Emissions monitoring is a really interesting technology challenge. So much of it is self-reported, which means a crapshoot. Remote monitoring seems more reliable but less accurate perhaps. The highest resolution monitoring tech I know of is NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory2.
Has anyone here studied the Orbiting Carbon Observatory? I'm curious for more details and how it might help here.
I have hope that the thermopile array tech we've been seeing lately might make gas monitoring more readily available. It likely will still require cryo-cooling though.
Really interesting idea! I'm not very knowledgeable around greenhouse gases, and even less around the various industrial processes that release them. Would cameras like this be able to give us the amount of CO2 released in say, metric tons? Or would it be too hard to actually get precise measurements and this is better for comparing orders of magnitude?
"Ingraffea’s own research has found that a small percentage of wells are responsible for the bulk of methane emissions either through leaks or deliberate venting."
Sounds like something that can be solved quickly, and without even bothering to debate fracking - hardly anyone could oppose regulating the wells involved.
It's not "The US government". It's not the scientists in the regulatory agencies. It's the Trump Administration. It's right there in the URL, the title, and the article body.
Shifting the blame - even unintentionally - from the politicians to the regulatory agencies helps further the narrative that government doesn't work, and (the ultimate, freely-acknowledged goal) that it should therefore be made small enough that it can be choked in the bathtub.
"hardly anyone could oppose regulating the wells involved."
This issue has been going on for a long time, even without fracking.
The issue always is access to natural gas pipelines. The natural gas comes up with oil production no matter what. Absent access to a pipeline, the well is "flared" and the natural gas is burned off.
This has been happening in Nigeria and other countries internationally for decades to due to gas rights disputes.
The question people should ask themselves is why oil & gas companies would voluntarily leave money on the table, and the answer is "they wouldn't." However, if you look at New York right now, and natural gas policy over the last 10 years, it has been actively hostile to building the pipelines that would prevent this resource from being wasted. The reality is the people "opposed" to fixing this problem are the people who force the oil production to happen without allowing the resource to be consumed.
people are incentivized to do the most profitable thing they could that pushes up to the legal edge.
Pipelines running across the mountains forests might look unsightly, but if they help utilize existing resources more efficiently, they should be allowed. Otherwise, wastage is even worse than the pipeline's costs.
The option where the oil remains unextracted in the ground won't/can't exist, no matter how much these people who refuse pipelines want.
You are effectively saying oil drilling should be banned in America.
Gas is a natural byproduct of drilling, and currently it is the U.S. government preventing this byproduct from being used and exported due to pipeline bans. Gazprom--the Russian gas giant--has no such desire to set perfectly good resources on fire (literally), and has captured the European market because of it.
Edit: for those who have not quite made this connection yet, the "natural" in "natural gas" is because there's nothing you can actually do to prevent the gaseous mixture from escaping from the ground (due to depressurization) with liquefied oil drilling. It is just "naturally" there. If it can't be contained under pressure in a pipeline, it either has to be released or set on fire.
Flaring it isn't even the main problem. If it's burned up, it's just CO2, releases of Methane are much more problematic as it's a much more potent greenhouse gas.
> Sounds like something that can be solved quickly
Then how do you think they could compensate the damage done and extract the methane back out of the air?
My definition of "solving" may be a bit different from yours. And most probably, not even your definition of a solution will be implemented. Tragedy of the commons at work.
Well, the good news is methane is fairly short lived in the atmosphere. About a decade. So it is very potent but if we stop emitting it, levels will fall on their own.
It allows extraction of natural gas, which will have to be part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future. Natural gas plants not only emit less CO2 than the coal plants they replace, but can serve as peaker plants to back up renewables. We’re a long ways away from battery technology being able to serve that function. (The US is also not independent in terms of critical minerals needed for battery technology.)
Fracking also allows the US to be energy independent, and reduce its dependent on unstable middle eastern regimes. Thanks to fracking, the US has the most flexibility in its Middle East policy it has had in half a century.
>It allows extraction of natural gas, which will have to be part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future. Natural gas plants not only emit less CO2 than the coal plants they replace, but can serve as peaker plants to back up renewables.
Yes, but you kinda defeat the environmental/GHG purpose when you leak out (unburned) methane, which is an even worse GHG than CO2.
Methane isn’t good for reducing GHG emissions when the act of extracting it releases something much worse!
