Millions of Abandoned Oil Wells Are Leaking Methane, a Climate Menace (reuters.com) 153
More than a century of oil and gas drilling has left behind millions of abandoned wells, many of which are leaching pollutants into the air and water. And drilling companies are likely to abandon many more wells due to bankruptcies, as oil prices struggle to recover from historic lows after the coronavirus pandemic crushed global fuel demand, according to bankruptcy lawyers, industry analysts and state regulators. Reuters reports: Leaks from abandoned wells have long been recognized as an environmental problem, a health hazard and a public nuisance. They have been linked to dozens of instances of groundwater contamination by research commissioned by the Groundwater Protection Council, whose members include state ground water agencies. Orphaned wells have been blamed for a slew of public safety incidents over the years, including a methane blowout at the construction site of a waterfront hotel in California last year. They also pose a serious threat to the climate that researchers and world governments are only starting to understand, according to a Reuters review of government data and interviews with scientists, regulators, and United Nations officials. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year recommended that U.N. member countries start tracking and publishing the amount of methane leaching from their abandoned oil and gas wells after scientists started flagging it as a global warming risk. So far, the United States and Canada are the only nations to do so.
The U.S. figures are sobering: More than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells together emitted 281 kilotons of methane in 2018, according to the data, which was included in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's most recent report on April 14 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That's the climate-damage equivalent of consuming about 16 million barrels of crude oil, according to an EPA calculation, or about as much as the United States, the world's biggest oil consumer, uses in a typical day. The actual amount could be as much as three times higher, the EPA says, because of incomplete data. The agency believes most of the methane comes from the more than 2 million abandoned wells it estimates were never properly plugged.
The U.S. figures are sobering: More than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells together emitted 281 kilotons of methane in 2018, according to the data, which was included in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's most recent report on April 14 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That's the climate-damage equivalent of consuming about 16 million barrels of crude oil, according to an EPA calculation, or about as much as the United States, the world's biggest oil consumer, uses in a typical day. The actual amount could be as much as three times higher, the EPA says, because of incomplete data. The agency believes most of the methane comes from the more than 2 million abandoned wells it estimates were never properly plugged.
Methane is only a shirt term atmospheric pollutant (Score:3, Insightful)
Its has a half life in the atmosphere of only 9 years so the vast majority if that release from these old wells has already been converted to water and co2. Other long lived industrial greenhouse pollutants such as flourocarbons and sulphur hex a flouride are far more worrying IMO.
Re:Methane is only a shirt term atmospheric pollut (Score:5, Informative)
First, half life of 9 years doesn't mean that after 18 years the stuff is completely gone. Second, it converts to CO2 which is also a greenhouse gas.
Re:Methane is only a shirt term atmospheric pollut (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh, I so wish I had mod points today. That was a good one.
Re: "Data"?? Bullshit. (Score:3)
That's total crap. They do have data from a subset of those wells. That's data. Hard numbers. Then they have to go through extensive modeling using that data to extrapolate to the whole set of wells. That's a very hard thing to do, and leads to large error bars (which are scrutinized by the community). But they go through great pains to try to minimize that uncertainty by making measurements from a representative number of wells. If you want to know more, RTF papers the story is based upon. There's years of
Re: "Data"?? Bullshit. (Score:3)
Re: "Data"?? Bullshit. (Score:3)
So you're saying conclusions can never be made via extrapolation? Good, then don't trust when researchers determine the efficacy of a drug based upon drug trials. Don't trust that the sun will come up tomorrow extrapolating upon previous experience and a "model". Don't trust any medical advice that isn't based upon testing all 7 billion people on Earth. Don't trust anything that draws conclusions from a statistical sampling of a subpopulation.
Let's do some quick math. It takes at least $1000 to measure lea
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Don't think you can really equate a well to a drug. A drug is a known quantity.
Wells can be great wells or shit wells. If your initial set of data is comprised of shit wells, you will extrapolate that shit to all the wells.
And you can be damned sure it will take more than $1,000 each to remediate 3.2 million leaking wells if we assume the worst so your money argument is shit.
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A drug may be a known quantity, but human bodies are quite variable. So I propose that we must test future drugs on 100% of humanity before we can really say they're effective.
