Big Oil methane emissions: ‘significant gap’ between reality and reporting | Hacker News Reader

Big Oil methane emissions: ‘significant gap’ between reality and reporting

reuters.com

227 pointssamizdis61 comments

I've spent a good amount of time on oil wells, and this was always obvious. Methane passively leaks from the ground of most wells, and is usually related to the quality of the cement reinforcements. There is no real incentive for oil companies to use higher quality materials.

There may be more to this story. I believe "Big Oil" actually wanted tighter control of methane emissions to remain in place when the previous administration proposed relaxing them. The problem may be with smaller producers, who would be favored by that relaxation if they have less resources for compliance than bigger companies do:

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/13/901863874/trumps-methane-roll...

I’m sure the smaller producers are lying about methane too. Call it a hunch.

There is truth to the GP post.

Large producers have a tendency to prefer stronger regulations, especially new regulations because they have a competitive advantage in being able to implement them fully while their smaller competitors will be more likely to struggle and ultimately fail and sell cheap to the bigger fish.

In other words for a lot of regulations a considerable portion of the cost to implement is fixed and does not scale with org size which tends to put smaller operators at a further competitive disadvantage.

I think it's more the large producers are global companies who have exposure to investors with different goals than smaller companies who have investors essentially looking at them like the lotto.

yes agree - I posted here about methane, small "cowboy" oil and gas in West Texas, and some conflict with Big Oil at the time.. remote methane detection using specialized sensors and Deep Learning on the sensing data, has pulled the kimono from this situation.. Big Oil saw a political liability, and did advocate to that US Fed Administration to be strict, and the opposite happened. I very much appreciate the Daylight here on this topic, much needed

I spent months trying to get a valve to pass the API 622 fugitive emissions test. It never passed before I got laid off. I suspect that valve stem packing for valves at methane plants is one of the leading contributors for this.

What were the challenges you faced attempting to have the valve pass?

This is why I've always preferred a metered tax on pollutants over a regulated "limit". Without revenue attached, there is less-than-zero budget to measure and audit in the firm _or_ the regulator. But with a metered tax (on methane, co2, benzene, etc), weak or fraudulent self reporting become back-taxes owed with penalties which tends to attract interested headcount.

Europe (ESA) has a satellite program that can measure methane emissions from space.

https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...

California also launching one soon.

https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/califo...

Which number is reality? How can we know what is the true number. We are only confident to a _degree_.

I get that there is an obvious incentive for o&g to bias downward, but we shouldn’t lead ourselves astray thinking that an outside audit is 100% accurate. It’s useful but we shouldn’t hang our hats on it.

Also, I get this is tangential to the true point, but it just bothers me when numbers derived from estimation are labeled as “reality”.

I mean, I get your point. The underlying data and studies should be analyzed and confirmed. But as the article mentions this is not the only study showing an under reporting of emissions, and as you said oil companies have obvious incentives to under report.

So the question is now "how much is being under reported", but not "are oil companies under reporting".

>Which number is reality?

Not the one the oil companies are telling us, which should be alarming.

One way to reduce methane emissions is to burn it and generate electricity for Bitcoin mining. It gives a direct incentive to try to contain all methane. There's an estimate that all methane that is currently flared or released would generate enough electricity to run the whole Bitcoin network 10 times over. Bitcoin mining is suitable for this, because no costly infrastructure is needed for transporting the methane (which would happen anyway if it was economical). Bitcoin miners can be located in remote areas near the oil fields.

See https://www.crusoeenergy.com/digital-flare-mitigation

But isn't the challenge actually capturing, storing, and transporting the methane? At a minimum, you'll need the first 2 even if you colocate your generator and mining rig near the methane source. I guess I would be skeptical that this is cost effective vs. other cheap electricity sources.

Most of it is already captured and burned, without using it to generate electricity. It's called flaring. And if they can get money from it, it should make sense to try to capture more.

So instead of methane that will stay ~10 year (GWP of 2.8-3.4) in the atmosphere, you release C02 (GWP of 1) that will stay ~10k year. So short term (for ~10year) you reduce warming by ~3.5, if your look long term (10k years) you increase warming by 285x by doing that.

CH4 + 2 O2 → CO2 + 2 H2O

Not sure I will call that a win for the climate. (and this energy could be put to better use than burning it on crypto)

I've been under the impression that methane is way worse for climate than carbon dioxide. And that's why most of the methane is usually flared, but maybe there are other reasons.

