What Are the Disadvantages of Natural Gas?

Natural gas burns more cleanly than coal or oil at the point of combustion, but that fact obscures a long list of drawbacks that span the entire lifecycle of the fuel. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over shorter time horizons, and it leaks at every stage from wellhead to burner tip. Beyond climate, the extraction, transport, and indoor use of natural gas carry consequences for water supplies, wildlife habitat, seismic stability, public health, and the communities that live closest to the infrastructure.

Methane Is a Powerful Greenhouse Gas

The central climate problem with natural gas is methane itself. Over a twenty-year window, methane traps roughly 80 times more heat than an equal mass of carbon dioxide.¹ Even over a hundred-year window, methane’s warming potential is about 28 to 34 times that of CO2.² The saving grace is that methane breaks down in about a dozen years, while CO2 lingers for centuries. But that shorter lifetime cuts both ways: it means rapid reductions in methane emissions would slow warming quickly, yet it also means every ton of methane that leaks right now packs a heavy punch during the decades when climate tipping points are most at risk.

Leaks happen everywhere along the supply chain. Wells, gathering lines, compressor stations, processing plants, and distribution pipes all lose methane to the atmosphere. These “fugitive emissions” were once treated as a normal part of operations, but they have come under intense scrutiny as satellite and ground-based monitoring have revealed their true scale.² When enough methane escapes unburned, the climate advantage natural gas holds over coal at the smokestack starts to shrink or even vanish.

The Extra Climate Cost of Liquefied Natural Gas

When natural gas is cooled to about −160 °C for export by tanker, the energy needed for that liquefaction process adds a substantial layer of greenhouse gas emissions on top of what domestic pipeline gas produces. Liquefaction alone accounts for roughly 9 percent of the total greenhouse gas footprint of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) when measured on a twenty-year global warming potential basis, and tanker transport adds another 5 to 6 percent.³ Combine those with the upstream emissions from shale gas production and the downstream emissions from regasification and burning, and the total climate impact of LNG is considerably larger than the headline figure for “natural gas” that most people picture.

This matters because LNG exports from the United States have surged in recent years, and more terminals are under construction or proposed. Analysis published in Cell Reports Sustainability argues that expanding LNG capacity is unnecessary for energy security and creates stranded-asset risks as renewable alternatives scale up, effectively locking in fossil-fuel infrastructure that may become economically obsolete before the end of its design life.⁴

Indoor Air Quality and Respiratory Health

Burning natural gas in your kitchen releases nitrogen dioxide (NO2), carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, and fine particulate matter directly into indoor air. For a fuel often marketed as “clean,” that indoor pollution profile is striking. A large meta-analysis pooling 41 studies found that children living in homes with gas stoves had about a third higher odds of developing asthma compared with children in homes without gas cooking.⁵ The association was strongest for gas cooking exposure itself, though the researchers also examined NO2 levels independently.

This finding has practical implications. Ventilation helps: a range hood that vents outdoors pulls much of the combustion pollution out of the living space. But many kitchens either lack a vented hood or have a recirculating model that does not actually remove NO2. In older or smaller homes with poor airflow, indoor NO2 concentrations from a gas burner can exceed outdoor air-quality standards within minutes. The growing body of evidence on gas stoves and childhood asthma is one reason that some jurisdictions have begun requiring or incentivizing electric cooking in new construction.

Water Contamination from Drilling

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves injecting large volumes of water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground to crack open rock and release trapped gas. The process can contaminate drinking water through several pathways: wellbore integrity failures, surface spills of chemicals or wastewater, and migration of methane or other substances through fractures into aquifers. A study linking health outcomes and drinking water quality to shale gas development found consistent evidence that drilling negatively affects both water quality and infant health in nearby communities.⁶

The contamination risk does not vanish when the well stops producing. Over time, the steel casings and cement plugs that seal a wellbore degrade. In the United States, 160 years of oil and gas drilling have left behind a vast number of unplugged orphaned and abandoned wells, some of which continue to leak methane and other hazardous chemicals into soil and water.⁷ Unlike active wells that are subject to monitoring requirements, abandoned wells often lack effective oversight, and their emissions can persist for decades or even centuries.⁸

Water Scarcity and Competition

Beyond contamination, fracking demands enormous volumes of water. In parts of the western and central United States, this consumption creates real competition with agriculture, municipal supply, and ecosystems. Research on the water footprint of hydraulic fracturing across different climate conditions found that about half of all water consumed by fracking occurred during abnormally dry or drought periods, with 9 percent of total water use happening under extreme or exceptional drought conditions.⁹ In some counties, fracking water use was equivalent to more than 10 percent of annual irrigation-sector consumption, and in others it rivaled half of domestic water use.