Because really, humans can be great humans or shit humans, and if your initial set of test data is comprised of shit humans, you will extrapolate that shit to all humans.
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You pretty much illustrated why trying to use Drug testing as a way to argue for models and extrapolating data from wells is a stupid argument.
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Then it seems you completely missed my point. Drugs are tested, validated, and released to the market all the time using models and extrapolations from limited sample sizes (or do you really believe drugs are only vetted when they've tested them on the entire population?).
There are long and well established fields of study that describe how to set up a sampling regime or study to ensure proper description of the sample. This is not rocket science, nor is it any new development. Although I do notice people t
There are satellites that measure methane in the a (Score:3)
The point is that you don't know if the data is representative of all wells unless you measure them all, or at least a major portion of them.
This is doable. There are satellites that measure methane in the atmosphere.
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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Yeah, too bad there's not a field of study out there that deals with how to characterize a large system by sampling a portion of it. Such a field of study could even explore ways to determine if a given number of samples is significant in some way, and if it sufficiently captures the variability of said system. Someone should really get on this, as I imagine it could be extremely useful in advancing our understanding in science, economics, sociology, and so many other fields! /s
decimal dust (Score:2)
Indeed, the data are problematic (both in scale, if true; and veracity if not truly vetted). However, compare this to the Aliso Canyon gas leak where approximately 107 thousand tons of methane (and 8 thousand tons of ethane) were released from one source. Also, let's not forget how much methane is being released by wells and exploration just in the Gulf of Mexico. Offshore drilling wells, especially in deep water, is where we should be focusing our attention. Also, before many of the test wells are capp
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Thanks for your input, comrade. We all need to be reminded that all science is inherently dishonest and corrupt.
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Their extrapolations have plenty of hard data behind them. The oil companies and the EPA at a minimum have been investigating leaks from abandoned wells since the 1970s at least (I saw them doing it in Michigan.) This looks like the first actual comprehensive survey rather than just spot checks, but they know how to do them really well with 50 years of experience.
Re: Methane is only a shirt term atmospheric pollu (Score:2, Troll)
So it wont be gone after 18 years? Noooo, say it ain't so! Well thanks for the heads up there Einstein.
FYI CO2 is a far less powerful greenhouse gas than methane so CH4 being converted to CO2 makes a big difference.
Re: Methane is only a shirt term atmospheric pollu (Score:4, Informative)
Duh, iz it a bad bad fing? Duh ok.
Heres the deal moron: Yes it should be stopped, but according to the artiel 281,000 tons of methane escaped in 2018. Most of that will become a similar amount of CO2 and given man made activities release 100 MILLION tons of CO2 PER DAY that 281K is a statistical blip.
you are right for the wrong reason (Score:2)
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Roughly over 100 years
If you're going to multiply one side of the equation you also have to multiply the other side otherwise you're cheating. It's 28 million tonnes compared to 10 billion tonnes over 100 years. Again, just a statistical blip. What is 1/4 of a day compared to 100 years?
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The issue is responsibility. Someone built those wells and didn't decommission them properly. We need to figure out who and make them pay to fix it.
Re: Methane is only a shirt term atmospheric pollu (Score:5, Insightful)
Most orphan wells are the result of operators who go bankrupt, and many are never even developed into producing wells.
In well-funded oil & gas producing US States, like Texas, abandoned wells are plugged by the oil industry-funded State Railroad Commission. Methane emissions aside, the protection of groundwater quality is an important concern.
Government cleanup of these corporate messes is less well done in other US States, especially if the abandoned wells are in places without much current oil and gas activity. Imagine the nightmare of contamination that occurs in busted nations like Venezuela.
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If a nuclear reactor company went bankrupt, would they be allowed to just leave their spent fuel spewing radiation into the environment? So why should an oil company be allowed to do the same?
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If a nuclear reactor company went bankrupt, would they be allowed to just leave their spent fuel spewing radiation into the environment? So why should an oil company be allowed to do the same?
What you going to do, unbankrupt them? And as to your question the answer is yes for the same reason. This is precisely why the insurance costs of the nuclear industry present an almost insurmountable barrier to building a new nuclear reactor in the west. The government literally relies them to set aside or secure funding precisely for that event.
