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Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

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Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#221

Post by kjkjadksj »

paulmd wrote: post #100
kjkjadksj wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people don’t get about places like Florida. The people in Florida are in fact aware that it storms and floods, thats why the house is built on stilts with metal storm shutters.

Sure, but it’s expensive and it’s still devastated by storms etc. Like these building techniques works so well that insurers have left the Florida market because it’s unprofitable to rebuild everyone every couple years, so the state outlawed charging rates that account for the actual expense of it, and now people can’t get home insurance policies anymore. Like literally it’s already too expensive to keep doing it wit…

Insurers have not left the florida market. The number of uninsured homes is estimated to be like 10-20%, probably what you'd expect given a certain percentage of holdout low income homeowning areas from before florida saw so much inflow in certain real estate markets. The national rate is a little under 10% for reference. Sometimes when headlines and assumptions seem absurd, like no insurance in florida, its worth looking into it a little bit.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#223

Post by idiotsecant »

closewith wrote: post #204
idiotsecant wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When accurate metering is called for we have the tech to do it just fine to far less than <1% error. This is a classic case where regulation is required. Rational capitalist enterprise is not going to fix this on their own. They don't currently have the right incentives.

To 1% volume, like rotary meters, but not 1% mass. At least not at reasonable cost. But you are right that regulation is the answer, although personally I think direct leak detection is more realistic than measuring gas flows accurately in a system that's already built around low accuracy metering.

Coriolis flow meters in natural gas have been accurate and pretty inexpensive since the 1990s with accuracies better than 99% on the extreme low end and 99.5% on the high end.

Its easy to say that anything is 'too expensive' when the regulatory bar is set so low that it doesn't exist.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#224

Post by paulmd »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #221
paulmd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it’s expensive and it’s still devastated by storms etc. Like these building techniques works so well that insurers have left the Florida market because it’s unprofitable to rebuild everyone every couple years, so the state outlawed charging rates that account for the actual expense of it, and now people can’t get home insurance policies anymore. Like literally it’s already too expensive to keep doing it wit…

Insurers have not left the florida market. The number of uninsured homes is estimated to be like 10-20%, probably what you'd expect given a certain percentage of holdout low income homeowning areas from before florida saw so much inflow in certain real estate markets. The national rate is a little under 10% for reference. Sometimes when headlines and assumptions seem absurd, like no insurance in florida, its worth lo…

https://www.newsweek.com/florida-insurance-crisis-explained-...

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#225

Post by h0l0cube »

throwaway290 wrote: post #187
h0l0cube wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> False. As I've explained in another comment, adding power stations and capacity doesn't mean running 100% all year. China is using coal as peakers much like other countries use gas for this purpose. Given that China is also installing the most energy storage, it's not long (at current growth, less than 10 years) before these plants are only used in emergency situations.

You explained wrong. literally no one uses coal as peaker ever, and they are building more coal plants than the rest of the world combined (the country is not even the most populous)

I can point to the data. Do you have anything to back yourself? Reputable sources? What are your convictions based on?

> literally no one uses coal as peaker ever

While these plants might be strained by having to adjust their output, they don’t need to have a long lifespan. On the current growth curve, 10 years max and batteries have taken over.

As for China building things that are redundant, look at the ghost cities. Their local governments are incentivized to hit quotas, and it ends up with useless crap being built

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#226

Post by geysersam »

glenstein wrote: post #198
geysersam wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just no. In terms of bang for buck it's easier to reduce emissions in rich countries with high emissions per capita. Unless by "buck" you mean the number of decisions that need to be made, but that's hardly the limiting factor. Country sizes are arbitrary. With your logic if China was to split into a bunch of smaller nations their emissions wouldn't matter any more? Per-capita emissions is the only reasonable way to…

If the Earth's population was 1 billion, 10 billion, or 100 billion, but the emissions were the same, in each of those cases we would be cooked to death by our own atmosphere. Even though they have wildly different per capita emissions. Or to put it a different way, if all I knew were the parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, and all you knew were per capita consumption figures, I would know when the atmosph…

What's your point? This is not about "knowing if the atmosphere is cooked or not".

