Using satellites to uncover large methane emissions from landfills | Hacker News Reader

Using satellites to uncover large methane emissions from landfills

science.org

146 pointsjacquesm86 comments

Note this is just further, more detailed confirmation of stuff we already knew for a long time.

This is why landfill is, and always has been, near the bottom of the waste hierarchy, below even incineration with energy recovery.

People who sell fossil fuels have regularly argued that we should just bury trash and have lots of silly arguments as to why that is the case.

But the various recycling schemes used in EU, Singapore etc. are clearly better on basically every metric which isn't "sales of fossil fuels".

For the methane issue, seperate recycling of food, agricultural and other organic waste into biogas and fertilizer is the obvious solution. GHG negative methane!

Germany is a world leader in this, but even they can do more.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-technology-busines...

Methane goes away after 20 years. Carbon Dioxide stays around for thousands of years. We should spend 100% of our resources transitioning to extremely cheap sustainable electric energy.

That is the only option for turning the tide on climate

Not sure what you are arguing when you say methane “goes away”. It does not disappear, it reacts with oxygen in the atmosphere to become becomes carbon dioxide and water.

It becomes much less of a greenhouse gas, does that make more sense?

Your original statement was that carbon dioxide stays for thousands of years, methane goes away after twenty.

So the fact that "going away" in this context means "is replaced by carbon dioxide, which stays for thousands of years" seems a rather important part of the total warming potential of the two greenhouse gasses.

and what about everything else, from farting cows and crazy vulcans?

It's burps, not farts.

We will almost certainly soon be able to track cattle based emissions via satellite and use that to enforce usage of the various solutions we have (seaweed based food supplements apparently work) and/or price in the externality.

Here's some work on that from the same info source used for the above:

https://www.ghgsat.com/en/newsroom/cow-burps-seen-from-space...

And the fugitive methane from fracking? Or will we just blame the farm that was fracked under without consent which had its bore water ruined?

I agree with your second statement but your first is a bit ambigous.

Methane is a much more potent GHG than Carbon (about 8-30x), and is a big chunk of the emissions (about 20%).

In fact after 20 years of being worse than carbon dioxide, it mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs around for millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.

>it mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs around for millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.

This too is inaccurate. CO2 has a half-life in the atmosphere variously stated between 27 and 49 years.

If the world magically went zero Co2 today, The atmospheric levels would decrease about 2.5%/yr

1000 years is definately a figure I've seen bandied about by NASA, and the Bern model suggests that some percentage is effectively permanent, so millenia doesn't seem outlandish.

Where are you citing your numbers from?

A quick Google suggests it's a Climate Change Denial source:

http://euanmearns.com/the-half-life-of-co2-in-earths-atmosph...

And even they cite the climate scientists as saying hundreds of years (before going on to prove them wrong in their blog post of course):

> We hear all the time form the climate science community that even if we stop burning fossil fuels (FF) today the CO2 we have already produced will still be in the atmosphere for centuries to come. We have already lit a long slow burning fuse that will lead us to climate Armageddon. How much of this is actually true?

You can find the numbers in the IPCC reports.

Headline numbers like 1,000s of years are are always talking about about a fraction of emitted CO2.

Like radiation, CO2 Decay has an infinite tail. When it is "gone" depends on how much you are talking about (50%, 90%, 99.9% ect)

CO2 decay is complicated because there are several removal pathways, and some cap out, and some keep going.

The IPCC doesn't talk about it in terms of half-life because it isn't true exponential decay. The 2007 Report said the following:

"Carbon dioxide cycles between the atmosphere, oceans and land biosphere. Its removal from the atmosphere involves a range of processes with different time scales. About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years" * More recent reports essentially provide an asterisk that says its complicated.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg1-chap...

The carbon cycle is complex and simple half life numbers are always wrong. A lot of the carbon we emit is removed from the atmosphere relatively quickly, for example into the biosphere or into the oceans. But the only way to "permanently" get rid of it is by sequestering it into the lithosphere. These processes take geological time. Until they are complete the equilibrium concentration in the atmosphere is larger than before we burned that piece of coal. So it is relatively accurate that some of the carbon we emit stays in the atmosphere "forever".

I completely agree. Certainly you would also agree that the following statement is misleading at best.