(Though of course an exact CBA depends on tabulating the relative amount of methane released per usable unit extracted, and its relative effectiveness as GHG ... to say nothing of the other harms of fracking.)
And? The damage from CO2 is logarithmic as well, and methane is currently at a much lower concentration and the atmosphere, meaning that any given mass is much more dangerous than CO2, even after adjusting for relative absorption.
Fracking is not the only answer. It is the cheapest answer. Traditional drilling still gets gas, but it costs more. On the flip side, fracked wells die off faster. When I worked in the natural gas industry, all the engineers told me that fracking was a great shorter-term plan, but it scared them because it would have all the younger wells drying up at about the same time as the older traditionally drilled wells, and they foresaw a bad convergence of both kinds of wells dying off at the same time coming in our future.
At the same time, it doesn't seem clear at all that methane is less harmful than CO2, so arguing that we're emitting less CO2 is only part of the story.
It may not even be the cheapest if you dig deeply (sorry) into the special concessions and other breaks that the industry gets which enable it to operate more cheaply than it should.
Take a look at some of the criminally low lease fees that have been charged to some drillers for public lands.
Is fracking sustainable? Are problems that are caused by fracking likely to get less as we get better at it, or are they likely to get worse as we try to get at riskier deposits?
Sorry, poor choice of word. I meant short term, will it even be a stable source until it is finished being tapped or will it increase in instability to communities around it.
We are talking about injecting heavy metals to aquifers and at the same time surface radon patches from deep areas. Mercury in water that somebody will drink later and Radon that kills silently people when accumulates in basements.
And is known that had caused earthquakes in dense populated areas from Mediterranean coasts (see Castor Project) or US, so is a danger for infrastructures also
All for a source of gas that could last one or two years in many cases, and then is exhausted and left contaminated. But is heavily subsidised by taxes in many cases
Fracking is greedy monkey stuff. Is a nonsense from any human point of view in any historical period (past or future) to pay for deliberately allowing a few people poison your own drink water.
Excellent response, thank you for all that information. I wanted to try and see a positive side to it as energy independence is a good thing for a nation. But it doesn't look like it's worth it. Hopefully renewables make it unprofitable sooner rather than later.
> which will have to be part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future
That is only true as long it is cheaper than nuclear. The usage of natural gas is a mix of economic and political choices, and depending on the country you can get a very different choices.
Modern nuclear plants can do this with control rods, but the fixed and sunk costs makes it prohibiting expensive. It is simply more economically to keep them running, even when wind/solar is producing. Changes in fuel costs could incentivize a more economical use, through that would only work if nuclear were made economical competitive compared to natural gas in the first place.
If we look at a map like https://www.electricitymap.org and imagine the carbon intensity to be a real economical costs then it would be a relative simple matter to determine how high those costs would need to be to make nuclear competitive against burning fossil fuels.
If one were to introduce a layered approach (eg adding in a battery storage layer), I wonder if this argument is reduced?
EG: When times of peak consumption out-paces the plant, it draws from battery system. When consumption is less than production, the batteries are recharged.
Pumped hydro, pumped heat, flywheels, batteries are all working solutions. Batteries are still expensive and need to be replaced every 10-15y. In order to use more nuclear and renewables in the mix, storage becomes a necessity.
It can suppelement gas or whatever in the power mix. Just keep'em running and adjust the output in the designed operating range, pump water uphill or spin up flywheels otherwise.
I live in the front range of Colorado. There is a fracking epidemic out here in the areas outside of the metro area.
Ignoring the "it creates jobs and grows the economy" argument, the oil and gas companies basically bribe communities to allow it. The town of Erie has a gorgeous new high school and rec center, and it is almost entirely paid for by fracking revenues. One of their summer festivals is heavily subsidized by the same industry.
Given that most people think of only themselves, I am not remotely surprised that fracking bans or setbacks fail at a state level here.
As someone who has lived in Colorado for his entire life and is closely involved in local politics:
If your idea of "being socially responsible and improving lives of people around" is giving kickbacks to the local school to the tune of 0.0001% of your profit... I don't want to be part of your society. These businesses are absolutely anything but socially responsible.
Because people want to drive cars, fly on airplanes, make use of advanced materials, and have goods shipped across the world to their doorstep in a week among other things.
