With U.S. midterm elections fast approaching, Americans of all political persuasions are newly questioning technology giants about the role of artificial intelligence in everything from workforce economics to data centers in their neighborhoods. But amid record heat this summer, push back increasingly focused on AI’s energy and climate implications, with burgeoning power demand from data centers driving consumer electricity prices up by 27% since 2019, while also escalating emissions.
Despite all this, the world’s most valuable companies are not yet cutting methane leaks from the natural gas that is key fuel source for American data centers.
Methane causes nearly one-third of global warming and is 80 times more powerful per molecule in heating the planet than carbon dioxide. Fortunately, methane dissipates rapidly in the atmosphere, so reducing methane leaks avoids at least half a degree Fahrenheit of global temperature increases by the 2040s, limiting more warming than cuts to carbon dioxide over the crucial next two decades. This makes methane abatement the fastest way to limit warming.
The gas and electric utility industries already know how to prevent leaks of methane very cheaply. It’s not rocket science. Stop venting and flaring of gas. Switch out old leaky equipment with new valves, compressors, and pipelines that can prevent almost all leakage, down to .25% of total gas volume. This limits expense because it conserves salable gas. Half of methane can be abated at no net cost by industry and reductions are far cheaper than carbon dioxide cuts.
But segments of these industries know they need large dedicated markets and contracts for ultra-low methane or “differentiated gas” to begin producing it at scale. Meanwhile, they continue to allow large leaks of methane.
Big tech companies have the power to remedy this problem quickly. They can establish new markets for differentiated gas, requiring utilities and the gas industry to deliver low methane gas to all their data centers. The sheer scale and planned growth of data centers powered by natural gas means big tech could tip the entire gas industry toward low methane emissions, delivering a major climate win at very low cost.
Yet right now, despite this, tech is making many dubious “net zero” emissions promises, and not one of the biggest companies—including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, xAI, OpenAI—has committed to using ultra-low methane gas. And while nearly half of existing data centers rely on natural gas for power, even more massive gas-fired expansions are planned for just the next few years.
In fact, under construction or planned data centers powered by gas have doubled in just the last six months, with proposed demand skyrocketing from only 7 gigawatts in 2024 to 189 gigawatts this year (a gigawatt powers about a million homes.) Even if only half of planned projects get built, they will constitute by far the largest increase in gas demand and methane emissions in the U.S. economy in coming years.
Many tech companies are building new gas power plants off the electric grid saying this will less directly impact consumer electricity prices, but still doing little to address methane. In Texas, Amazon is building a huge “behind the grid” gas power plant for massive data center, which would become the largest single U.S. source of climate pollution.
Tech also promises without clear evidence that AI itself will help limit long-term emissions by more efficiently using energy and discovering new, cleaner technologies. But in the meantime, AI’s current and near-future emissions keep rising, and leading climate scientists find that temperature increases must be limited over the next two decades to have a chance of avoiding many severe climate impacts.
Some companies like Alphabet and Google have joined JPMorgan and others in creating a coalition aimed at reducing super climate pollutants, which include HFC’s and black carbon soot in addition to methane. Yet thus far the group not taken any action to ensure only ultra-low methane gas powers it’s expansion, and it’s overall funding is a small percentage of what’s needed.
Methane-emitting gas producers, however, are being increasingly exposed. New satellite methane detection technologies are revealing specific large methane emissions, often in the Permian gas basin of Texas.
Technology companies can also use more renewable energy and electricity storage, which are becoming increasingly cheap, as well as other forms of low or zero emitting electricity generation. But inevitably gas will power some of AI, especially over the next decade as it grows fastest, so that gas must be as low-emitting as possible.
Indeed, a number of gas-fired power plants are now being built with carbon capture technologies to reduce their emissions even further, with Exxon Mobil just gaining approval last week from Texas state regulators to build the world’s largest, 900 mile network of pipelines to inject CO2 underground.
Globally, the movement toward ultra-low methane gas is growing. New European Union regulations will increasingly require that U.S. liquefied natural gas exporters, who supply the EU with most of its gas, to meet very low methane leakage rates. Europe is by far the largest export market for U.S. gas that has directly displaced the EU’s previous addiction to high methane gas from Russia, which has funded Vladimir Putin’s malign regime for years.
President Trump in his second term has delayed rules to limit methane emissions that many oil and gas companies wanted to keep since major companies realize methane abatement is crucial to the future of gas. But if consumers push tech to act directly, markets can bypass politics and cut emissions now.
Big tech has no excuse. Pledging to use only low-methane gas is the fastest way to reduce warming. Even a quick AI search will tell you that.
Paul Bledsoe is president of Bledsoe & Associates, an economic and energy consultancy, and served on the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Clinton.