High emission countries/individuals are most responsible for the environmental damage, and most capable of reducing their emissions with the least impact on their living standard.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#227

Post by knappe »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #151
knappe wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so having gone down this path I can tell you it is impossible. To reduce the output of the sun by 2% at L1 would require 20 MM tons of metal. In order to launch that much tonnage we would have needed to start launching mass 500 years ago. And that assumes no loss of material over time, which would mean even more launches. It is not feasible.

Wikipedia says: > A more recent design has been proposed by Olivia Borgue and Andreas M. Hein in 2022, proposing a distributed sunshade with a mass on the order of 100,000 tons, composed of ultra-thin polymeric films and SiO2 nanotubes.[7] The author estimated that launching such mass would require 399 yearly launches of a vehicle such as SpaceX Starship for 10 years.[7] That seems very feasible to me.

100000 tons is 907184749 kgs and the max capacity of a starliner is 150000kgs. So to launch 100000 tons it would require 6048 launches or one launch a day for 16.5 years.

That would mean we'd have all the mass launched by 2040, if we started today. Nope, not feasible.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#228

Post by FeepingCreature »

knappe wrote: post #227
FeepingCreature wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia says: > A more recent design has been proposed by Olivia Borgue and Andreas M. Hein in 2022, proposing a distributed sunshade with a mass on the order of 100,000 tons, composed of ultra-thin polymeric films and SiO2 nanotubes.[7] The author estimated that launching such mass would require 399 yearly launches of a vehicle such as SpaceX Starship for 10 years.[7] That seems very feasible to me.

100000 tons is 907184749 kgs and the max capacity of a starliner is 150000kgs. So to launch 100000 tons it would require 6048 launches or one launch a day for 16.5 years. That would mean we'd have all the mass launched by 2040, if we started today . Nope, not feasible.

That's honestly not all that unfeasible if SpaceX gets Starship reuse down. Assuming we get launch costs down to a few million, it won't even be that expensive relative to the size of the problem. And launches can be parallelized pretty well - just build more launch pads.

The cool thing about reusable rockets is that even for a project like this you're not going to be rocket construction limited. If every rocket can launch 20 times (and that's pessimistic!) you only need to build 300 of them. And say you have ten launch pads, you only need to launch once a week per, to grind through the problem in a decade.

And that's all of course assuming SpaceX don't manage to scale the platform up further, improve cargo capacity etc.

It's a civilizational project, sure, but it wouldn't even be as expensive as the Apollo program.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#229

Post by closewith »

idiotsecant wrote: post #223
closewith wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To 1% volume, like rotary meters, but not 1% mass. At least not at reasonable cost. But you are right that regulation is the answer, although personally I think direct leak detection is more realistic than measuring gas flows accurately in a system that's already built around low accuracy metering.

Coriolis flow meters in natural gas have been accurate and pretty inexpensive since the 1990s with accuracies better than 99% on the extreme low end and 99.5% on the high end. Its easy to say that anything is 'too expensive' when the regulatory bar is set so low that it doesn't exist.

Right, you could put a combustible-gas-safe mass flow sensor on every gas line, high and low pressure, at a cost of roughly 100x current rotary and aperture flow meters, but then metering would become by far the largest cost in gas production.

Re: Multisatellite data depicts a record-breaking methane leak from a well blowout

#230

Post by nine_k »

katbyte wrote: post #201
skybrian wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile in California, PG&E underfunded maintenance, perhaps because regulators squeezed too hard? Eventually we had things like the San Bruno gas explosion and wildfires so bad that PG&E went bankrupt. Finding the optimal amount of regulation seems difficult. It seems like too blunt an instrument. Incentives are no substitute for technical people who want to do what's right.

Thank you for pointing out why it should be a public utility that does the right thing rather then a private company who was willing to burn the state down for profit.

Public utilities can also face perverse incentives, and be run poorly.

Commercial enterprises at least can face some competition! But with infrastructure like last-mile gas pipelines, it's tricky, and the companies end up being local monopolies. Hence the trouble: a monopoly has very different incentives than a company actually competing on the market.

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