>it mostly turns into carbon dioxide and then hangs around for millenia, meaning it is categorically worse.

It's also useful though. Capturing it means we can use it.

Transitioning to sustainable electricity is necessary but not sufficient, we also need to address methane, cement and steel production, and a bunch of other things. Regarding the urgency of methane in particular: https://climateer.substack.com/p/aerosols

The people involved in recycling infrastructure are usually not qualified to build wind turbines or electrolyzers, so I think we can safely do 100% of both.

Korea is another great example in recycling food waste. The country's food culture historically created a lot of food waste (although the total food waste had been reducing lately), and being a limited territory like Singapore, they recycle everything they can. Separating food waste is mandatory and you can get fined for not doing it. They use the recovered food waste as pig feed, compost and bio-gas.

https://earth.org/food-waste-south-korea/

Feeding pigs with food waste has a long tradition of course, in Eastern Europe many rural households still have one or two pigs just for this purpose, but in 2006 the EU banned that for commercial pig farming after outbreaks of Foot and Mouth Disease...

I didn't know about that. For me this is also an ethical issue. Raising a household pig and feeding it your own food waste and leftovers is fine, but when done on an industrial scale, for commercial purposes, we are bound to see regular abuse, possibly with sanitary consequences.

Why do you think that pigs fed on food waste are more likely to be abused than pigs fed other feed?

There are a lot of extras that appear happen in food waste i.e., plastics, paper etc.

In industrial settings this is not easy to filter out, so pigs end up consuming more of these non food waste products more than they would in small farms or feed-fed pigs.

There are many articles on the practice of hog garbage feeding recently

Composting of organic matter is not used for biogas and the plastic, when not sent to other countries, is burned. A lot of big cities have a "MVA".

I don't know what you are trying to say.

Organic matter is used to generate biogas and other useful things all over the world.

https://www.epa.gov/anaerobic-digestion/types-anaerobic-dige...

Burning plastic is, as I mentioned in my post, better than landfill if you use the energy for something and displace fossil fuels.

We don't really need to do that for much longer, since renewables are so cheap, so recycling is getting to be a better and better option and has been a good option for decades now.

Landfill has always been a last resort.

edit: figured out that with the reference to MVA you might have been saying that the US recycled too. They do, they don't do as much as they could and should because there's a lot of disinformation about it, but yes it's so obviously a good idea that even the US does it.

What I meant with reference to non US places was: recycle more and more stuff, don't moan and lie about it all the time, be an industrial leader not merely allow the US to get dragged kicking and screaming into saving money and improving people's health against the will of half the nation.

Burning plastic is only good if you capture the released CO2. Otherwise, I have a hard time imagining plastic is a more efficient fuel than most fossil fuels, meaning you release more CO2 for the same result when burning plastic.

To be clear, if what you have is just plastic, you should really be recycling it. If it's mixed solid waste and it's too late for that then...

> According to the Environmental Protection Agency, burning municipal solid waste emits nearly as much carbon per unit of energy as coal, and almost twice as much as natural gas.

And while gas is definately better than coal (due to burning clean, cheap to build, fast ramping) many estimates of methane leakage in the fossil fuel extraction process mean it could be (depending on how and where you source it) more than double the GHG impact than just the burn itself.

For me, the extra money diverted from the fossil fuel industry tips it in burnings direction, as long as sufficient effort is made to scrub the exhaust gas of toxins and if recycling wasn't clearly better.

Which it is. So we should do that instead.

I just see a lot of people saying it's worse than landfill, which it isn't.

Agreed. In addition I think people overestimate the CO2 produced by burning plastic. A plastic shopping bag is 6-8 grammes. Burning it produces about as much CO2 as driving a car 200 yards. If you pick a supermarket one mile further from your house because they have a better policy on plastic bags then the environment loses.

You can either pull oil out of the ground, make plastic of it and bury that plastic, where the decomposition will release greenhouse gases. Or you can burn it and capture the energy.

The difference in greenhouse gases isn't big - provided you burn it properly.

Except if burning the plastic is a replaceement for buring other kinds of fossil fie, in which case it's a win vs burying it.

I believe some landfills burn off the methane? I wonder how effective that is.

