Natural gas is making a quiet but highly placed comeback at Climate Week. At a number of events on Tuesday, senior officials made a case for gas as essential for energy security and a buttress to renewables. Anna Bjerde, managing director of operations at the World Bank, told a small group of reporters that the lender is agnostic about which technologies it helps finance to improve access to electricity around Africa. The main focus of that work has been on solar, she said, but “gas has to be discussed and pursued” for providing baseload power. “We should be leaning in to help countries develop gas.”
That view should get a warm reception from the Trump administration, which has reportedly been pressuring the World Bank to unwind its restrictions on financing oil and gas production. And it was a view echoed in a separate briefing at the Rockefeller Foundation offices by Daniel Chapo, president of Mozambique, who said he is working to expand the country’s large hydroelectric dam while also pursuing gas production deals with Western drilling companies, and hopes to use more of that gas for domestic power plants.
In the evening, between glasses of prosecco and mini lobster rolls at a reception in a high-end Times Square hotel, Ditte Juul Jørgensen, director-general for energy at the European Commission, took the podium alongside Toby Rice, CEO of major US gas producer EQT, and lauded the security benefits of LNG. “The energy war in Ukraine has come to redefine our strategy of independence,” she said. “The energy transition will continue to be our path, but we will need gas for many years to come.”