Climate Crisis: An invisible, odorless gas pits Texas against the Biden government

by

More importantly, it also measures methane, which is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over the next 20 years. You know it better as natural gas. Heating and cooking aren’t the only culprits of methane. Two thirds of emissions come from farm cows, factory farms and rotting landfills. But as any Texan will tell you, it’s much easier to control gas coming out of the ground than gas coming out of cows.

The “greenhouse effect” was discovered before women could vote (in fact by a suffragist), but in 2021, the metaphor for indoor gardening does not match the emergency. Instead, imagine a baby in a hot car. Carbon dioxide is like steel and glass that traps the sun’s rays as they bounce off the windshield. Methane provides the equivalent of turning on the car’s heating; it works much faster but is easier to control in the long run. Planet Earth is of course the baby.
Without the tools of a methane hunter, you can’t see or smell natural gas, but virtually all of Earth’s peer-reviewed scientists agree that in order for life on Earth to survive with any semblance today, it must go the way of the dodo along with coal and oil. Climatologists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tell us that deadly changes will only get worse until people stop using fuels that burn and leak.
But in Texas, methane is so abundant and cheap that it escaped largely unseen and unmeasured until both the Environmental Defense Fund and the oil producers started using tools like the Picarro spectrometer. Scientific Aviation, based in Boulder, Colorado, owns these and will be sniffing the air for all kinds of customers, but only the EDF makes the data public.
Mackenzie Smith, a senior scientist at Scientific Aviation, checks the measurements of the instruments that measure gases such as methane in the atmosphere.
“What we’ve discovered here in the Permian basin is that operators are wasting enough gas to heat about 2 million homes a year,” said Kelsey Robinson, project manager for EDF’s PermianMAP project.
Sometimes the methane leaks from faulty equipment or from the tens of thousands of orphaned sources. Sometimes when no one is there to buy it, they just burn it in a practice called flaring. Former President Donald Trump tried to do away with all the rules on methane, a move so extreme that even ExxonMobil was against it. But until President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency can navigate the legal traps left by the Trump administration’s giveaways to methane speakers, it’s up to the oil and gas companies to fix a problem that no one can see. or smell.

“We found that the Permian Basin radiates more than double that of any other oil and gas region in the United States,” said Robinson.

Ban all prohibitions

Named after Earth’s greatest mass extinction, the Permian basin is so flat you’d swear you can see the curvature of the Earth in the bed of a pickup truck. When oily, gaseous, combustible evidence of the Great Dying – the nickname given to the mass extinction that marked the end of the Permian geological period – was found beneath the red earth, Midland and Odessa grew into the vena cava of the oil of the state. industry, the setting for “Friday Night Lights” and the perfect spot for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to fire the first shot in a 2021 methane civil war.
The Permian Basin, which covers most of West Texas, is flat, wide open, and sits atop a lot of oil.
“I’m in Midland to make it clear that Texas is going to protect the oil and gas industry from any kind of hostile attack from Washington, DC,” said Abbott, days after Biden signed his first round of executive orders targeting a climate. in crisis.

Then the Republican governor signed his own executive order, ordering any government agency to give him every reason to sue the Biden government and stop the clean energy efforts. By calling on cities like San Francisco, where a movement is growing to ban natural gas stoves and appliances from new construction, Abbott vowed to ban all bans.

“In Texas, we won’t let cities use political correctness to dictate which energy source you use,” he said. “So I support legislation that prohibits cities and counties from banning natural gas appliances.”

But as a sign of the changing times, Abbott’s fierce opposition to the Paris Agreement puts him at odds with the statements and sound bites of Big Oil’s biggest lobbyist.

“We think the threat of climate change is very real,” Mike Sommers, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute (API), told CNN. “We support both industry and federal government actions in the United States and around the world to address this very important issue that we know is existential in nature.”