The same is not required of the oil industry. Fortunately most of the big players are somewhat responsible in this regard. You've heard of CAPEX and OPEX right? Th
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No, dumbass, you said it yourself up thread. Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas. Approximately 25X that of CO2. So for the first 9-12 years the methane is in the atmosphere the equivalent in CO2 would be 25 times the the methane tonnage... tapering to lower numbers as it decays to CO2. That is assuming no NEW methane was introduced though.
As an aside, the leaks are wasted money. We want methane for fuel. We spend a ton of money exploring and making new wells to get it. And here people are just
Natural gas is dirt cheap [Re: Methane is onl ...] (Score:3)
...As an aside, the leaks are wasted money. We want methane for fuel. We spend a ton of money exploring and making new wells to get it. And here people are just letting free money go up into the atmosphere, where we don't want it to be. It may not be AS profitable as a high producing well....
Exactly. Natural gas is dirt cheap. It's not economical to capture minor leaks like these.
from the summary: "2 million abandoned oil and gas wells together emitted 281 kilotons of methane".
That averages 140 kg per well. At 3.6 dollars per thousand cubic feet, that's maybe 20 dollars worth of natural gas wasted per well per year. It would take hundreds of times that much money to run a pipeline to the well to capture it.
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You wouldn't need a pipeline. Much like single wells on properties in Texas and surrounding states, a storage tank that gets emptied when it periodically gets full would suffice in most cases. It would be a nice bumper cash flow for any company that gets to set up on abandoned wells. Cash that could go towards more exploration. And this would be free money in short order, once the wells pay for themselves.
You would obviously cap off and seal the small leakers, but methane capture from the larger offenders c
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You wouldn't need a pipeline. Much like single wells on properties in Texas and surrounding states, a storage tank that gets emptied when it periodically gets full would suffice in most cases.
Twenty dollars a year won't pay for the storage tank, much less the truck that goes and empties it when it gets full.
On all of these fossil-fuel discussions, alway evaluate them while keeping firmly in mind fossil fuels are dirt cheap.
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The atmosphere contains about 5 billion tonnes of methane.
If the half-life is 9 years, that means 300 million tonnes are added annually.
So the 281000 tonnes mentioned in TFA is 0.1%.
Perhaps we should be worried about the other 99.9%.
Re:Methane is only a shirt term atmospheric pollut (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this calculation is that it assumed the ideal is 0 tonnes of methane in the atmosphere, and it's not. How much is this adding above the sustainable level is the question.
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The problem with this calculation is that it assumed the ideal is 0 tonnes of methane in the atmosphere, and it's not. How much is this adding above the sustainable level is the question.
So for context, let's calculate the average annual methane released into the atmosphere by America's largest swamp, the Florida Everglades.
The Everglades today are ~5600 square kilometers [intechopen.com], 90% of which are rich peat bogs. The median rate of methane release from rich peat is 48 grams C per square meter per year [ufl.edu], 80% of which is oxidized before it reaches the surface of the water.
5600 km^2 * 0.9 * 48 g C/m^2 * 0.2 = 48,384 tonnes per year, naturally emitted methane plus 193,536 tonnes per year of carbon diox
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Its has a half life in the atmosphere of only 9 years so the vast majority if that release from these old wells has already been converted to water and co2.
First, half life of 9 years doesn't mean that after 18 years the stuff is completely gone. Second, it converts to CO2 which is also a greenhouse gas.
But this is an ongoing leak of methane into the atmosphere, which nobody is going to stop because nobody really cares about non-producing wells.
So it doesn't "go away" with a half life of 9 years: it's constantly being replenished.
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Indeed but this is not new. TFA is talking about the human history of wells. It's not like we are abandoning massive amounts of new leaky wells continuously pushing the greenhouse gas emissions up. At this point it's almost a baseline source of warming rather than an increasing one.
I'd be more concerned about the groundwater contamination of this. The global warming angle is far less of an impact than farming or say setting on fire the things we got out of these wells in the first place.
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The 281K tons of methane emitted in 2018 needs to be put into context - man made activities emit 100 million tons of CO2 PER DAY.
