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Comment by strommen | Hacker News Reader

To put this in perspective: the US emits 6,673 million metric tons of CO2e* each year [1]. That's 18.2 million per day.

EDIT - I also had some numbers wrong! I was using the total leakage as the daily leakage.

This leak is 110,000 lbs CH4/hr, 50 metric tons CH4/hour, 1200 metric tons CH4 per day, 30,000 metric tons per day of CO2e.

That's .16% of our nation-wide emissions. Or, about as much as a half-million people.

*(CO2-equivalent, abbreviated CO2e, is used to normalize emissions of different gases. They are weighted based on their Global Warming Potential (GWP), which is a measure of how effective they are as a greenhouse gas. CO2 has a GWP of 1; Methane has a GWP of 25.)

[1] http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/usinventoryre...

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A thing I find helpful in cases like these is to switch to using SI units:

    : user@debian:~; units
    2529 units, 72 prefixes, 56 nonlinear units

    You have: 6673 million tonnes per year
    You want: Mg/s
            * 211.45913
            / 0.0047290463
    You have: 110000 pounds per hour
    You want: kg/s
            * 13.859767
            / 0.072151286

For some stupid reason, every field invents their own idiotic and idiosyncratic collection of slightly incompatible units: millibars, Torr, kilograms per square centimeter, or psi instead of Pascals; pounds per hour, metric tons per day, or metric tons per year instead of kilograms per second; quadrillion Btu per year, kilowatt-hours per month, or horsepower instead of watts; and so on. It's totally counterproductive and I wish people would stop.

>every field invents their own idiotic and idiosyncratic collection of slightly incompatible units

Well at least chip tech is still measured in nanometers and not beard-seconds.

I think you are mixing the number up. I could not find a source that said anything close to the 1.7 million metric tons per day emitted by the leaking well you used for your calculation.

The leak is emitting 1247 metric tons of CO2e per hour that is 29928 metric tons of CO2e per day. So its 0.17% instead of 9% of nation-wide emissions.

I think I've corrected it, but we're still off from each other :) Can you take another look?

I'm not sure what you're using for US-wide methane and CO2e emissions figures.

Damn these numbers! :D

Regarding your correction. The percent value is now too low (.002%). I think you used the factor value of ~0.002 as percentage. So you probably meant 0.2% which would be close to my number.

Using your numbers

30000/18200000 = .00164835164835164835 = ~0.16% = ~0.2%

That was it - thanks!

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