As more European energy companies embrace a green transition, France’s Total became the first oil giant to lift its API membership, citing differences over a carbon tax, subsidies for electric cars and … methane. In October, the French government stepped in to block a $ 7 billion deal and decided that Texas liquefied natural gas is too dirty for their standards.
But Sommers says the API is willing to work with the Biden administration to regulate new and existing methane sources.

A call for more pipelines

As for Biden to be an existential threat to oil and gas, Sommers seems less concerned, arguing there is no need to switch them to geothermal, solar or wind, as the world will demand fuels that will burn and leak for generations .

“This industry currently provides about 60% of the world’s energy,” he said. “And the trend that there will be a transition in energy. But I am also confident that this industry will be around for a long time to come.”

Signs of old and new strength: An oil pump pack sits between wind turbines outside Odessa, Texas.

To solve the methane problem, he argues that if America only had more pipelines, the industry wouldn’t need to burn so much natural gas unnecessarily.

“I think the biggest challenge we have from an emissions perspective is frankly getting our infrastructure right,” said Sommers. “We need to make sure we have pipelines to get these products to market as quickly as possible. And that means we need a regulatory structure that allows these pipelines to be built.”

Kelsey Robinson of the EDF has a simpler idea. “Cutting methane emissions actually creates a job in and of itself because we need people to investigate these sites and then take steps to fix those leaks.”

“There’s no point in burning it,” said Texas state geologist Scott Tinker as we stroll outside his office on the extensive Texas rock garden map. “They don’t have the collection systems to catch it. So instead of leaking the methane, they burn it and they leak CO2. CO2 as a product is better than methane if you are going to put something into the atmosphere. But it is” it would be much better to collect it. “

Texas state geologist Scott Tinker agrees it would be better to collect methane, but says progress could be slow.

After the 2008 recession, Tinker says the fracking boom took West Texas by surprise. Years of oil field decline saw a renaissance as the new method of injecting water into shale doubled oil production and created invisible streams of methane that it could not capture.

“The conversation is shifting,” said Tinker, after pressure from the public and shareholders. “It is happening, but it is slow, it costs a lot of money, requires approval for the pipelines. It takes an industry and a regulatory system that made this happen.”

Sommers emphasizes that its API members are taking the issue seriously, with 70% of onshore producers joining the Environmental Partnership, which is all about reducing methane emissions within the oil and gas industry, he said.

“It brings together producers, big and small, to share technology and best practices to reduce methane emissions,” he said. “And it works.”

Check-in from space

But far beyond the methane problem, the only way to save life on Earth as well as the fossil fuel industry is to rapidly develop technology to capture and store carbon on an astonishing scale. This would require sophisticated, expensive methane traps to be built around the chimneys of every petrochemical, power and steel mill in the world.

Hopes for such a panacea were hit hard this week when Petra Nova’s factory outside Houston was closed indefinitely. Backed by a $ 190 million grant from the Department of Energy, the four-year plant aimed to capture 90% of the carbon dioxide flowing from a 240-megawatt coal-fired power plant. It was the only major carbon capture project in the US after a $ 7.5 billion project in Mississippi shut down before ever going online.

Exxon Mobil says they are working on 20 new carbon capture projects around the world, including one in Texas, as part of a new $ 3 billion investment in a company they call ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions.

This Scientific Aviation aircraft is equipped with technology to measure climate-changing gases such as methane.

But Robinson and her flying methane fighters have heard promises before. With no enforceable regulation for producers large and small, she says profit-making almost always wins.

“ExxonMobil and some of the other major manufacturers have set pretty high goals for how they want to maintain their emissions,” said Robinson. “But we found that here in the Permian basin, the methane leak rate is more than 10 times higher than what many companies plan to do.”

In the meantime, she says she will let her small team fly, snort, and measure methane, while the plane will soon have a high-altitude backup. Following a $ 100 million grant from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund, the EDF will soon launch their own methane-hunting satellite.

.Source