True, even if 30x more efficient greenhouse gas (Score:2)
Yes, that's true. However, remember that methane is a much more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2 - it would contribute around 30x more to warming than CO2 for the same amount of gas. See for example https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio... [epa.gov]
This won't change the reasoning, but good to know. Also still good to try mitigating - every source has to be capped (literally in this case) if possible.
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Well it is going to need to fall on the Tax payers to pay for the sealing, because we tax payers didn't want to pay for the regulations and monitoring of these companies to make sure they were doing the right things while they were in business.
Free market solution? [Re:Methane is only a sh...] (Score:2)
Good thing I don't have mod points; wouldn't know whether to mod that "insightful" or "clueless."
In fact, the problem could go away with a free market solution if it were possible to make people who are responsible for negative effects pay for the negative effects that they cause.
But, with negative effects distributed across the planet, and with a thousand or more polluters causing those negative effects, there's just no way to accurately asses the negative effects to the individual polluters.
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The Tragedy of the Commons, writ large. Considering that many (most?) of the shut down wells no longer have a financially-viable owner so there's no one to sue even if you could assess value/damage. Even ones drilled by the big companies have probably been "sold" or reassigned to holding companies that were spun off and then allowed to go bankrupt. (A common way to get rid of unwanted liabilities in the '70s and '80s, still used in some countries where it hasn't been outlawed.)
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Remember Love Canal and Hooker Chemical? Hooker used Love Canal as a dump site for years, then stopped using it and sealed it. Later, the local school district extorted Hooker into selling the property for $1, while Hooker repeatedly warned the board and the general public of the danger of building on the site. The school district built anyway, and people got sick. Occidental Petroleum, which had bought Hooker, was held financially responsible for damages by the federal government despite Hooker having foll
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The town I live in makes mining operations post and maintain a bond for environmental recovery. When operations cease the site is either repaired by the mining entity or the bond is used by the town to fix the site.
Libertarianism is not anarchy, and it does not ignore human nature just because it recognizes that freedom is a good thing.
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But if you constantly replenish it in the atmosphere, then the level won't go down.
Only if you're dumping a large amount into the atmosphere. Otherwise a steady state is reached over time, and it's a fraction of the amount you're adding plus whatever occurs naturally.
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We might be better off just setting fire to each gas-emitting well. That means the gas will be emitted as CO2 right away.
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Pennies per day [Re:Methane is only a shirt te...] (Score:3)
If only we could harness that energy from the fire.....
Yes! At the price of fossil fuels, some of those methane leaks could generate many pennies worth of value per day!
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All of which is true, but it ignores the fact that methane is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, so much so that the net effect of a ton of methane emitted, over the course of the following century, is dozens of times greater than ton of CO2.
The extremely long half life of CO2 means that it's like a ratchet; CO2 levels in our lifetime only go one way. But *methane* levels are something we can do something about in the short term. What's more methane *leaks* are emissions that aren't doing anything usefu
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Decaying organic matter, for instance the leaves that fall each autumn, create methane as they decompose. To fix this problem, we must cut down all forests and seal the resultant wood waste in stainless steel tanks. Then sow all land with strong herbicides to prevent the creation of new organic matter.
Alternately, we could judge relative risks and not act stupidly.
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Translations: "LA LA LA!!!! Here is an unrelated scientific fact so to make us think that we don't have to worry about problems!"
Re: Methane is only a shirt term atmospheric pollu (Score:2)
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Yes and no. Increased methane means the permafrost melts faster releasing more CO2. The increase in temperatures also cause more energy use in air conditioning. To the extent the grid is carbon based, yet more CO2.
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What about it? They have their own problems too. However an interesting thing with a world of over 6 billion people, we can work on multiple problems at once. Heck it is often more effective, as having 6 billion people working on only 1 problem at once wouldn't be too efficient.
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A waste, but hardly a catastrophe (Score:4, Informative)
Why do journalists have to exaggerate everything? "The U.S. figures are sobering" TFS then goes on to point out that the annual amount is equivalent to one day's usage of oil. So about 0.3% of oil usage, and excluding any other sources of CO2 or methane. Molehills...
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Responsible governments... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Responsible governments... (Score:4, Insightful)
Responsible governments would track down the money that was taken in profits and seize it for the purpose of correcting the mistakes that threaten our existence. But yet again, it will be the poorest that end up paying the most.