Water supply concerns are especially acute in drought-prone regions of Texas, California, and New Mexico, where freshwater is already stretched thin. Extracting large volumes from a single surface-water source during a low-flow season can alter river and stream flow enough to damage habitat for fish and other aquatic species.¹⁰ Some operators have shifted toward brackish or saline water to relieve pressure on freshwater supplies, but the practice is far from universal.

Induced Earthquakes

One of the more unexpected consequences of natural gas production is seismicity. The fracking process itself can trigger small tremors, but the bigger issue is the disposal of wastewater. After gas is extracted, millions of gallons of produced water and flowback fluid must go somewhere. The standard method in much of the United States is to inject that wastewater deep underground into disposal wells. In central Oklahoma, this practice caused a dramatic surge in earthquake activity that turned a historically quiet seismic zone into one of the most active in the country. A statistical analysis found that 76 percent of seismically active blocks in Oklahoma could be linked to wastewater disposal at a 95 percent confidence level.¹¹

Several of these induced earthquakes were large enough to damage buildings and be felt across state lines. Oklahoma eventually imposed restrictions on injection volumes, and seismicity rates declined, which itself serves as evidence of the causal link. But the precedent is clear: wherever wastewater injection from oil and gas activity ramps up, earthquake risk can follow.

Habitat Loss and Wildlife Disturbance

Natural gas infrastructure fragments landscapes in ways that extend well beyond the well pad itself. Roads, pipelines, compressor stations, and staging areas carve corridors through forests and grasslands that many species depend on. In the Fayetteville Shale region of Arkansas, researchers found that gas development fully converted about 2 percent of natural habitat in the gas field and increased edge habitat by over a thousand linear kilometers. Each individual well pad cleared roughly 2.5 hectares of land and modified an additional half-hectare of surrounding forest.¹² Without the gas activity, the researchers estimated, forest cover in the area would have slightly increased, consistent with broader reforestation trends in the southeastern United States.

The effects on wildlife are not limited to habitat removal. Some species avoid gas infrastructure even when technically suitable habitat remains nearby. Greater sage-grouse in southwestern Wyoming, a species already in long-term decline, avoided wintering habitat in areas with high well pad densities regardless of how active those pads were at the time.¹³ The mere physical presence of infrastructure was enough to push the birds out, which suggests that seasonal shutdowns or reduced activity do not fully mitigate the disturbance. Multiply these effects across the thousands of wells drilled each year in the U.S. alone, and the cumulative pressure on forested and sagebrush ecosystems is substantial.

Environmental Justice

The burdens of natural gas production and processing are not distributed evenly. In the United States, fossil fuel infrastructure concentrates disproportionately near low-income communities and communities of color. In California, people living close to oil and gas wells are disproportionately from low-income, non-white, and Latinx households. Petroleum refineries and petrochemical manufacturing, much of which is fed by natural gas liquids, impose some of the most lopsided toxic burdens on Black, Indigenous, and economically disadvantaged communities.¹⁴

This pattern holds across the supply chain. Compressor stations, processing facilities, and pipeline corridors tend to follow paths of least political resistance, which often means they run through communities with fewer resources to oppose them. The health consequences of living near these facilities, including elevated rates of respiratory illness, headaches, and stress from noise and light pollution, fall on people who derive little direct economic benefit from the gas being produced.

