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NASA finds super-emitters of methane

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane

#311

Post by neRok »

tremon wrote: post #305
neRok wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to confirm the numbers myself; 18,300kg methane per hour * 24 hours * 365 days = 160,308,000kg (~0.160 million metric tonnes). At 25x CO2 equivalent, that is 4,007,700,000kg (4 million metric tonnes). This link about US electricity generation: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 shows 767 "million metric tons" from coal, or 1.55 "billion metric tons" from all sources. 4 / 767 ~= 0.5%, so in the bal…

At 25x CO2 equivalent Where do you get the 25x from? Wikipedia says it's 80x-100x: > over a 20-year period, [methane] traps 84 times more heat per mass unit than carbon dioxide (CO2) and 105 times the effect when accounting for aerosol interactions (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane ) After that 20 years, methane decomposes into CO2 so its long-term contribution is 3x CO2 equivalent (due to the h…

It was just my first google result for "methane co2 equivalent", and so the number came from this link (am Australian) - https://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/NGER/About-the-Natio...

You are right that there are different valid factors to consider, as can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential

But also, 25x vs 100x is a 4x difference, which doesn't affect the comparison to coal that much (it's still single digit % "at best").

Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane

#312

Post by Tepix »

This whole topic raises a bunch of questions:

- How hard is it to stop these leaks? How expensive?

- If it's relatively cheap and easy, why hasn't it been done in the past already?

- How can we excert pressure on emitters like Turkmenistan to stop the leaks?

- How long does it take to do this?

- How much of a difference will it make for the climate (and perhaps local cancer rates)?

Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane

#313

Post by ljf »

feoren wrote: post #162
ljf wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting here but; Methane has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere. Even though CO2 has a longer-lasting effect, methane sets the pace for warming in the near term. At least 25% of today's global warming is driven by methane from human actions.

No, 80x is about right for the 20-year time horizon; Wikipedia lists it as 86. You're right that the 20-year Global Warming Potential is lower than the 100-year, but the 20-year is already what the poster you were replying to was using. The 100-year is around 25 to 31.

They edited it after my comment, as they note.

Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane

#314

Post by antris »

Tepix wrote: post #312

This whole topic raises a bunch of questions: - How hard is it to stop these leaks? How expensive? - If it's relatively cheap and easy, why hasn't it been done in the past already? - How can we excert pressure on emitters like Turkmenistan to stop the leaks? - How long does it take to do this? - How much of a difference will it make for the climate (and perhaps local cancer rates)?

Our economic system has no built in incentives to stop these leaks. Considering how massive these leaks are, the budget to plug them shouldn't be a consideration. We're ruining our planet's livability with leaks like this, but since it's not profitable for anyone to do anything about it, we won't do it until there's enough political will behind it.

Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane

#315

Post by fuzzfactor »

runnerup wrote: post #16
MichaelZuo wrote: post #2

How could a 2 mile long methane plume in New Mexico have been undetected for any significant amount of time? From what I understand basic environmental monitoring is done in 2022 around all major industrial facilities in the U.S.

Sadly, the environmental monitoring is woefully inadequate, even next to the western hemisphere's largest industrial complex (Freeport, TX ... though its a bit better of an example to use or include Deer Park / Houston Ship Channel as well because it's part of America's 3rd/4th largest city). Below the dashed line is a copy/paste of a comment I made two months ago on a post of ProPublica's dispersion model and public…

Familiar with trace quantities of Brutal Acrylate? How about 2-EH?

A number of days after the water receded from hurricane Harvey I didn't need an instrument to smell the lingering 2EH that had washed in with it. Probably from Bayport and reached as far away as at least Genoa.

Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane

#316

Post by Retric »

tkk23 wrote: post #292
Retric wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a little over 1/1,000th of human released methane, so on it’s own not that critical or that far above expectations for a country with a little over 1/2000th the global population. The issue is mostly that it’s presumably cheap to fix unlike a billion cows all farting.

>The issue is mostly that it’s presumably cheap to fix unlike a billion cows all farting. It's even cheaper to fix the farting cows: Just stop raising cows. Of course, if you want to supplement beef and dairy products, it's not that easy. But if we would believe that global warming and methane were a problem, we could make a difference within weeks.

Even just killing all a billion would be quite expensive by comparison. You can’t exactly do it for 0.01$/ cow and fixing this would likely cost significantly less than 10 million.

Re: NASA finds super-emitters of methane

#319

Post by TexanFeller »

29athrowaway wrote: post #166

YouTube is full of trash burning tutorials. Some of them are exceptionally stupid and talk about "clean burners", which is essentially a burn barrel connected to a leaf blower, such that the smoke is dispersed, creating the illusion of "clean" air. Such dumb tutorials have hundreds of hundreds of thousands of views. Each video has dumb comments on them like "Oh yeah this burner is awesome, I made the same thing at ho…

My family lived outside the city limits of a rural town and trash service wasn’t even available to us. Us and every single family in that situation used a burn barrel. There are a huge number of people in America that have never done it any other way!
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