Methane plume seen by satellite over Alabama mystifies experts | Hacker News Reader

Methane plume seen by satellite over Alabama mystifies experts

bloombergquint.com

73 pointsmarc__137 comments

If they concentrated on looking only in Marion County they missed it. It clearly is in far southwestern Winston County due south of Haleyville on a line between there and Eldridge that places it a little over 3/4 mile west of Hwy 13 pretty close to the half-moon shaped pond on the headwaters of Dry Creek.

If they would focus their search on a radius of about 5 miles from that location they will probably have more likely candidates to consider. There is a small community on the curve in Hwy 13 south of the Hwy 9/13 intersection and further west of that there is an active quarry. It doesn't look like coal but I can't be sure. Anyway, though this is at the NE edge of the Black Warrior basin I don't see any active production.

Here are a few pics I put together for grins.

https://postimg.cc/gallery/phsPyBJ

EDIT: I wanted to add that there has been frac activity in the Black Warrior Basin for about 10 years. It is mostly south of there. That basin has been productive for a long time so there is a high likelihood that there are old wells that have not been plugged, they are simply abandoned and many could be essentially open-hole. That would be an obvious path for hydrocarbons to reach the surface and it would definitely not be the only time it has happened. I know from experience that fracking a well can cause pressure and production increases in connected wells 10s of miles away if the fracked interval is connected in the subsurface. Pressure always moves from high pressure to low pressure while it equalizes. This area is also the southwestern extension of the Appalachian coal trend. There could be some coal activity locally.

Apparently this satellite (the Sentinel-5p) has a 7 x 7km resolution. [1] There are other satellites with much higher resolution that might be used to narrow it down, and more launching soon.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel-5

If they image repeatedly at various offsets over an area - perhaps over multiple flybys - shouldn't they be able to localize it better than that?

The Wikipedia pages claims that pictures are taken every second but I am not sure how that translates to image density on the ground.

Emissions are not always persistent (esp with methane).

There is a lot of work done to try and reverse advect plumes using tropospheric wind data... But it's not an easy problem

That link isn't working for me, but I think this is the same article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-10/methane-p...

"An emissions rate of about 58 tons of methane per hour would have been required to generate the plume, according to an estimate from Kayrros SAS, which analyzed European Space Agency data."

That sounds like a lot!

Maybe hard for surveillance though? A single railcar of liquid is 100 tons (I don't know if liquid methane is shipped, this is just a way to visualize - and this is a rough number. Methane is about 12 pct lighter than water.)

I wonder what the most likely reasons are. I might think a fracking based earthquake opening up an underground reservoir that feeds into a mine? But that is very speculative! I am assuming there are no chemical plants in the area.

For context [0] says global annual methane generation is ~570E6 tons, which puts hourly production at 570E6/(24*365)~=65000 or over a thousand times this source. Like, not /great/ definitely want to address. But unless it's a symptom of a new mechanism I don't know if I should be super alarmed.

[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/methane-tracker-2020

1,000th of the worlds total methane emissions is pretty enormous

> The EPA said that the potential area is too broad and the satellite data “does not provide enough tangible information of potential sources in which to conduct a programmatic review,”

Perhaps we should have airplanes/drones fitted with similar measurement instruments as the satellite, so we can take a closer look when necessary?

I believe that's become standard practice in the last few years. For example: https://www.microdrones.com/en/integrated-systems/ge-industr... or https://kairosaerospace.com/methane-detection/

Or just people driving around with a bike and a detector? 7 km x 7 km might take a while but it should be possible within a few days?

Sounds like EPA is either too lazy or they're trying to conceal something.

Has anyone made a generic "I am willing to carry one or more sensors on my bicycle, and criss-cross an area as long as software tells me where I need to go next" app that we can all use to congregate sensor readings with?

Methane, decibel levels, all sorts of opportunities here.

Airliners gather some air measurements, at least CO2. Don't know how widely:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atot/25/10/2008jt...

https://newsroom.usra.edu/commercial-airliners-monitoring-ca...