There's a company called Crusoe Energy [0] who develops this, and they use the energy for other computational tasks as well. However, bitcoin mining is the most straightforward and scalable way to convert energy into money.

[0] https://www.crusoeenergy.com

GWP already takes into account half life. This has been thoroughly explored. Leaked methane is 11x worse than the co2 formed by burning it when half life is taken into account.

Also, our best estimate is that the single half-life for excess CO2 lies within the range of 19 to 49 years, with a reasonable average being 31 years.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

I didn't take that into account, thanks

Their Co2 emissions from flaring unused methane is also significant. This company has some kind of live map of them:

https://www.flaringmonitor.org/

Not that you want any extra greenhouse gas emissions, but methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas on short timescales, 100x over 5 years. CO2 is the lesser of the two evils.

Oil companies not telling the truth about the environmental impact of their processing should be dealt with in a way that take all of the profits, and then some, but since most all politicians here have taken money from them the odds of that happening seem very low.

Old news, just FYI https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chevron-redubs-ship-...

Something that needs to happen more often is corporate abusers need to be fined into bankruptcy, shareholders wiped out, ownership transferred to the people (state) and kept operating while sold or broken up into pieces during bankruptcy restructuring. i.e. real consequences for boards and shareholders that aren't just small dents in quarterly profits while minimizing consequences for the more ordinary workers

That sounds like Utopia compared to what we have.

That this doesn't happen is all the more proof we live in a plutocracy with a veneer of democracy.

Companies have been destroyed by courts, but very few, very infrequently.

What?

How on earth would the government seizing control of one of the largest industries in the country make us more of a democracy?

We would then be in company with countries such as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, famously democratic countries

what about norway

What you're describing is practically impossible in a capitalist state, both due to political unwillingness and by juridical obstructions. One has to realize that the main function of a capitalist state is to secure private capital and facilitate profits for the capitalist class, in short - to preserve the class hierarchy.

Seems anything being remotely anti-capitalist gets downvoted here.

no, just comments that draw conclusions based off conjecture.

One thing's for sure, the US & Canada were founded by multinational corporations for the benefit of multinational corporations.

IIRC not public corporations but with royals and noblemen for partners.

After so much time people are bound to draw different conclusions sometimes.

And actual liability for directors. None of this “oh, just take all my shareholder’s money for my mistakes in exchange for jail time”

Should the death penalty be on the table for executives in particularly egregious acts of pollution? Environmental destruction irreparably harms public commons, including the lives of millions of future humans.

These people are making millions and it doesn't seem like current enforcement has the desired deterrent effect. Slaps on the wrist with small fines don't seem effective. How often do executives get prison time for serious pollution?

Is there a fair legal test that you believe would justify the death penalty for egregious acts of pollution where an executive knowingly participated in the cover up? Currently it feels like the commons is being exploited without consequence. I can't help but think that executing just a couple of the worst offenders would make violators much more cautious and curtail this destructive behavior.

>Should the death penalty be on the table for executives in particularly egregious acts of pollution

because that worked so well to deter murderers?

>These people are making millions and it doesn't seem like current enforcement has the desired deterrent effect. Slaps on the wrist with small fines don't seem effective.

I don't understand why the logical progression from "small fines" is "death penalty".

Polluters can make hundreds or thousands of people get sick or die due to cancers, respiratory illnesses, etc as well as making species go extinct. That seems worse to me than even the worst mass shooters, but there doesn't seem to be proportional prosecution of these crimes.

I think as long as we have a death penalty than, yes, it should be on the table. Some of the comments on your question offer compelling reason for that to be the case.

it would be irresponsible of a corporate officer to not optimize for profit as decreased operating expenses vs the risk of environmental litigation.

This reminds me of a cartoon.

In front of the skyline of a derelict city, a man in a torn suit and a few children in similarly ragged clothes are sitting at a campfire. The man says: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”.

You can find it here: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

Irresponsible to what? Their shareholders? Or life on planet Earth?

To the most important thing - his bank account.

"Responsible" performance of a role in an organization doesn't put one above judgement for one's actions, at all, which may, though correct from a very narrow perspective, be horrible. The most obvious & crystal-clear examples would Godwin the thread, but I trust the idea's simple enough not to need illustration by example.