Pipeline Safety and Explosion Risk

Natural gas is flammable and delivered under pressure through hundreds of thousands of miles of pipeline, much of it aging. Leaks from distribution mains, service lines, and meter connections are routine in older urban systems, and when gas accumulates in enclosed spaces the explosion risk is real. One risk assessment of underground spaces adjacent to gas pipelines in a Chinese city identified nearly 25,000 high-explosion-risk locations out of roughly half a million surveyed underground spaces, and documented more than 200 dangerous cases of gas leaks and accumulations over three years.¹⁵

High-profile gas explosions in residential areas have periodically made international headlines, but the less dramatic chronic leaks are arguably the bigger issue. They waste fuel, contribute to local air pollution, and represent a persistent safety hazard that grows as pipeline systems age beyond their intended service lives. Replacing corroded cast-iron and bare-steel mains is enormously expensive, and utilities in many cities are still decades away from completing the work.

Fueling the Plastics Problem

A disadvantage that rarely makes the list is natural gas’s role in accelerating global plastics production. Ethane, a hydrocarbon extracted alongside methane during natural gas processing, has become the preferred feedstock for making ethylene, the building block of polyethylene and many other common plastics. Cheap ethane from the U.S. shale gas boom has made plastics manufacturing significantly more profitable, stimulating a wave of new petrochemical cracker plants and driving increases in world plastics production.¹⁶

This connection matters because plastics pollution is now a planetary-scale environmental crisis in its own right, contaminating oceans, freshwater, soil, and even human bloodstreams. The flood of inexpensive ethane has made it cheaper to produce virgin plastic than to recycle existing material, undermining the economics of waste reduction. When people debate whether natural gas is a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future, its role in turbocharging plastics production is usually left out of the conversation.

The Abandoned-Well Problem

Every gas well eventually stops producing, but its environmental legacy does not end there. Across the United States alone, millions of wells have been drilled over more than a century and a half, and a large share were abandoned without being properly plugged.⁷ Wellbore integrity degrades over time as cement cracks and steel corrodes, enabling methane to seep to the surface and contaminants to migrate into groundwater.¹⁷

These wells are difficult and expensive to locate, monitor, and remediate. Many were drilled before modern record-keeping, so their exact locations are unknown. Unlike active wells that fall under regulatory oversight, orphaned and abandoned wells often sit in a jurisdictional gray zone, leaking quietly for years before anyone notices. Current satellite detection technologies struggle to identify individual abandoned wells because their emissions, while persistent, tend to be smaller per-source than those of active production sites.⁸ The federal government has begun funding plugging programs, but the backlog is enormous and the pace of remediation is slow relative to the scale of the problem. Each abandoned well is a small, ongoing environmental liability, and collectively they represent one of the least visible but most persistent costs of the natural gas era.

1
Environmental Science & Policy. Beyond CO2 equivalence: The impacts of methane on climate, ecosystems, and health
2
Society of Petroleum Engineers. Strategies for Reducing & Monetizing Fugitive Methane Emissions from Natural Gas Infrastructure
3
Energy Science & Engineering. The greenhouse gas footprint of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exported from the United States
4
Cell Reports Sustainability. Locked in a fossil-centric system paradigm: LNG expansion impedes socio-ecological transition toward a just and renewable energy future
5
PubMed. Meta-analysis of the effects of indoor nitrogen dioxide and gas cooking on asthma and wheeze in children
6
PubMed Central. Drinking water, fracking, and infant health
7
PubMed. Geologic sources and well integrity impact methane emissions from orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells
8
National Science Review. A global inventory of methane emissions from abandoned oil and gas wells and possible mitigation pathways
9
PubMed. The water footprint of hydraulic fracturing under different hydroclimate conditions in the Central and Western United States
10
PubMed Central. Hydraulic fracturing water use variability in the United States and potential environmental implications
11
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. Earthquakes Induced by Wastewater Injection, Part II: Statistical Evaluation of Causal Factors and Seismicity Rate Forecasting
12
PubMed. Habitat loss and modification due to gas development in the Fayetteville shale
13
The Journal of Wildlife Management. Winter habitat use of greater sage‐grouse relative to activity levels at natural gas well pads
14
Energy Research & Social Science. Fossil fuel racism in the United States: How phasing out coal, oil, and gas can protect communities
15
Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology. Assessment of gas explosion risk in underground spaces adjacent to a gas pipeline
16
Energy Research & Social Science. From cheap ethane to a plastic planet: Regulating an industrial global production network
17
International Journal of Science and Research Archive. Environmental risk assessment of abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells as long term sources of methane and groundwater contamination