Anatomy of a State Blunder: Quebec’s “Green” Gas Fiasco

First published in French on Association des climato-réalistes site. Translated by Google Gemini.

By Robert Girouard

Because it promised to fight climate change while preserving the existing gas network, renewable natural gas (RNG)—strategically rebranded as “green gas” by communications professionals—was touted as the ultimate miracle for Quebec’s energy transition.

Conceived under the Coalition Avenir Québec government and enshrined in regulation in 2019, the strategy appeared crystal clear on the surface. It aimed to force gas distributors, primarily Énergir, to inject an increasing proportion of RNG derived from the decomposition of organic waste—whether manure, compost bin contents, or sewage sludge—into their distribution networks. The stated targets were intended to be progressive yet ambitious: 1% integration in 2020, 5% by 2025, and 10% by 2030.

This policy was adopted under constant pressure from environmental groups and, later, structured coalitions such as Sortons le gaz! (bringing together Équiterre, the David Suzuki Foundation, Nature Québec, and other key players). By demanding an urgent exit from fossil fuels and setting utopian decarbonization targets, these organizations contributed to imposing a demand for immediate results, effectively bypassing a rational cost-benefit debate on the policy.

A few years later, the verdict is unequivocal. Production from Quebec’s biomethanation plants remains capped at a marginal level, production costs have proven astronomical, and the government has been forced to backpedal by officially postponing its own regulatory deadlines. Beyond a simple supply chain failure, this file offers a textbook case of institutional blunder, where ideological blindness, activism, corporatism, and technocracy combined to suspend the laws of arithmetic and physics—at the expense of taxpayers and businesses.

Denying Basic Physics and Economics

A policy becomes foolish when it results in a net destruction of value for the community without delivering any real benefit, and when it relies on premises disconnected from reality. That is precisely the case here.

The first flawed premise concerns the thermodynamic absurdity of the model. To heat residential or commercial buildings, Quebec already possesses an electricity grid that is almost entirely decarbonized. A modern heat pump boasts exceptional efficiency, capable of converting one kilowatt-hour of electricity into three or four kilowatt-hours of heat. Conversely, producing biomethane requires collecting biomass from all four corners of the province, building complex and expensive processing plants, and then piping the gas underground to burn it in boilers with considerable heat loss. Using a scarce organic resource for an application that electricity accomplishes at a fraction of the energy cost is complete nonsense.

The second premise relates to the illusion of supply. Decreeing by regulation that green gas would make up 10% of the network by 2030 assumed the almost magical emergence of dozens of processing facilities. However, Quebec’s organic waste supply is physically limited and logistically complex to mobilize. Lacking sufficient volumes within the province, the distributor was forced to import RNG from the United States or other Canadian provinces in an attempt to meet its quotas.

Narrative over Reality

According to several reports, the government acted against the advice of numerous experts, independent energy researchers, and carbon market economists. Their analyses demonstrated that Quebec’s biomass was physically too scarce and that the cost per ton of avoided CO2 exceeded all reason.

Instead, leadership chose to buy into the circular economy fairytale pitched by consulting firms and promoted by public relations agencies tasked with selling “grassroots biomethanation” to the public. The government allowed itself to be seduced by an alluring, politically expedient, yet utterly unrealistic promise.

A Financial Disaster 

For citizens and the local economy, the bill for this green complacency is exceptionally steep, as the cost of the fiasco is extracted both from their taxes and their energy bills.

As taxpayers, Quebecers watched hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds injected through the Plan for a Green Economy to finance the construction of municipal biomethanation plants. Many of these public infrastructure projects accumulated major delays, cost overruns, and technical breakdowns before ever producing their first cubic meter of gas.

As consumers, these same citizens absorb the surcharge for RNG on their monthly gas bills. Because the Régie de l’énergie authorized the integration of transition costs into general rates through a “cost socialization” mechanism, bills automatically rise for all users, even though renewable natural gas costs three to five times more than conventional fossil gas.

Industrial users find themselves trapped in an economic vise. Forced to absorb overpriced energy or pay compensation fees, they face a direct loss of competitiveness against rivals in Ontario or the United States who maintain direct access to cheap conventional gas. Furthermore, when these plants wish to exit the gas grid and switch to electricity, they frequently run into connection delays and a shortage of available power blocks from Hydro-Québec.

In the fight against climate change, the only rigorous metric remains the cost per ton of avoided carbon dioxide. Where direct energy efficiency—such as building insulation or conversion to electricity—eliminates a ton of carbon for $50 to $100, replacing fossil gas with green gas in the general grid regularly costs between $200 and $400. It is one of the most inefficient uses of public funds imaginable.

The Functional Stupidity of Institutions

How could an idea so economically flawed take hold without encountering major institutional resistance? Organizational sociology explains this phenomenon through the concept of functional stupidity—the capacity of a system to paralyze the critical thinking of its own actors in order to preserve a dogma or a facade of consensus.

In the case of green gas, a tacit alliance of interests formed among various organizations. For the gas monopoly, the concept of green gas offered an ideal ecological justification to preserve the value of its underground pipeline network and postpone the deadline for a definitive gas phase-out. For political and municipal leaders, satisfying the demands of environmental groups while telling voters that their food scraps would heat neighborhood homes provided a gratifying techno-ecological narrative with no apparent drawbacks. Finally, for the technocratic apparatus, setting numerical targets allowed for a show of political resolve on the international stage.

For years, anyone pointing out the model’s inconsistency was sidelined in the name of climate consensus. The word “green” acted as an intellectual anesthetic, completely obscuring the principle of optimal resource allocation. Once again, the imperative to “save the planet” trumped rational policy.

A Lesson for the Future?

The Quebec government’s retreat (hopefully) marks the end of a technocratic illusion. The greening of the gas network will not happen. RNG is not, and will never be, a mass energy source for heating homes or retail businesses.

Beyond the energy and accounting failure, the true lesson of this fiasco is political and democratic. It underscores the urgent need to break the lock on public debate. When a society converts environmental objectives into unassailable articles of faith, it deprives itself of rational debate, cost-benefit analysis, and responsiveness to warning signs.

This error has cost taxpayers and businesses dearly: ignoring the constraints of economic and physical reality to protect an ideological narrative always ends badly. To avoid repeating such mistakes, Quebec must learn to debate calmly once again: prioritizing facts over symbols, accepting scientific debate, and reintegrating fiscal discipline into the heart of its collective choices. Unfortunately, this requires a shift in mindset that is unlikely to materialize in the short or medium term. Ideology dies hard.