Genuine question: why does your chain of responsibility stop there? YOU bought that oil. You used it to power your car. You used it to ship food in large tracks to your local supermarket. The way I see it, you profited massively from all these things. So why shouldn't you (also) pay?
Without consumers, without people buying oil for all sorts of things, I think it's safe to say that it would have been left in the ground. So first you wanted it, but now you want the person that you paid to get it for you to clean it up for free. Why aren't you paying for that as well?
Re:Responsible governments... (Score:4, Insightful)
Shouldn't that be priced into the product?
But even if it isn't, the reality is that WE ARE. As citizens and taxpayers, we're the ONLY ones on the hook right now. I don't want oil companies to clean things up for free, I want the government to pass regulations that this shit is illegal (and it already sort of is) and then put a bunch of money in trust in case the company goes bankrupt, and then I want for the cleanup to be paid for. And if a company can't front that money or afford it, then the well should never be drilled.
But the oil companies run lobby groups far more powerful than my vote and my letters, and so no matter what I actually want and where I think the responsibility lies or whether or not I'm willing to pay more for energy, it's irrelevant, because the laws are casually flouted or worked around or never put in place at all.
Given the profits that the oil industry at large has accumulated over the years, I'd say that they priced in more than enough space to at least clean up their messes if we wanted them to; that gap between their costs and revenues never should have existed in the first place. We're asking for nothing 'for free', we're asking for debts to be paid.
That's what we so in Texas (Score:2)
You pretty much described how it works in Texas. But then, the oil industry was extremely important here for a few decades, so we had motivation to get it right.
Canada's cleaning them up (Score:5, Interesting)
As part of an effort to keep skilled oil workers working, the Canadian government's hiring them to close down abandoned wells properly. And the courts have ruled that their owners can't just sell them to a shell company that then goes bankrupt.
I speculate the oil companies will soon find themselves paying the Government back, while it in turn is looking for people to employ and money to invest in wind, solar, pumped storage and batteries.
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As a land owner with several abandoned wells on my property (and my cousin has many on his), I'm definitely happy to see the government finally taking the orphan wells and orphan pipeline problem seriously. Conservative governments have never taken it seriously, despite our lobbying (a lot of rural land owners vote conservative; you'd think they'd listen).
Besides the global environmental impact that this article mentions, there's also the issue of local land contamination. Abandoned pipelines, of which ther
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I speculate the oil companies will soon find themselves paying the Government back, while it in turn is looking for people to employ and money to invest in wind, solar, pumped storage and batteries.
Wind, solar, and storage will not be sufficient to meet our energy needs. We will also need hydro, geothermal, and (most of all) nuclear fission as well.
We will also need a source of transportation fuels besides petroleum. That can be from synthesized hydrocarbons, which can be net zero carbon by using municipal and industrial waste, or CO2 from the air, as the source of carbon for the synthetic fuel. We can build electric commuter cars and trains but airplanes need kerosene to fly. We can propel large
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Responsible governments would track down the money that was taken in profits and seize it for the purpose of correcting the mistakes that threaten our existence. But yet again, it will be the poorest that end up paying the most.
Okay, so the government takes this money. Now, what assurances do we have that once the government has this money that it will go towards the intended goals of fixing the problem?
You know the government collects taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel, no? This is called a "road tax", because it's supposed to fund the building and maintaining of the roads. How much of this money actually goes to fix roads? Or bridges? I seem to recall a couple bridges collapsing in my lifetime. These were not unknown issues
People that drop their trash where they stand (Score:3)
Only on a corporate level. I expect the only fix is to have anybody that wants to drill having to make a security deposit that covers fixing up their mess or at least get insurance that covers it. And then making sure the mess actually gets fixed. Probably need to make a business out of that fixing activity.
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Bechtel? I've heard of them before. After looking them up I recalled where. They were brought in on projects like the Hoover Dam, the Chernobyl New Confinement structure, the Watts Bar and Votgle nuclear power stations, several solar thermal power projects, the cleanup of burning oil wells in Kuwait, destruction of nerve gas and other chemical weapons collected from World War I to today, and in the cleanup of radioactive messes from the Manhattan Project. They are also responsible for many submarine nuc
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As far as I know, that's already theoretically the case in many jurisdictions. The problem is that usually the deposit is too small, and the government is eager to bend over backwards to accommodate these small drilling companies in the name of jobs and the economy. At least, that's how it's been in Alberta. Regulators are so thoroughly in the pocket of the oil industry, nothing ever really changes.