The oil industry exists because people want the quality of life the use of oil enables them to have. Until we have just as cost effective alternatives to all the things the use of oil lets us have it will continue to exist.
Another poster uses Erie, CO as an example how the oil industry are bad actors. The poster fails to mention Erie is a bedroom community full of people living in big new suburban houses and driving their vehicle (very likely an SUV) into Denver for work everyday
The number of earthquakes is less significant than the direct impact. Mine blasts cause it regularly technically so just going by earthquake count is sensationalist.
It would be like counting the number of explosions in a city including car engines and every bullet fired, firecrackers, car bombs, artillery shells, and every airdropped bomb or warhead equally.
The groundwater contamination and greenhouse gas releases are more significant reason why to disallow it.
- Natural Gas from fracking produces less CO2 and other pollutants than oil or coal alternatives
- It's produced domestically, so you don't fund Wahhabism or other oppressive regimes by buying it
- It's produced domestically, so you don't have to burn filthy bunker oil on oil tankers just to transport it to the US
- Fracking happens primarily on rural land, and pays royalties to individual landholders. Oil drilling in Saudi Arabia pays out only to the megacorp doing the drilling.
Almost like there are tradeoffs and costs to complicated decisions like energy policy. Obviously we'd all love to be in a post-carbon future with Nuclear / Wind / Solar grids, but in the short-term, I'd much rather have a LNG-based energy economy than a coal-based one, fracking and all.
There is no more time left for the fracking/gas transition argument. While the argument is true in the abstract, and was true in a logistical sense 10 - 20 years ago, to continue to advance the argument after that report was published (which to be fair was only a year ago this week) is to be misinformed and spread misinformation.
We should have used nuclear and domestic gas to power the 00's and 201X's. We didn't. Its too late now. The remaining available carbon budget does not afford for a two-step transition. All investment in carbon emission producing generation needs to be replaced with investment in non-carbon-emitting generation, starting "in 2020" but honestly that's just politician talk. The real deadline is "fucking yesterday".
> We should have used nuclear and domestic gas to power the 00's and 201X's. We didn't. Its too late now.
Should have. But we didn't. So we can either throw our hands up and give up, or continue and try to mitigate some of the damage.
Now GP has an important point here, forgetting which does a huge disservice to the climate problem mitigation efforts. Namely: our economy is dependent on fossil fuels right now, and until we transition to 100% renewables, it will be. You cannot just cut out fossil fuels, because that would collapse the economy, kill off most of the population, and forever stop any and all efforts at fixing the damage already done. And since our economy is growing, this means new fossil projects.
We absolutely still need to transition off the fossil fuels ASAP. But it's like with operating on a patient with very severe injuries: maintaining life support is more important than fixing the damage. Yes, you want to eventually get the patient off life support, but if you shut it down too early, you'll be trying to stitch up a cadaver.
No one's accusing of you anything... take a deep breath. Being angry on HN isn't going to solve anything.
Our economy is ~really~ dependent on fossil fuels. Eneregy is only part of the problem, there's also transportation. We live in a global economy predicated on cheap, oil-based shipping, and electric alternatives are very far off.
It would be, but it isn't right now. Getting from here to there takes time, and as you replace fossil fuel capacity with renewables, you have to still keep the not yet replaced capacity running. Non-renewable capacity consists of deposits that get exhausted and have to be continuously replaced with new ones. So until we can replace fossil fuels faster than existing sources get depleted, new extraction sites will have to be built.
It keeps taking longer because we keep enabling the highly profitable fossil fuel extraction instead of making the singeing energy cuts and investments in other sources (renewables and nuclear) that we should have made decades ago.
Abrupt and large scale transitions will be an economic shock, bt will not 'crash the economy and kill off most of the population' as you aver. The climatological models are far, far more robust than the economic models we use, and suggesting that an abrupt transition away from fossil fuels is going to kill off most of the population is simple scaremongering. If you actually believe this, then I would like to gently suggest that You've Been Had.
> Abrupt and large scale transitions will be an economic shock, bt will not 'crash the economy
Abrupt enough will, and my point is that we can only go as abrupt as possible without crashing the economy, because crashing the economy is immediate game over (climate change is only a pressing problem because it might eventually break our economy through war and resource pressure).
