EQT’s Toby Rice on How Environmentalists Can Truly Make an Impact

PITTSBURGH—Natural gas is a major green initiative that misguided people with good intentions are blocking, EQT CEO Toby Rice said during Hart Energy’s DUG East Conference and Exhibition.

The more energy people use, the better their quality of life, he said. Solar and wind alone cannot meet the energy needs of the world, and without natural gas to round out energy supply, countries are likely to turn to coal, he told the audience on June 15.

Coal use has ramifications on emissions. Natural gas can help reduce emissions, if the infrastructure to distribute it can be built, he said.

“They take us for granted to the point where they don’t think they need us. But we provide a real solution to a global problem.”—Toby Z. Rice, president and CEO, EQT Corp.

The reality the world is dealing with is that coal emissions have increased by 50%, Rice said.

The elephant in the room, he added, is that in the amount of time it took the United States to drop emissions by 1 billion metric tons, the world added 4.4 billion metric tons of emissions.

“Nearly half of emissions come from foreign coal,” Rice said.

The U.S. can lead the charge in replacing coal use with natural gas to meet the world’s energy needs, he said. But to do so, it must sort out a couple of issues.

The key challenge of using natural gas to help meet climate goals is building pipelines and LNG facilities “faster than we’ve ever done it before,” he said.

Rice cited instances of proposed pipelines in the Northeast being blocked.

“They blocked it for concerns about the climate. They are scared about the climate,” he said.

He suggested reframing the discussion to focus on what the industry can do “to help solve this issue with climate and get back to producing cheap, clean energy and bringing progress to the world.”

Environmentalists blocking pipelines have “good intentions and want to make an impact,” he said, but they are misguided in their thinking that blocking a pipeline is going to reduce emissions.

What they are actually doing, he said, is “blocking a green initiative.”

And that green initiative can be a major jobs creator for the country and bring “unprecedented energy security to the world,” he added.

“Natural gas is the biggest green initiative on the planet,” Rice said. “This is going to bring peace to the world.”

Read more about EQT CEO Toby Rice and climate change in the June 2022 issue of Oil and Gas Investor.

And while the industry builds infrastructure to bring more natural gas to the world, it should do so while thinking about the needs of the future.

“Let’s build it with hydrogen in mind,” he said, adding the world will still need natural gas. “It may become feedstock, but we’ll still need it.”

Natural gas can be transferred into a zero-carbon product like hydrogen, he said, but the question is how that can be done cost-effectively. That cost, he added, is less in the making of hydrogen and more in transporting it where it needs to go.

“This is an opportunity for us to rebuild,” he said.

At the same time, he said, the industry needs to remind the world just how well the industry has done the job of meeting energy demands.

“We’ve done a great job,” he said. Yet most of energy production is “out of sight, out of mind. We may have done too good of a job.”

The result being that people don’t really think about how much they rely on energy for their daily lives.

“They take us for granted to the point where they don’t think they need us,” he said. “But we provide a real solution to a global problem.”