Mind you, identifying leaks isn’t enough; it takes actively fixing them and decommissioning the infrastructure which resulted in methane release in the first place.
Are the leaks perchance closely correlated to locations where oil and gas are being mined?
Generally yes. At least with respect to the methane leaks in the Four Corners area, where UT, AZ, NM & CO meet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Corners_Methane_Hot_Spot
However the Siberian one seems to be from methane clathrates as the permafrost melts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate
The larger picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_emissions
Fossil Fuel Use (33%) Animal Agriculture (30%) Plant Agriculture (18%) Waste (15%) All Other (4%)
The fossil fuels numbers are probably an underestimate; up until a few years ago, they were based on self-reported numbers from the industry. There have been a string of papers suggesting they only report about 1/4 of what actually leaks.
They’re still based on self-reported data, unfortunately. This will change in some places in the next few years, but we’re not there yet.
Doubtless. Would you post links to some, any of those?
Mix of scientific papers, political reports on the problem, and news coverage:
- https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c00437
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-40671-6
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq0385
- https://web.archive.org/web/20220611180059/https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/science_committee_majority_staff_report_seeing_ch4_clearly.pdf
- https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/13/us-gas-leaks-report-climate-change
There’s a lot more if you look
TY! I’ll give it a gander when I get a chance. And this puts it in thread of this post for the benefit of others. ;-)
Great! So then regulators can increase their finger wagging rate. If only there were some way to assign cost to pollution, based on output. But that would decrease profit, and we can’t have that….
In the US, the biggest oil and gas industry sources have a significant emissions tax ($900/tonne, rising to $1500 in 2026) attached to them. So they can do a bit more than wag for the worst cases.
It’ll take shifting that down to include smaller sources though, and enforcing that kind of penalty worldwide.
Unfortunately these satellites don’t have a high-enough resolution for oil and gas source attribution in most cases. They’re great for CAFOs and landfills, though.
My understanding is that the plan is to use a mix of high-frequency-low-resolution imaging with less-frequent-higher-resolution images to pinpoint specific leak sources.
That’s true, but because oil and gas emissions are stochastic in nature, it’s expensive and difficult to get enough measurements from airplanes and drones to really fill in the gaps. There are also only so many planes available that can do this kind of measurement. MethaneAir is one. The state of Colorado has funded these kinds of flights, but only for a few weeks per year and only for a small subset of the oil and gas industry in the state.
These flights also have to be planned long in advance and it’s difficult to react to emissions seen from satellites. This part will hopefully improve as time goes on.
