Climate crisis: Invisible, odorless gas hits Texas against Biden government

Climate crisis: Invisible, odorless gas hits Texas against Biden government

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More importantly, it also measures methane, which is 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over the next 20 years. You know it better than natural gas. Heating and cooking are not the only culprit methane. Two-thirds of the emissions come from bulging cows, factory farms and rotting landfills. But as any Texan will tell you, it is much easier to control gas coming from the ground than gas coming from cows.

The “greenhouse effect” was discovered before women could vote (actually by a suffragist), but in 2021 the indoor garden metaphor does not correspond to the emergency. Rather imagine a baby in a hot car. Carbon dioxide is like the steel and glass that holds in the sun’s rays as it reflects through the windshield. Methane provides the equivalent of heating the heater in the car; 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 cannot see or smell natural gas, but virtually all of Earth’s peer-reviewed scientists agree that it must go on earth to survive life on earth with any semblance of today. coal and oil. Climatologists at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tell us that lethal changes will only get worse until people stop using fuel that burns and leaks.
But in Texas, methane is so plentiful and inexpensive that it largely escaped unseen and unmeasured until both the Environmental Defense Fund and oil producers began using instruments such as the Picarro spectrometer. Scientific Aviation, based in Boulder, Colorado, owns this one and will be sniffing the air for all kinds of customers, but only the EDF is disclosing the data.
Mackenzie Smith, a senior scientist at Scientific Aviation, looks at readings of the instruments that measure gases like methane in the atmosphere.
“What we have found here in the Perm basin is that operators are wasting enough gas to heat about 2 million homes a year,” says Kelsey Robinson, project manager of EDF’s PermianMAP project.
Sometimes the methane leaks from faulty equipment or tens of thousands of orphans. Sometimes, when there is no one to buy it, they just burn it in a practice called torch. Former President Donald Trump tried to remove all regulations on methane, a move so extreme that even ExxonMobil was opposed to it. But until President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency can navigate the legal traps left by the Trump administration to methane leaks, it’s up to oil and gas companies to solve a problem that no one can see or smell.

“We have found that the Permian basin emits more than double any other oil and gas region in the United States,” Robinson said.

Prohibit all prohibitions

The Permian Basin is named after the largest mass extinction event on earth and is so flat that you can swear you can see the curvature of the earth standing in the bed of a pickup truck. When an oily, gaseous, flammable evidence of the Great Dying – the nickname given to the mass extermination event that marked the end of the geological period of the Permian – was found under the red dirt, Midland and Odessa grew into the vena cava of the state’s oil industry, the environment for “Friday Night Lights” and the perfect place for Texas government organization Greg Abbott to fire the first shot in a 2021 civil war methane.
The Perm basin, which covers most of West Texas, is flat, wide open and sits on top of plenty 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 launched from Washington, DC,” Abbott said, days after Biden signed his first round of executive orders on ‘ a climate focused on a crisis.

Then the Republican governor signed an executive order of his own and ordered each state agency to give him all the reasons to sue and stop the Biden government’s efforts to clean energy. In calling out cities like San Francisco, where a movement is growing to ban natural gas heaters and appliances from new construction, Abbott has vowed to ban all bans.

“In Texas, we will not allow cities to use political correctness to pretend what energy source you are using,” he said. “I therefore support legislation banning cities and provinces from banning natural gas appliances.”

But as a sign of the changing times, Abbott’s fierce opposition to the Paris Agreement contradicts the pronouncements and phrases of Big Oil’s biggest lobbyist.

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

But as more European energy companies adopt a green transition, France’s Total has become the first oil giant to break its API membership, citing differences over carbon taxes, subsidies for electric cars and … methane. In October, the French government stepped in to block a $ 7 billion deal and decided that liquefied natural gas from Texas was too dirty for their standards.

A call for more pipelines

As for Biden’s existential threat to oil and gas, Sommers seems less concerned and argues that there is no need to shift it to geothermal, solar or wind transitions, as the world will demand for generations fuel that fire and leak.

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

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

To solve the methane problem, he argues that if America just had more pipelines, the industry would not have to burn as much natural gas unnecessarily.

“I think the biggest challenge we have from an emissions perspective is to fix our infrastructure,” Sommers said. “We need to make sure we have pipelines to get these products to market as quickly as possible. And what that means is that we need a regulatory structure that makes it possible to build these pipelines.”

Kelsey Robinson of the EDF has a simpler idea. “Reducing methane emissions is in itself a job creator because we need people to investigate these sites and then take steps to resolve the leaks.”

“It does not make sense to burn it,” Texas state geologist Scott Tinker said as we walked the extensive Texas Rock Garden map outside his office. “They do not have the collection systems to capture it. Instead of licking the methane, they burn it and lick CO2. CO2 is better than a product than methane if you want to put something in the atmosphere. But it ‘ be much better at putting it together. ‘

Texas state geologist Scott Tinker agrees that it is better to collect the methane, but says progress may be slow.

After the recession in 2008, Tinker says, hydrofracking in West Texas came as a surprise. Years of deterioration in the oil field had a renaissance when the new method of spraying water into shale doubled oil production, and which formed with invisible methane, without capturing it.

“The conversation has shifted,” Tinker said, following pressure from the public and shareholders. “It’s happening, but it’s slow, it takes a lot of money, it’s pipeline approval. It’s an industry and a regulatory system that made it happen in the first place.”

Sommers insists its API members take the issue seriously, with 70% of land producers joining the Environmental Partnership, all concerned about reducing methane emissions within the oil and gas industry, he said.

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

Departure from space

But far beyond the methane problem, the only way to save lives on Earth and the fossil fuel industry is to develop carbon capture and storage technology on an astonishing scale. It requires advanced, expensive methane starters to be built around the smoke stacks of every petrochemical plant, power station and steel plant in the world.

Hopes for such a miracle had a major setback this week when the Petra Nova plant outside Houston closed indefinitely. Backed by a $ 190 million grant from the Department of Energy, the four-year plant aims to capture 90% of the carbon dioxide from a 240-megawatt coal-fired power station. It was the only major carbon capture project in the U.S. after a $ 7.5 billion project in Mississippi was shut down before it ever went 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 aircraft, operated by Scientific Aviation, is equipped with technology to measure climate-changing gases such as methane.

But Robinson and her flying methane hunters have heard promises before. Without enforceable regulations for large and small producers, she says profit motive almost always wins.

“ExxonMobil and some of the other major manufacturers have set fairly high targets for how they want to maintain their emissions,” Robinson said. “But we have found that the leakage of methane into the Permian basin is more than ten times higher than many businesses intended.”

Meanwhile, she says she will let her small team fly, sniff and measure methane, while the plane will soon have a major backup. Following a $ 100 million grant from Amazon Fund Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund, the EDF will soon launch its own methane search satellite.

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