It's relatively common to capture it and use it in places where air pollution is taken serioisly (it also avoids the occaisiobal ecplosion). Definately worth doing if the landfill already exists, but much easier to keep the organic material seperate in the first place.

It's one of the remedies the paper mentions for the sites they identified

Nitrous Oxide from Nitrogen fertilizedrs applied to broadacre grains is another gas being watched and thought about:

> In broadacre cropping, fertiliser production and use accounted for 58 per cent of the Australian wheat crop's greenhouse gas footprint in the past five years, according to the Department of Agriculture.

> Of that, 31 per cent occurred on-farm, a large part of which came through the volatilisation of nitrogen fertiliser, where nitrous oxide is released into the atmosphere.

> Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that is almost 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

There are mitigating strategies, in principle the most appealing would be legume crop rotation, however:

> "I guess naturally the go-to option is to grow more legumes in the rotation, because when we grow legumes we don't need to apply nitrogen to meet production," he said.

> "But it's not as simple as that, because there are greenhouse gas emissions such as nitrous oxide associated with the breakdown of legume stubbles."

so that needs quantification and further study.

Other approaches are discussed:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-11/grain-industry-push-t...

You can see N2O emissions as a layer in Null School [1], which clearly shows the tracks left by aircraft.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/ani...

Cheers for that link, it's a really nice little layered GIS globe :-)

That's NO2, nitrogen dioxide. It contributes to acid rain but not to global warming: https://www.epa.gov/no2-pollution/basic-information-about-no...

Unless you already know this fact it's hard to search for, though. Even with an exact-quotes Google search for "nitrogen dioxide" "global warming potential", Google shows me an info snippet for N2O, nitrous oxide.

There are also denitrification inhibitors. Some are even natural (procyanidins and others). I can imagine growing crops engineered to produce and release these.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7466050/

Why bother with mini farts when there are far larger methane leaks? https://www.ecowatch.com/methane-leak-russia-coal-mine.html A clear case of over-focusing on the problem.

Should I applaud that in a few years we will be able to visualise individual animals' methane emissions when clearly this follows a Pareto distribution and shutting down the largest offenders will have the greatest impact.

Instead it seems we want to congratulate ourselves again that we created more data points about our methane-guilt. It is clear to me that if this kind of tech can be used to slap fines on people it will. And so we can create new markets for allowable methane emissions!

Why not do what we can rather than shake our fists at greater problems we cannot address?

We fine people for littering even though there are also murders.

That was the same satellite source that was used in this paper.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ghgsat/status/1537051266127482880

https://www.ghgsat.com/en/case-studies/coal-mining-methane/

So now they have the data they should only look at Russian coal mines?

I know that it is a polarising topic but it is possible to capture this methane and convert it into Bitcoin for a profit.[0]

[0] https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/turning-garbage-into-...

You could also use the generated electricity for something more useful

/sarcasm Or you can just burn it like Russia does [1] in enormous scales, just because they cannot stop gas production while reducing the transport to Europe to increase economic pressure.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/wfxzjr/russia_is_no...

Russia should generate bitcoin with that. And people say blockchain isn't a solution for everything.

Hm, now I wonder. Would that actually make sense for them? They’d have the hardware costs upfront, but could then actually use the gas instead of just burning it. Or do they not have enough gas power plants to use all that excess gas? Anyone with background information and/or some napkin math? ;)

Yeah this is exactly what the world needs.

Finally we have a killer use case for Bitcoin: allow Russia to circumvent Western European sanctions by burning fossil fuels and generating money to buy weapons for their war in Ukraine.

Nvidia would be all for it if it involved ETH.

I hadn’t considered the momentum of outflows across the gas supply chain. Interesting.

I still don't understand why Moscow doesn't look like Dubai with all the resources Russians have.

The national wealth is not reinvested and instead is extracted by kleptocrats and invested into places like Miami and Dubai..

Honestly the bigger tragedy is that they're unable to put their brilliant population with wonderful education to use building a modern economy and instead put their minds in a vice, put them in prison, and force them to flee in droves. It's really a human tragedy

Are you actually familiar with Russia (or just the Reddit/Twitter depiction of Russia)?

For one, Russia has a lower prison population than the USA. And that's even with some absolutely ridiculous and archaic laws.