> suggesting that an abrupt transition away from fossil fuels is going to kill off most of the population is simple scaremongering
Well, I'm looking at how the world works today - how we've concentrated most people in dense cities, and how those people (meaning, us) can be fed only through a highly mechanized and fossil-dependent infrastructure. Oh, and through electricity and supply chains and GPS too. And, we have nuclear weapons now. It's not a matter if an abrupt transition can kill most of the population, it's only a question of how abrupt can we go without that happening.
This is at least a shift from your earlier position. At this rate, we might be able to take action when we have closed only half the remaining distance to the iceberg.
I don't believe my position has shifted, I think I've only failed at communicating it.
I can't tell you how big a shock the economy will survive, only that it has to survive, so whatever shock we apply it must be less than the lethal dose. Killing the economy is literally the game over, because climate change isn't about climate for climate's sake, but about climate not killing our economies and civilization through the pressure of increasing uninhabitability.
Fossile fuel is used for anything from concrete to cement to textites to pesticides to contact lenses, to ..... solar cells, and..... wind mills and medicin and thousands and thousands of other products.
Fossil fuels is the most valubale resource we have and all modern life is heavily depending on it. There is currently no realistic alternatives to most of this.
100% is actually trivial in the sense that we don't have surplus energy, so we can't turn off fossil fuels until we can turn them off.
What I should have said is this: economy is growing, and for now, it has to keep growing to even work. It's also dependent on fossil fuels and is using them up "just in time" - we don't have much in form of a buffer (or rather, the "buffer" is untapped sources, like ones exploited through fracking). As old sources get used up, new need to be tapped. We'll be able to stop tapping into new sources only when renewable/nuclear alternatives start growing faster than economy + drop in output of existing sources. Which might be somewhen in the future, but it's not now.
> The fact that you took it all the way to accusing me of trying to kill off most of the population is extremely rude.
I didn't accuse you of anything, you're projecting. I was only reminding everyone that the economy is not something you can just shut down and restart in a better form. Only gentle and incremental change is on the table.
> You are thinking in false extremes and stories, not numbers and graphs.
I can draw you the graphs if you like; the point is still that until we replace any given chunk of fossil fuel capacity, we have to keep that chunk running. Simple as that.
> willfully miss-frame the discussion. That is rather rude of you.
Sorry, that wasn't intentional. On the other hand, you've attacked me personally multiple times in your reply, which is that much ruder of you, and also against HN guidelines.
I didn't accuse you of anything, you're projecting. I was only reminding everyone that the economy is not something you can just shut down and restart in a better form. Only gentle and incremental change is on the table.
According to that chart, it’s too late to do anything now. (Arguably, it’s always been too late. There is nothing we could’ve done even starting in 1990 that would avert climate change while accommodating the industrialization or China, India, and Africa.)
If you turn off the natural gas plants now, the economy shuts down whenever the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. The alternative energy storage you need to back up renewables simply doesn’t exist yet.
Yes, we needed to use nuclear back in the 1970s. We would be much better positioned today if we had done it. But the same type of environmentalists that want to ban fracking today are the folks who stymied nuclear uptake. We shouldn’t listen to them this time.
> The remaining available carbon budget does not afford for a two-step transition. All investment in carbon emission producing generation needs to be replaced with investment in non-carbon-emitting generation, starting "in 2020" but honestly that's just politician talk. The real deadline is "fucking yesterday".
First, this is a response to someone who suggested we ban fracking. We will need fracking for the foreseeable future to power natural gas peaker plants. So your response to me doesn’t really make sense in context if you’re not actually supporting a fracking ban.
Second, until we have replacement technology, we need to replace retiring coal plants with natural gas even as we invest in renewables. Renewables are, at this stage, not stand alone power. More renewables means we need more peaker plants capacity to balance it out. That means fracking will have to continue and even increase over the next 20-30 years as we shift to more renewables.
The very part you quoted has the word "investment" in it twice, and the post you're replying to had the word new in all-caps to highlight it, and yet somehow your brain twisted that into turning off existing capacity.
You either cannot read, or are not discussing in good faith. I honestly can't do more than be triple-redundant in my explicit phrasing.
The problem isn't really that hard, we need to have vast far reaching austerity measures be put into place immediately or the human race AND human civilization will cease to exist.
People that make arguments like yours beg the question as to economic progress and standards of living. Standards of living should drop overall, but should normalize across the population. A smooth transition is not possible.