Could be harvested? (Score:3)
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Leaking methane is rarely leaking at rates which make it economical to compress or liquefy. That's ultimately the problem.
Who's news is good news? (Score:2)
Methane Vents Set on Fire (Score:2)
You lost me at "a typical day" (Score:2)
That said, it is low-hanging fruit. We might as well make sure they're properly sealed, but while keeping the cost/benefit ratio firmly in mind.
What should we be doing instead? (Score:3)
There is no perfect energy source. Everything is a compromise. You don't like the methane released from natural gas wells? Okay then, provide an alternative.
As it is now, or at least as of 2018 according to the pie chart I found at the Wikipedia link below, we get roughly 1/3rd of our energy in the USA from natural gas. What's supposed to replace that if we aren't drilling for more continuously?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Also in that chart we will see about 1/3rd of our energy comes from petroleum. That last 1/3rd is split roughly equally between nuclear, coal, and renewable energy. If you believe coal and petroleum to be a problem then it's not a matter of replacing just 1/3rd of our energy needs with something more acceptable, it's now 2/3rds. Then we have the knuckleheads like Representative Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Sanders that don't like hydroelectric dams or nuclear power either. So, we've had at least 40 years of government incentives to get people to use more wind and solar energy and all we have to show for it is maybe meeting 10% of our total energy needs from wind and solar. When in fact it's really just wind because solar is a rounding error in comparison to everything else.
So, what do you want?
This is what I want. I want people to look at the numbers. Or, using the words of these knuckleheads, "look at the science" and come up with a solution that can actually work. We aren't going to get rid of natural gas any time soon, but we can at least create a path in which our needs for it will get lower year over year. Make a list of all the energy sources available to us today, rank them in two lists, one on the least CO2 emitted per energy output, and another by cost of the energy output. On those lists you will see nuclear fission, hydro, onshore wind, and geothermal come out on top. Since we must take into account the reality of the situation we will have to keep natural gas on the list of our future energy supply for the foreseeable future. Again, it's on the list but the plan is to make the contribution of natural gas to our energy supply lower every year.
How can we replace petroleum fuels with our list of top five energy sources? By synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels. This is an existing technology, and has existed for over a century. We can improve on the technology and get the energy from our top five and then carbon for the process from the air to close the carbon loop. Closing the loop on this means no net CO2 added to the air.
You don't like my plan? Fine, come up with your own. I want to see people talk about solutions that can actually work. Knuckleheads that keep talking about abandoning nuclear and hydro are not helping. There is no future in which we can keep our modern lifestyle and not use both nuclear and hydro.
The future is onshore wind, hydro, geothermal, nuclear fission, and some natural gas to help us through the transition. Energy for transportation will be from synthesized hydrocarbons, some natural gas, electric commuter cars and trains, and large ships with nuclear power plants onboard. Solar power will continue to be within a rounding error in future contributions to our energy supply.
Government will not fix this (Score:2)
Here's an article I saw today that I believe to be relevant here.
https://www.manhattancontraria... [manhattancontrarian.com]
The point is that the government is as "addicted" to natural gas and petroleum as anyone. But then we hear, "We won't tax the oil and gas, we'll sue them for the money to pay for the damage they did!" If the money is going to the government then it's a distinction without a difference. This still creates a constant stream of revenue for the government from which it can draw. Shouldn't this money go towards
Low hanging fruit (Score:2)
This is one of the most simply obvious things we should be fixing. We need to use every simple chance we have to help our odds of avoiding climate breakdown. Sealing the old wells is one obvious solution.
Here's another. We should be burning that methane, harvesting that energy, to mitigate runaway climate change.
