So, I went down a rabbit hole this morning on natural gas. Figured I'd share a TLDR of what I learned.
A. Methane is super bad. Over a twenty-year time frame, it's 84 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2. It does dissipate faster but it's still a huge issue and we don't really know where it's happening. [1]
B. There's a lot of exciting research happening around measuring methane emissions from orbital satellites. We can now see methane emissions in places we might not have looked and over vast areas. [2] [3]
C. Before satellites, the only way to measure it was to fly over or even walk over to places you suspect might be emitting and stick measuring tools in the air. There are some cool visualizations though! [4]
D. These new capabilities shed light on how often emissions aren't being reported by natural gas companies. Last year, an Exxon-subsidiary claimed there was no way to know how much an Ohio-based well had released into the atmosphere, but these scientists showed it was something like 120 metric tons per hour for twenty days, twice the greatest known leak to date. 100 Ohioans had to be evacuated. It was plugged after the scientists reached out "through diplomatic channels"; I guess they have mutual friends, but that's not really a scalable system of oversight. [5]
E. The Trump administration's loosening of oversight and restrictions for natural gas companies is bad for everyone, including humans and polar bears and birds and anything that drinks water, so like yeah all carbon-based life. Stepping up legislation around climate change should include policy around methane gas leaks, including scientific oversight and heavy penalities for leaks. (Carbon pricing is one way to do this; taxes or fees are also probably a solid deterrent but they're less holistic and have different political challenges).
Props to Tarcisio Reis for pointing the Ohio event out to me, prompting this rabbit hole dive.
Sources:
https://www.edf.org/climate/methane-other-important-greenhouse-gas
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/12/10/1908712116
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL083798
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/climate/texas-methane-super-emitters.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/16/climate/methane-leak-satellite.html