AFAIK the extreme, apocalyptic statements you are making are not supported by the science such as the IPCC. 3-4 degrees C of warming by 2100 will not make the human race or civilization cease to exist. There are also technological options available to us to cool the planet such as seeding the upper atmosphere with dust, which we have not yet used and could provide some additional time to switch to sustainable energy production means.
In any case, a non-smooth transition is not possible right now. Look at France which was paralyzed by “yellow vest” protests for a fuel tax increase until it was rolled back - the needed carbon taxes are far higher than that small tax increase. Right now the best scenario is to continue R&D and target promotion of sustainable energy, not attempt to reduce people’s standard of living which a democratic society will refuse to accept.
AFAIK the extreme, apocalyptic statements you are making are not supported by the science such as the IPCC.
Other people here are asserting that an abrupt and urgent transition away from fossil fuels 'will crash the economy and kill off most of the population' (which I take to mean >50%) without offering any citations for that claim whatsoever.
considering modern society relies on Diesel trucks and fuel oil-burning ships to feed itself, those numbers don’t seem too crazy. If we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow we’d have mass starvation everywhere within weeks.
So I guess it depends on what you mean by abrupt. I think we could certainly do something like add a $2/gallon tax on gas and diesel fuel without that happening, and it would reduce driving and emissions, but I would see the politicians who passed that law getting voted out at the next election as the people refuse to have their current standard of living lowered.
The year 2500? Who knows what technologies we might have available by then (e.g. fusion power enabling cheap energy to the point where we can do carbon capture and reverse warming).
What we are already seeing is that we are trending away from a baseline scenario by electrifying transport, energy generation and energy storage. And it’s probably harder to predict politics than the climate but right now I only see that trend continuing. There are some unfortunate anti-nuclear steps being taken but eventually enough solar and wind will get online to replace them. Emissions in the USA have trended down thanks to fracking and coal being wiped out.
Sea levels will rise but new land in the arctic will open up for human habitation and agriculture. Wars and migration may certainly happen but we’ve had plenty of that in the last 200 years without the end of civilization.
Obviously most people and governments aren't going to agree to voluntarily lower living standards, regardless of the consequences. So we need to focus on what's actually achievable.
Fracking in the US is very low-infrastructure. It's not like the 10-30 years it takes to spin up a deep-sea drill rig. It's literally a month or two and a couple million dollars. Here are some actual numbers: https://www.roseassoc.com/the-current-costs-for-drilling-a-s...
That's the whole reason it has taken off -- you turn it on when prices are high, you turn it off when prices are low.
We aren't committing to 30 years of energy policy by fracking in the US. You're committing a to maybe a couple years to pay off the investment.
It's not too late to bootstrap more nuclear, but big nuclear plants don't make less sense economically nowadays. SMRs on the other hand do. NuScale's design is very interesting.
It is specifically, exactly, too late to wait for that. Did you not look at the graph?
I'm all for continued and increased R&D funding, but the best case scenario for SMRs is they help us with the back half of the transition (2035 - 2050) not the front half (2020 - 2035).
Anything more optimist than that is simply denying the science (see ipcc report again).
All of these claims about the consequences of various levels of warming, including this "1.5 C is the limit" claim, are based on an assumption of predictive power, not just in climate science but in economics and sociology, which simply does not exist. Nobody knows how to predict what the consequences will be, particularly when you take into account that people will change the way various things are done in order to adapt to change. Indeed, that is happening now (and has always been happening throughout the history of the human race). These are the same people that predicted there would be worldwide famines in the 1980s and that oil and mineral prices would skyrocket by 2000. Their only predictive track record is of entirely wrong predictions. There is no reason to believe them this time.
> These are the same people that predicted there would be worldwide famines in the 1980s and that oil and mineral prices would skyrocket by 2000. Their only predictive track record is of entirely wrong predictions. There is no reason to believe them this time.
Predictions not panning out because they were mitigated in time doesn't mean the predictions were wrong.
> Predictions not panning out because they were mitigated in time doesn't mean the predictions were wrong.
They weren't "mitigated". Nobody took action based on those predictions in order to keep them from coming true. People just continued to improve technology and continued to have fewer children as their standard of living rose--trends that were just as observable when the predictions were made as the trends that the predictions were based on.
And the prediction I was referring to, more precisely, was that oil prices would skyrocket by 2000 and then would never come back down again but continue to rise.
