Fracking boom tied to methane spike in Earth’s atmosphere
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
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.
The OCO-2 spectral bands were chosen for H2O and for CO2. I don’t think they provide methane information. A successor mission concept, GeoCARB, can get methane as well: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/geocarb-a-new-view-of-carbo...
Meanwhile, there are in situ methane monitors, and in some areas, spectroscopic observations (ground based) that allow methane source localization. For very new results for the LA area, see: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018..., pdf at https://authors.library.caltech.edu/96023/1/2018JD030062.pdf
It is a very cool science/technical problem, with high potential payoff for identifying big sources.
"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.
Especially since most of the big industry players complained about said loosening of rules which don’t benefit them.
Cui Bono?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pipeline opponents are not 'forcing oil production to happen'.
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.
Yep. Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California.
https://www.npr.org/2015/04/26/402413137/oklahoma-now-has-mo...
Why do we still allow fracking?
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.
There are so many absolutely terrible things we could do which help us immensely in the short term yet ultimately lead to immense harm.
The two often go hand in hand.
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.
- 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.
Particularly the graph in the bottom left corner here: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1...
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".
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.
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).
Seriously someone just ban me from this dumb site, no one can read.
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.
In what way are these "the same people"? Members of the IPCC previously made predictions about mineral prices?
Predictions not panning out because they were mitigated in time doesn't mean the predictions were wrong.
Also FWIW, oil prices did skyrocket in 2000s.
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.
> oil prices did skyrocket in 2000s
Sort of, but then they came back down again:
https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009–19_Oklahoma_earthquake_sw...
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.
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.
Is that an honest question?
It's used to extract a fossil fuel. That should answer your question in case you know the definition of "sustainable".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMsLEqjVbgA
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PHVhjaNRI
And there is also this thing that I don't even have words for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvJAKVnK4qM
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.
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.)
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/methane-the-irrelevan...
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.
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.
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.
https://electricenergyonline.com/energy/magazine/1142/articl...
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.
Take a look at some of the criminally low lease fees that have been charged to some drillers for public lands.
Good question. Seems like a bunch of opportunists are taking advantage of irrational fears about nuclear power.
Because our political systems are catastrophically corrupt.
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
I'm not sure we have the time for the luxury of that sort of transition any more.
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.)
Ideas and perspectives: is shale gas a major driver of recent increase in global atmospheric methane? Robert Howarth, Ph.D
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cuadrilla-packs-up-in-pre...
Life imitates art.
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092575351...
I wonder what the feasibility is in seeding the troposphere with hydroxyl radicals to accelerate the breakdown of methane?
> 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.
https://www.epa.gov/natural-gas-star-program/primary-sources...
Given* that our actions are causing climate change, what is the logic of oil companies continuing to do damage?
1. execs truly dont believe their Corp’s actions impact climate
2. theyre making piles of cash, they can buy theirselves and their descendants out of future problems
The first seems naive, the second seems pretty bleak.
What other logic is there for this behavior?
* let’s assume it is for the question above
i.e. "I never thought it would happen to me."
Your username is fantastic by the way.
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.
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.
Vegetation and other organic matter in flooded areas decomposes and releases methane, large amounts of it.
Arctic permafrost contains a large amounts of methane as well, like the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.
According to this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permafrost#Base_depth
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.
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.
If the frackers are totally unwilling to tolerate & abide by regulation, then people will feel like "it can't be fixed, just shut it all down".
Do you have some evidence that more methane is being released into the atmosphere during the weeks of fracking than during the years of production?
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.