you now, as opposed to impacting climate.
The Less Bad
The less bad category is just methane. Otherwise known as natural gas, it’s just CH4 (one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms). When you burn it, you get one molecule of carbon dioxide and two molecules of water.
It’s a ubiquitous form of hydrocarbon that bacteria can produce from eating organic material. That makes some of it non-fossil fuel, right?
However, it’s also the final form of fossil fuel. As you heat and compress oil, the carbon chains break. Methane is the shortest chain, before it breaks down.
That makes it a useful (and clean) fuel
And it’s flirting with its lowest price in decades, as you can see:

We are fans of natural gas because it provides the backbone for renewable energy. When we build huge wind farms or solar plants, we know that they aren’t “full time” energy sources. Solar only works when it’s sunny, right?
Often, these plants have natural gas as a backup. So that when the sun is out, the natural gas is off. But at night, the natural gas plant can fill in and meet demand. Until we have dependable, community-scale batteries, this is an excellent backstop.
If you replace Real Bad with Less Bad that is good
And when natural gas is this cheap, it will encourage communities to ditch coal and switch to renewable with natural gas backstops. And that’s a huge win. We would love to see coal removed as a power plant fuel.
For the Good,
The Mangrove Investor Team
Numbers You Need to Know
1 Million
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock with a high amount of carbon and hydrocarbons. Coal is classified as a nonrenewable energy source because it takes millions of years to form. (eia.gov)
20 Million Barrels Per Day
The U.S. uses an estimated 20 million barrels petroleum products per day. With the transportation sector using 68 percent of that number. (eia.gov)
1776
Methane was discovered and isolated by Alessandro Volta between 1776 and 1778 when studying marsh gas from Lake Maggiore. (phys.org)
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