There are many benefits of using natural gas over other fossil fuels. When burnt, it produces half of the carbon dioxide and just a tenth of the air pollutants produced by coal, and as such it has long been considered the ‘clean’ fossil fuel.

There are also economic benefits to the usage of natural gas, in particular when looking at the US. The rise in fracking, unlocking vast stores of natural gas caused prices to drop continuously in the US from 2005 for a decade. This also enabled export growth within the sector and is a model many countries have been keen to follow.

Gas-fired plants have generally been cheaper than their coal equivalents, for example, in March 2016 in the US, power from a natural gas plant averaged out at $16/MWh, whereas coal plants cost an average of $21/MWh and $23/MWh between 2014 and 2016. Whilst prices are subject to market trends, the combination of lower emissions and an average lower price makes natural gas attractive.

However, whilst it is cleaner than other fossil fuels its production and usage still emits carbon. It has been suggested that carbon capture and storage (CCS) could greatly alleviate this, but it is yet to take off.

“The problem with CCS and the reason it hasn't progressed far more quickly and commercially is the absence of a strong commercial driver to do so, either in the form of a powerful carbon price which makes it economically sensible to do, or for that matter substantial government support in many countries,” says Nick Turton external affairs director at EI.

“Some countries have been putting money into demonstration and R&D, but the scale of what you might hope to see in the future hasn't yet materialised and I think it's to do with that absence of a real powerful economic driver for it.”

Within EI’s research, however, there seems to be a great deal of optimism about the use of CCS. Of those asked, 56% said they expected decarbonised natural gas to play a significant role in the long term. This relies on developments in the technology and the incentives, currently there are just 21 projects researching the use of CCS for oil and gas globally, the most advanced of which focus on oil.

Carbon is not the only major emission to worry about within the gas industry, and the IE’s report highlighted an important but often overlooked problem: fugitive methane leaks which are extremely common in gas production and processing and remain very damaging greenhouse gas.

“It feels like when you look at the debate not just in the industry but more broadly that methane is sort of the poor cousin of carbon,” says Turton. “When people talk about tackling climate change we always talk about decarbonising don't we. That's really, really important, but when we think about whether fossil fuels have a continuing role to play you've got to look at the methane and fugitive methane emissions that are produced during production. Primarily because the release of methane is a lot more potent in fact than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.”

Methane warms the planet much faster than carbon dioxide, although unlike carbon which stays in the atmosphere for millennia, it deteriorates after a few decades and becomes carbon dioxide. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, methane warms the world as much as 86 times more than carbon dioxide.

Despite the clear damage leaked methane can cause, a large percentage of the industry remains unaware of the possibility to capture and commercialise methane emissions. Of those asked by EI, 66% responded “I was aware of some possibilities, but I’m surprised about the scale”, and 16% answered “I was not aware of the technical possibilities to avoid methane emissions.”

This lack of awareness is something that the IEA also have begun to emphasise. Their World Energy Outlook 2017 stated that “Stepping up action to tackle methane leaks along the oil and gas value chain is essential to bolster the environmental case for gas: these emissions are not the only anthropogenic emissions of methane, but they are likely to be among the cheapest to abate.

"We present the first global analysis of the costs of abating the estimated 76 million tonnes of methane emitted worldwide each year in oil and gas operations, which suggest that 40%-50% of these emissions can be mitigated at no net cost, because the value of the captured methane could cover the abatement measures.”

Whether the predicted golden age of gas ever truly happens is yet to be seen, but with its environmental benefits so fundamental to its success it is essential that emissions are managed.

“I don't know if this is a cliché, but it’s about its licence to operate,” says Turton. “We live in a world where the general public is more and more aware, and more and more engaged in environmental issues, there's far more scrutiny from the media, be it conventional or social media, of company operations and strategies.

“Coal sort of became the bogey man of the environmental NGOs and in some senses it’s understandable because coal is high carbon emitting. I think the only way gas can avoid following coal down that line is to act on these two particular problems, i.e. methane and carbon, and demonstrate that it's got a legitimate place in the longer term within a low-carbon mix, obviously alongside renewables and in some countries alongside nuclear and so forth.

“That's the only way that I think it can do that, otherwise the questions will get stronger and stronger.”