Russian consumer and tech companies are on par or in many cases, surpass the US. Yandex Taxi (and their other services), Ozon, Wildberries, Kusvil (grocery), banking mobile apps, shipping/logistics services - these are just some examples.

Not the poster, but I know quite a few native Russians and their description of the corruption and looting matches the posters description.

When was the last time they lived in Russia? That was true in the 90s and 2000's but things have changed drastically in the past 10 years.

About that time, but have family and friends in Moscow and used to visit regularly until the war. What they noted is had started to get better (albeit still with corruption and kleptocrats everywhere outside of the big Moscow foreign companies) then with the sanctions everything imploded again - but it was still pretty awful.

They’re pretty left leaning and the wife is in tech and had to leave because of the blatant discrimination/sexism against her though, so I’m sure that weighs heavily on her analysis.

I'm guessing you live in Moscow? the rest of the country is half way between a developing economy and a western state in terms of quality of living, and that's all on top of the fact that Russia is pursuing a violent war of aggression, by choice, against a large European-leaning neighbor.

No, but I've spent time living in Russia (outside Moscow) and understand enough Russian to get by.

A Russian friend of mine recently ordered a fresh avocado from the Delivery Club app and had it delivered to his front door within 15 mins. For like $2. And that's after 6 or 7 packages of sanctions and getting cut off from SWIFT.

Yep, sounds like a place that's dysfunctional and on the verge of collapsing...

I'm not sure what you're saying: access to a vegetable is comparable to access to a TSMC produced chip necessary to fly a guided missile into a Ukrainian schoolhouse?

An exotic vegetable that expires quickly. It means their supply chains nor financial links are not in tatters contrary to the western narrative.

i.e., grannies fighting over buckwheat

That's a very specific supply chain for an unsanctioned good.. avocados ship straight from somewhat neutral countries Israel and Cyprus.

In terms of the ability to purchase, you are correct that dollars continue flowing into Russia due to the energy export situation. That of course is the big open question, can the West endure a cold winter with jackets indoor and cripple the Russian economy or not

Let's see if they'll be able to buy a computer

Intimately familiar. The culture is so beaten down by totalitarianism that no one even feels comfortable speaking out even to their friends. All of the tech you're mentioning was built during a unique period of access to western technology that is now going to be harder and harder to get. You're hitting the nail on the head that during that period it was the perfect moment for Russia to change and it was what the west was betting on. The tragedy is that without institutions to nurture an open society Russia became a totalitarian state yet again and that has now gone beyond oppressing its own people into living in squalor by western standards and now into violently attempting to destroy a large western leaning country: we're seeing a nightmare play out.

> Intimately familiar

So you're Russian or spent time living there?

Have you visited in the past 5 years or so?

I was there 3 years ago. It was a summer time visit to one of the medium size cities in Siberia, St Pete, and Moscow. I saw people that reminded me enormously of the US: folks absorbed by their own (very large) world and I realized how Siberia was settled at a similar time to the American west: so many parallels. The difference being the power of the federal center and the boot stomp of the authorities that are expected. The fear. People don't even cross the road when there is no traffic.

Cool, thanks for sharing. We're in agreement on some things. I also noticed the parallels with the US (people kind of in their own world). Also like Americans, Russians don't usually speak foreign languages (outside of the two big cities). But I do think they know geography and foreign events better than Americans fwiw.

Regarding traffic attitudes, I think it depends. There was a lot of Caucasus people where I lived and they know no such road rules. Crossing the street was fun... And don't get me started on attitudes towards seat belts and children's car seats...

I noticed that you very specifically avoid talking politics. I wonder if you're blind to what authoritarianism does or just don't feel comfortable/safe speaking about it? If the latter it really does kind of prove the point doesn't it

You can't really compare the two as one was a greenfield top-down project while the other is an old already built-out and developed city.

And have you been to Moscow lately?

Current situation aside, Moscow is easily one of the cleanest and most well functioning cities in Europe. There's plenty of construction and a lot of renovation. They recently completed their second ring metro line (second!) complete with beautiful and unique stations:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/12/08/moscow-metro-opens...

It's actually shocking to land there after spending a couple days in NYC. I'd (and many Russians) would argue that there's actually too much investment in Moscow and not enough outside of it.