Society bears the cost, the profit goes to the shareholders. Capitalism in a nutshell.

Communism also : https://search.brave.com/search?q=pollution%20in%20soviet%20...

The USSR was a state capitalist system, not sure where you got the 'communism' ideea. Something vaguely socialist happened during the original bolshevik revolution, but Lenin quickly put a stop to that and restored economic/industrial control from the soviets to the state.

Russia today is a capitalist, kleptocratic oligarchic state, highly dependent on fossil fuels.

USSR is listed as a communist state here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state#List_of_commun...

Sure, but "communist state" is a technical historical term that is simply the shorthand tag for countries similar to and influenced by the USSR. It originates in propaganda about communism (or socialism) related to these countries, but otherwise has little to do with communism or socialism as ideological/economic systems.

The propaganda origin is two-fold. Russian propaganda used these terms to ingratiate itself both with the revolutionaries who fought against the Tsar, and with European workers' parties at the time, trying to create a positive association between communism/socialism and their regime. As the disaster of Lenin and Stalin's takeover of power and totalitarian control started to become clearer after the war, the terms started being used by European and American propaganda machines to create a negative association between the Russian disaster and communism/socialism.

The fact that this was used for propaganda and did not reflect actual beliefs about the working of these systems is visible in the way the USSR's claims about being a democracy were never taken seriously, while its claims of being socialist/communist are presented as unassailable.

To be clear, socialism has a very simple definition - "workers' control of the means of production", or, in more modern terms, "democratic organization of the workplace". Basically an economic system is socialist if most/all enterprises are worker-owned co-ops, in contrast with a capitalist system, where most/all enterprises are owned by those with capital. The USSR and most other communist countries were totalitarian regimes where those in power exerted control over all enterprises, with workers at the bottom of the hierarchy, having even less say about the direction of their work than they do in capitalist systems.

Communism as an ideological term refers to a more extreme form of socialism, where not only do workers have control of their own work, but resources are actually pooled and the entire community has a say in the direction of each enterprise, including those that don't directly work in that enterprise. It is a far more idealistic model than socialism.

It's important to also note that socialism can easily happen in a free-market system, except that labor and enterprises can't be bought and sold - only goods and services. Communism is less compatible with the idea of a market, as it implies much more direct cooperation between stakeholders.

And in one sentence, you have explained why actually-free market capitalism must not be allowed to exist, and instead must be heavily regulated to allow other stakeholders to have a say in the operation of any company.

If that is the only possible result with corporations, then continued human survival is not compatible with the continued existence of corporations.

It is possible that e.g. benefit corporations may do a better job than standard corporations, but I have my doubts that it is possible to make corporations consistently account for negative externalities under capitalism.

In that statement is inherent the fact that unless you put a dollar figure on an item it does not matters to capitalism. this is not a criticism of capitalism, just that how this works. what needs to happen is that we provide a value assessment for 'common goods' like not polluting the rivers or atmosphere. then and only then capitalism will start to care about them. one way of doing that is to create instruments like carbon taxes which models cost of 'making life worse for everybody' which is currently assumed to be zero.

Fiduciary duty being the highest moral imperative is quite problematic.

>Fiduciary duty being the highest moral imperative

But it's not. That's what laws are for. If you're just going to expect people to be moral voluntarily you're going to have a bad time, because there inevitably will be people who have lower standards of morality than you'd want.

have we managed to pass any laws to stop these companies from saving a few bucks to not manage their methane emissions? no.

i think its because we have actually internalized this idea as a society.

The idea that corporations should regulate their own behavior without the threat of force/punishment? I agree. Self-regulation is a thing you lobby for in order to prevent actual regulation.

partially. the idea that the market is _the most important_ thing, and that companies know best about how to optimize, and that any time anyone tries to modulate their behavior for the social good - it turns out to be counterproductive.

I'm sorry but environmental litigation is not a simple thing any corporate officer shrugs concern for. They simply try not to know about those things or offload the risk to third party's etc.

/s?

“decreased operating expenses vs the risk of environmental litigation.”

Then we have to increase the expense of environmental violations by a lot to make sure that it would be irresponsible to ignore regulations.

Not only irresponsible but a signal of corruption. Corporations should be controlled by laws and their enforcement, not the arbitrary political whims of the people working in them.

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