Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Salagossa. Coming up, natural gas, the world's energy giants say it's part of any long-term solution to climate change. But is that just, well, a lot of hot air?

One of the first things is to get new houses, for example, off the gas grid. It's not hanging on to gas. It's making sure we

have to minimize the amount, certainly of carbon-based energy, that we use at all. So what does the

future of energy look like? We will have a lot of wind farms in the North Sea and we will have

a lot of solar panels in the Saharan Desert. And these solar panels and these wind farms will generate a lot of

hydrogen that will be transported into Europe. And that's coming from someone in the fossil fuel industry.

The details all coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC.

Natural gas is the cleanest of all fossil fuels. It's invisible, it's odorless, it's great to cook with, heat your home with. And the big oil and gas companies say natural gas should be part of any green future.

Natural gas can provide positive environmental and health benefits to our cities and towns.

Natural gas can keep our lives powered reliably and sustain.

That was an infomercial from Shell, and there are lots of them online.

Like the other fossil fuel giants, Shell is touting natural gas as an essential so-called bridge fuel. In other words,

a fuel we need as we transition to cleaner renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.

In a moment, we speak to those who say that claim is all hot air. But first, let's hear from the industry.

Over to Marco Alvera. He's the chief executive of Znam, one of Europe's biggest

gas pipeline operators. If we look at the global picture, natural gas is by far the fastest

growing fuel because it's greener and it has a lot less CO2 than coal and oil. So if we take a very

long-term view, like looking at 2040, the world will be

running 20% on a natural gas, 20% on oil, 20% on coal, and the rest will be a combination of

old renewables, hydro, nuclear and newer renewables. So you see a role for gas?

Definitely every percentage point of coal that can be switched to gas will reduce CO2 a lot.

And so from a global climate perspective, the issue and the effort should be to get rid of coal as fast as we can in places like China and India that are actually continuing

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