A lot of Westerns have an distorted understanding of what Moscow is actually like due to how it's (intentionally) depicted in Hollywood. If you want to get an idea of what Moscow feels like check YouTube for the "Lost in Moscow" channel and just scroll through a bunch of their videos. Here's an example:

https://youtu.be/h6vpRtbuJfM

Agreed. As an American who lived in Moscow, I would consider retiring there if Russia wasn't actively hostile to the West. Excellent public transit, much lower cost of living vs the United States, commuter train (electrichka) access to the countryside

The way Russia transitioned from Socialist to Capitalist was a bit of a mess. The widely accepted best practice was to sell state-owned companies to raise capital to operate the state. But Russia didn't want to sell to Western countries for obvious reasons, and citizens from the former Soviet Union weren't well equipped to pay fair prizes. So companies more or less went for pennies to those who could call in the most favors, cementing the corruption that already plagued the USSR.

Of course there are also other factors, like Russia spending a bunch on things that it deems strategically necessary, but that don't result in immediate money flows (like subsidizing cites beyond the Ural).

That is really both hilarious and depressing.

Burning it is better than venting it unburned, which is still subsidized in the US (though some recent, bipartisann EPA changes will hopefully reduce this).

Russia also leaks lots of it unburned too, which new satellite tech will be able to track, so hopefully there will be a global improvement on this front with well regulated oil and gas production being carbon taxed less than irresponsible production.

An easy win, once you can confront people with irrefutable evidence, but sad it takes that do something so simple.

I.e. just pipe it to a genset and just contribute to the local power grid.

The issue is that in the majority locations, the amount of energy to be recaptured is too low, and the location of the landfill is too remote to justify building the infrastucture to distribute it. With bitcoin mining, the energy can be used on-site.

There are many landfill gas projects operating in the US - see https://www.epa.gov/lmop/project-and-landfill-data-state

This is a great option because it helps small and poor municipalities to retrieve the initial cost of setup up a Methane based power plant.

After some x years of BTC mining, the initial investment is fully paid back. Afterwards, they can choose to continue mining BTC or simply hook up the power plant to the electricity grid.

A classic win-win.

Ted Cruz seems to agree on that:

  Ted Cruz Says Bitcoin Mining Can Fix Texas’ Crumbling Electric Grid.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg8yj8/ted-cruz-says-bitcoin...

> Ted Cruz seems to agree on that:

Honestly, even as an optimistic Bitcoiner that is too much of a stretch; Texas' electricity grid is a nightmare of Enron proportions, and at best Bitcoin can provide stabilizers to the grid to offset some unnecessary expenses and turn off it's mining operations when the grid becomes overwhelemed by demand, what is really needed there is much more than what BTC can provide.

It's use and investment into Wind is laudable, but what is needed as complete overhaul of how ERCOT does business, and I honestly doubt a corrupt politician like Ted Cruz (or anyone else from that state) will actually do anything about that as he will just go to Mexico when the grid fails... again.

I said Texas was a bad place to relocate those miners after China banned it, and yet it still provides a significant amount of the hashing power proving the point that it cannot be banned, and even more showed up after the uprising situation in Kazakhstan earlier this year--El Salvador or Tonga could have used them, or even Iceland would have been a better choice. And still it went ahead and mining operations were backed by tech 'luminaries' like Peter Thiel, which were followed by continuous winter and summer based outages and blackouts, proving that just coaxing something as energy demanding as BTC is far more complex than just shoe-horning something that sounds 'green.'

Here is a cool infograph to put the methane budget in context:

https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/12/1561/2020/essd-12-15...

One question I raise is how much of the methane leaks related to oil & gas activity also include accurate data on abandoned oil/gas wells?

The method described in the paper should perhaps in the future confirm the accuracy of the current estimates.

Yes, current data for most of these things are estimates based on complicated extrapolations.

Being able to measure them more accurately, particularly in countries that don't publish any reliable information is going to be interesting.

As far as I'm aware the current new info is generally summarized as "worse than we expected" since overestimates (i.e. accurate estimates) would get heavy pushback without solid data to justify them.

Every time we get better instrumentation and revise that data, the share of emission from fossil fuel handling explodes. I can only imagine it will keep growing until we have satellite surveys of all sources on the entire world.

MethanSAT project description

https://www.methanesat.org/2021/06/28/edf-announces-satellit...