Airline routes are not sampling evenly though, and flying at 10 km height means ground level resolution is very very low.

I worked on a project called Bikenet at Dartmouth College that used bicycles for sensing carbon dioxide:

https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sensorlab/pubs/BikeNet-SenSys0...

http://sensorlab.cs.dartmouth.edu/pubs/a6-eisenman.pdf

We tried measuring carbon monoxide also but CO is lighter than air so we got no measurements. Methane is also lighter than air and would probably not be measurable on the ground unless you were very close to the source. However, the biker could carry a drone with a methane sensor and launch it periodically:

https://www.ravanair.com/drone-uav-methane-gas-detection/

Maybe a laser could be mounted on the bike firing straight up and be used to detect methane?:

https://www.crowcon.com/products/portables/lmm-gen-2/

I wanted to add radiation sensors to the bikes but the prof vetoed that idea, afraid it might affect property values in the town if we actually found differences in radiation levels.

The company Aclima (https://www.aclima.io/) has a commercial business in which they pay drivers to drive around and collect air quality data, including methane concentration. Originally they co-located the sensors on the Google StreetMap vehicles, but now they run their own fleet. I don't think they've made it out to rural Alabama quite yet, though. . .

High-Resolution Air Pollution Mapping with Google Street View Cars: Exploiting Big Data https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b00891

Annual Chili Cookoff?

That, or a presidential visit, especially if rep. Swallwell was also in attendance.

Title is clickbait. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management saying "there is no permanent facility allowed to do this" is not mystifying.

> The Oct. 22 release was detected by satellite and pinpointed to an area in Marion County near natural gas wells in the Black Warrior Basin, a pair of gas pipelines and coal mines.

Read: it's almost certainly gas from the mines.

> The Alabama release is the fifth largest detected by the ESA’s Sentinel-5P satellite this year in the lower 48 U.S. states, according to Kayrros.

"Fifth largest in this part of the country" is... not news.

> The Alabama Department of Environmental Management wasn’t able to identify a permanent facility that would be responsible for any releases after a diligent review of its records.

This isn't even a "they don't know" it's just a "they didn't tell us."

C'mon Bloomberg...

You're just assuming as much as Bloomberg. What makes you reach these conclusions?

Not "Fifth largest in this part of the country"

Rather "Fifth largest .. this year in the lower 48 U.S. states", which is pretty large area.

"The Alabama release is the fifth largest detected by the ESA’s Sentinel-5P satellite this year in the lower 48 U.S. states,"

U.S. states. Isn't that redundant? Is this an editorial error, or an editorial decision on a rule that has changed since I was in school like the Oxford comma?

I guess normally, sitting from the US, you'd say "in the lower 48 states"; but if you're writing for an international audience, the USA is not the only country made up of many states (see the nearby country named the United Mexican States, for instance). So I can see why there might be an urge to specify by adding "US States" for the United States' States.

When does anyone referring to Mexico use the abbreviation US?

One wouldn't say UK kingdom, would they? It just seems awfully redundant and leans towards a bit of not understanding the words being abbreviated.

"United States" is a (shortened form) of the name of a country. "US" here functions as an adjective, and the lowercased "states" refers to the states themselves (the noun). It'd be exactly like saying "German states" or "Indian states".

The world isn't as US centric as some of us would like it to be..

I bet people would also better understand an article about Karelia if it referred to it as a republic in the Russian federation.

Well, now I’m concerned that European satellites could be counting my farts. Great…

> Well, now I’m concerned that European satellites could be counting my farts. Great…

You only have anything to worry about if you're gunning for at least the fifth largest ever recorded in your part of the country.

not "ever recorded", just "this year". Time for more protein powder chilli!

Hold my beer…

Compare the current market value of ~58 tons/hour of CH4 (needed to generate the plume which the satellite saw) with the market value of 12 solid gold goose eggs per day.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CursedWithAwesom...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com