> These are the same people that predicted there would be worldwide famines in the 1980s and that oil and mineral prices would skyrocket by 2000. Their only predictive track record is of entirely wrong predictions. There is no reason to believe them this time.
In what way are these "the same people"? Members of the IPCC previously made predictions about mineral prices?
>> That's straining credulity, especially considering the waning influence of religion in modern societies.
Not in the least. Dominionist and dispensationalist theology has had a huge influence on modern American evangelicals who in turn have a very significant influence on American politics.
I still disagree, but even if I did agree that religion has heavy influence, it's hard to say this is only a product of the right. Modern American government is largely a product of the victories of the Progessives (early 20th c.), which as a movement had heavy evangelical influence (read up on the social gospel). The idea that religion is somehow exclusive to the right is an oversimplification and ignores somewhat recent history. Of course evangelicals did a 180, but even so it's hard to see our relation to the environment as being mostly defined and controlled by the religious right.
Seems like you're both disagreeing that religion has an influence on modern American government, and arguing that religion isn't exclusive to the right-wing of American politics.
I don't think anyone was suggesting that religion only influences the right-wing, but rather that dispensationalism and dominionism have a greater influence on politics than you're accounting for, and that those movements have a much greater influence on the right-wing than you're accounting for.
Dominion (ownership/power) isn't (just) a licence for exploitation, but also implies responsibility.
There is a growing movement within christianity that recognises this, and has thereby found a way to environmentalism along the right flank of politics. The pope is all in, and so are many protestant churches in Europe. It's mostly just US protestants/born-again reactionaries that continue to only read the unwritten parts of the bible that align with Ayn Rand.
Assuming you weren't joking, I'm only guessing but the amount of pressure fracking releases is tiny. For example assuming there is pressure for a magnitide 7 earthquake building up, to stop it you need 1000 level 4 quakes or 10000 level 3 quakes, or 100000 level 2 quakes or a million level 1 quakes. Believe fracking is even below that (and my numbers are probably off)
For the moment magnitude scale, I believe the (typical; it doesn’t actually correspond directly to energy release) ratio is even steeper than that, at around a 32x factor for each point in the scale. So to equal the energy of a 7 you’d need roughly 1 billion magnitude-1 quakes.
If you have seen how hard Oklahoma has bit the dust in recent decades from local and macroeconomic changes, the place doesn't need anything more working against it --- least of all more "make a buck today at the expense of tomorrow." Allowing itself to incur damage to low-value buildings whose owners can barely afford to maintain them sounds like a self-inflicted wound. Even in spite of this recent extraction boom, schools are operating four days a week instead of five. What's going on is resource extraction exploitation with the costs externalized --- plain and simple.
It's incomprehensible. That place needs to modernize and adapt but without petroleum and its trappings. It's had 35-50 years to adapt from these changes; why should I believe that petroleum will be this place's saviour again?
I grew up with pumpjacks operating down the street (their ambient background sound as natural as the crickets and katydids and cicadas). The smell of petroleum, too. It wasn't until I moved away and returned to see how unnatural this was.
Because having more earthquakes on-top of the natural ones, in addition to all the other negative side-effects like pollution, isn't exactly a great situation for the people affected by it.
Fracking also significantly reduced coal and oil usage in the US (and probably elsewhere).
This had dramatic effects on air quality, and some good effects on CO2 emission.
The article also mentions that most methane leaks are from a small number of operations. So my takeaway is that rather than discourage fracking, encourage it, and also require those operations to fix their equipment.
Then you get the best of both worlds.
(And before you say: No burning any fuels at all, only renawables, remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good. It's still valuable to make things better even if you can't make them perfect.)
Also in an ideal scenario where countries move aggressively to renewables we need energy sources to put that infrastructure into place and as you say natural gas is a key part of keeping emissions low. That's why it's not good that candidates are arguing for straight out bans.
Awesome. That's the only UK site isn't it? I didn't think go-ahead had actually gone through for any of the others. Mainly because even Tory party members seemed to be firmly against it.
Culver City in L.A. has one of the largest, if not largest, urban fracking operations in the US. We were getting earthquakes with the epicenter right at the operation, and immediately all the local forums, such as Nextdoor, had long posts insulting and labeling anyone insinuating that the earthquakes were caused by fracking. It was very fishy.