Here's why. Methane may be short-lived in the atmosphere, but its effects are drastic. When it gets sequestered in ice form on the ocean floor, for example, a bit of greenhouse gas enough to cr
Bet we fuck this up some more (Score:2)
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More than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells together emitted 281 kilotons of methane in 2018, according to the data
So if each well produces, on average, 281,000 tons/3,200,000 wells, or 0.088 tons of Methane per year(that's 176 pounds/methane per well, per year, or less than half a pound a day, on average), how large a community can such a well provide fuel for? You do realize these wells were capped/abandoned because they were not worth operating, right? The economics don't suddenly change when you plan to use the methane locally. I don't think I could run a home gas grill for 24 hours on a half-pound of fuel... [santaenergy.com]
By the numbers... (Score:2)
The U.S. figures are sobering: More than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells together emitted 281 kilotons of methane in 2018, according to the data, which was included in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's most recent report on April 14 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That's the climate-damage equivalent of consuming about 16 million barrels of crude oil, according to an EPA calculation, or about as much as the United States, the world's biggest oil consumer, uses in a typical day . The actual amount could be as much as three times higher, the EPA says, because of incomplete data. The agency believes most of the methane comes from the more than 2 million abandoned wells it estimates were never properly plugged.
So this "crisis" is that in the US, over the course of one year, about one day's worth of crude oil consumption is leaked out of 2-3.2 million improperly capped abandoned oil wells? Seriously? If we properly capped every one of the 2-3.2 million abandoned oil wells the US carbon footprint would be reduced by 1/365th, or less than one-third of one percent? Is anyone arguing this is a significant difference, one-third of one percent?
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I'm not looking for him, and please don't post those links, even at -1. Thank you.
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Sure, but it probably costs more to harvest methane from those leaks than it would to gather it from cheaper, better sources. Remember that some active oil well operators still flare off methane since it would cost more to capture it and sell it on the open market.
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it probably costs more
If people are running around screaming that the world is going to end because of this methane, then it's impossible for it to be "too expensive". Any price is ok...
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Any price is OK, for the generations who will be affected. Unfortunately the ones currently in control are going to die off before it gets really bad.
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Cost represents effort required (with some variation). If you run out of money and go out of business, the leaks are still happening and you can't capture anything. That's why people tend to avoid things over cost.
If one therm (100 cubic feet) of LNG from "stray sources" costs X and the market value of that one therm is Y where Y X, then you lose money capturing it and you go under eventually.
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Sounds like we need to hook up methane powered PCs to the sealed wells locally and just generate bitcoin. Convert a well farm into a bitcoin farm. The end product is trivial to move out even from the most remote locations and consumption can be throttled automatically if methane output goes down over time.
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Someone should come up with a cheap method of solving world hunger, extracting carbon from the atmosphere, and manufacturing high end GPUs for my gaming rig.
The problem it technical and logistical. You can't just capture it. You have to do something with it. Do you put it in a ship and send it to shore? The greenhouse gas emissions of that alone would outweigh the benefit. So you could run flare gas recovery, for that you need either high pressure compression or liquification both of which add high double d
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There is. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, there is. A thermoacoustic gas liquifier [phys.org]. Here's a description of the guts of one design [lanl.gov].
This is a device that:
- Burns about 35% of the well natural gas to drive a thermoacoustic heat engine, generating power as high intensity sound inside its plumbing. (Burning methane to CO2 is very good, because methane is about 30 times as greenhouse-boosting.)
- Uses the sound power to drive a thermoacoustic refrigertor, cooling and liquifying the remaining 65% of the gas, producing Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). This is much easier to collect and ship than NON-liquified natural gas, making it economic to haul it off and sell it - to be burned into CO2, yay!
The device is basically some plumbing containing helium pressurized to about ten atmospheres. Moving parts are the helium, the natural gas, and maybe a valve in the burner. Haul it and an LNG storage tank out to a well, plumb it in, light the burner, and come back occasionally with a truck to haul away the LNG.
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Who are you going to negotiate with? Chemistry? You know that effect of some chemicals and their property of insulating heat is really inconvenient to us. Lets say you don't do that, But break apart into Oxygen, and perfectly Aligned Carbon Nanotubes. In exchange we will give you central Australia as your own territory. No? How about the Southern coast?
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Don't you think displacing 1.677 million people would be worth fixing climate change. What are you some type of commie or something?
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personal responsibility
Corporate 'persons' have the superpower that allows them to de-materialize in one location and reappear somewhere else.
Nothing personal, kid.
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