How could a 2 mile long methane plume in New Mexico have been undetected for any significant amount of time?
From what I understand basic environmental monitoring is done in 2022 around all major industrial facilities in the U.S.
From what I understand basic environmental monitoring is done in 2022 around all major industrial facilities in the U.S.
I'm not the least bit surprised it took aerial surveys to notice the situation.
This wasn't a surprise. Laws had been previously passed specifically to allow this to continue.
"Among the dozens of plumes of methane spotted by EMIT so far, one stretches for about two miles in the Permian Basin, a massive oil field southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico. This source of methane emissions was previously undetected, writes Grist’s Avery Schuyler Nunn."
was incorrect.
Odd for the Smithsonian magazine to not fact check this...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62917498
Its not in the US, but once its in the atmosphere, the whodoneit is long gone.
TIL about CBG: Cleaner Burning Gasoline
From https://twitter.com/westurner/status/1564443689623195650 :
> In September 2021 we covered a new "green gasoline" concept from @NaceroCo [in Penwell, TX] that involves constructing gasoline hydrocarbons by assembling smaller #methane molecules from natural gas
From https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Opi... :
> The Inflation Reduction Act imposes a fee of [$900/ton] of methane starting in 2024 — this is roughly twice the current record-high price of natural gas and five times the average price of natural gas in 2020.
> These high fees present a strong incentive
... "Argonne invents reusable [polyurethane] sponge that soaks up oil, could revolutionize oil spill and diesel cleanup" (2017) https://www.anl.gov/article/argonne-invents-reusable-sponge-...
FWIU, heat engines are useful with all thermal gradients: pipes, engines, probably solar panels and attics; "MIT’s new heat engine beats a steam turbine in efficiency" (2022) https://www.freethink.com/environment/heat-engine
Are there existing methods for capturing methane from insufficiently-capped old wells?
Are the new incentives/fees/fines enough to motivate action thus far in this space?
OpenAPI is one way to specify integrable APIs. An RDFS vocabulary for this data is probably worthwhile; e.g. NASA Earth Science (?) may have a schema that all of the state APIs could voluntarily adopt?
Presumably the CophenHill facility handles waste methane? We should build waste-to-energy facilities in the US, too
FWIU Carbon Credits do not cover methane, which is worse than CO² for #ActOnClimate
Data quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_quality
... Space -based imaging.
How long should they wait to up the methane fee if it's not enough to incentivize capping closed wells?
A. Privately and/or Publicly grant to P&A wells
($25k+ * n_wells)
+ ($7-8m+ * m_wells)
C. increase the incentives/fines/fees
**
Shouldn't it be pretty easy to find such tools with IDK neutron detection and/or imaging at what distance?
I am very much looking forward to more and more satellites like this one and ESA's SENTINEL-5P and SCIAMACHY. But AFAIK they'll never be able to tell the difference between, say, ethyl acrylate vs. butyl acrylate (both incredibly toxic) or ethyl mercaptan vs. methyl mercaptan (both noxious/cause headaches at unbelievably low concentrations; ethyl mercaptan has an odor threshold of 0.35 parts per trillion).
So if one plant makes one chemical, and another plant next door makes a similar chemical, these satellites might let the public know that one of the plants is leaking, but both still would have deniability - "it's the other guy across the street". And you'd still not actually know which chemical you've been exposed to.
For that, you'd need monitoring stations with comprehensive sensor combinations at the property boundaries of each chemical plant.
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I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with {sulfur, N-O bonds, aromatic carbon rings} -- no clue what precisely though!". This is the same capability of the most advanced atmospheric pollution satellites. Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals. The technology to measure individual chemicals exists, but the government isn't paying for it or installing it.
The ENTIRE east side of Houston metropolitan area is dedicated to or "next door" to massive chemical manufacturing. This is an industrial area nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond/Renton/Tukwila. This massive area has only 3 air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals[0]. During huge major events like the ITC fire[2], they often show no increased pollution at all. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But the 3 monitoring sites over 10 miles from me showed nothing at all.
Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the chemical plants of Houston: [0]... but several of its analyzers are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of all the other ones: [1] Generally single/dual color dots mark "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5 or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally useful, they measure specific (large) families of chemicals so you can see very roughly what is leaking, even if it doesn't have "soot" in it.
The data used by ProPublica is actually far worse than the woefully inadequate data collected by TCEQ/EPA air monitoring stations -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical plants. But I know from working in them and living next to them that many leaks are never reported and many leaks are never even known internally! Our government's data collection is a travesty. ProPublica couldn't use the real air quality measurements because having 2-3 points across 1000 mi^2 is completely useless for the wind models they wanted to apply to the problem.
We don't actually have any data. The government is failing us. They need to spend about $1 million per air monitoring station and build them along the perimeters of each plant so that leaks can be assigned to the offending companies, and they need to be built near housing so that we know how families are being affected. ITC fire which blanketed houston's sky in smoke: [2]
0: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...
1: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...
2: https://abc13.com/deer-park-fire-2019-itc-houston-air-qualit...
It seems to be succeeding for the plant operators, though.
A number of days after the water receded from hurricane Harvey I didn't need an instrument to smell the lingering 2EH that had washed in with it. Probably from Bayport and reached as far away as at least Genoa.