It decomposes to CO2 and water vapor over about 10 years. The more methane we pump out, the longer decomp takes because there are fewer atmospheric hydroxyl radicals to drive the reaction.
The methane cycle I'm familiar with is related to things dying and getting buried underground or in the ocean. I don't think there is any comparable process to how photosynthesis consumes CO2. There are methanogen bacteria who consume it, but that's probably not a globally scalable solution. I think it would be cheaper just to capture and store it.
Water (the stable form of hydroxyl + hydrogen, we can't disperse radicals at the atmosphere) is a powerful greenhouse gas and will offset a lot of the cooling you may get by it.
This is really fascinating, thanks for the clarification.
I know that data for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere go back at least 541m years, i.e. the whole Phanerozoic. Does a similar dataset exist for methane?
The biggest spike in the Phanerozoic was at the Permian extinction event 251m years ago and was caused by huge volcanic eruptions in Siberia that burned off coal deposits created in the Carboniferous era. See Figure 7 in this publication.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
Methane is not directly related to fracking or not, it's related to any oil/gas operations.
> Methane emissions occur in all sectors of the natural gas industry, from production, through processing and transmission, to distribution. They primarily result from normal operations, routine maintenance, fugitive leaks, and system upsets.
4. Entire world is so addicted to oil that just shutting it off at this point is out of the question.
We can blame oil companies and governments for not getting serious about transitioning away from oil, and yes, plenty of this is about money, but the reason such ridiculous amounts of money are involved is precisely because interruptions in supply are an existential threat to every country on the planet.
Natural gas is currently replacing Coal, which is a far worse energy source both from a greenhouse gas perspective and from a health perspective (coal plant exhaust is radioactive, toxic, and is estimated to kill millions)
So oil execs could perfectly well be complete believers in science and global warming and still think they are doing a good thing.
It’s probably because they want to make money though and companies will do anything to make $$ as long as it’s legal enough.
The article addresses that. Recent (biologically) produced methane has a different carbon isotope ratio than the ancient gas released from shale deposits.
Asking about the difference between permafrost methane and shale gas produced methane is interesting tho. Reading the article now, lmk if you find a good answer.
Agreed! I wrote the author of the paper to get his input. If you want a copy of his response when I get it, shoot me an email tito@impossiblelabs.io (tho you may be attempting anonymity here...I can post his response to this thread in a few days if of interest.
It is a fair point, but I suspect the methane from shale is way way older than the permafrost methane. My understanding is that the carbon isotope half life is ~5000 years, so after 50,000 years it is 0.1% of its starting level and becomes useless for determining age.
the first 460m of permafrost depth have formed over the past 35,000 years. The permafrost that is thawing now and releasing CO2 has been formed during that period. There is deeper permafrost which may be much older, but that isn't thawing now and releasing CO2.
From the article:
"Methane released from shale gas production has a slightly different chemical fingerprint compared to methane from cow burps (not farts as commonly believed) and wetlands."
> Fracking involves drilling an oil or gas well vertically and then horizontally into a shale formation.
No, that's a horizontal well. Vertical wells get fracked all the time. Non-shale wells get fracked all the time. Fracking is any time you intentionally fracture rock formations with pressurized fluids.
> ...studies that show fracking operations leak, vent, or flare between 2 and 6 percent of the gas produced, Howarth said.
That's not fracking. That's leaking, venting and flaring. Those things may happen on wells that have been fracked but that doesn't mean they're caused by fracking.
If you're opposed to methane entering the atmosphere trying to stop the breaking of rocks a mile beneath the earth's surface is a bizarre way to solve that problem. At that point you're not trying to stop leaking, you're trying to stop production and for some reason are trying to do it under the guise of stopping fracking.
Perhaps they made a mistake and just used "fracking" to refer to this whole category of extraction techniques? If they did, does it make much of a difference? These techniques have got to end because they're not sustainable practices.
It absolutely makes a difference. There's no way to properly regulate an industry without understanding it.
But like I said above, people don't care about fracking because they don't even understand what it is. It's just a buzzword people use when what they really want is to stop the entire industry. Or maybe they hate how our society runs. Or they hate rich people. They're angry about something but it's almost never the practice of using water pressure to break rocks thousands of feet beneath the earth's surface.
Has anyone here studied the Orbiting Carbon Observatory? I'm curious for more details and how it might help here.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco2/index.html