How will this address methane leakage, which is a substantial source of athmospheric greenhouse gas emissions? Converting Co2 to methane is not carbon neutral if/when leaked...
Natural gas is already stored in enormous quantities, and shipped around the world. Leakage appears to happen mostly in transit, or at poorly maintained installations. My guess is, it's a solvable problem.
The industry provided (self reported) estimates of linkage is a little over 1%. The realistic value is over 2% and is at the point that coal and natural gas are likely equally bad for the environment given our current infrastructure.
Carbon neutral is a useful feature but doesn’t solve that problem.
I will say I am a fan of carbon neutral methane in place of the efforts to move to hydrogen combustion (this is a thing) and hydrogen for fuel cells since there isn’t a commercially viable carbon neutral version of that yet.
Making existing methane infrastructure cleaner and less leaky is better, in my mind, in the path to solar/wind/nuclear electrification than trying to capture the emissions of coal or retool petroleum infrastructure into hydrogen.
I agree we can do it. It just has to be done. Aka give the EPA some teeth and require actual monitoring and enforcement rather than a self reported fantasy.
Exactly. Sure we can do it but the better question is are there any incentives to do any of it ?
The fact that there isn't and that we would have to create one through some sort of government policy should be worrying, especially now that we know that enforcement is in general the government asking a branch of industry to self-regulate... and that's exactly what's happening right now with the natural gas industry and its leaks.
> Carbon neutral is a useful feature but doesn’t solve that problem.
Uh... yes it does? A fossil-fuel free fuel production process that loses 2% to the atmosphere is still fifty times lower-impact (when considering output energy -- obviously production costs are different) than one that pulls 100% out of the ground.
See the video I linked or the other commenters with references that Methane is a higher contributor to global warming than CO2 by 30x. It’s not about the carbon removed, it’s about the methane leaked.
Even granting that number (and the 2% loss above), Terraform still wins. It's just math, sorry.
I mean, sure: this might be bad on balance. But it's starting from a position of overwhelming assumed advantage. You need to come to the table with analysis actually showing it's bad, and all you have is "it's only about twice as good and not 50x better".
Remember that “at least 2%” is what we know. We don’t know the real number because it’s self reported and reconnaissance show it’s over 2%. The EPA needs to actually audit and find the real values. It could be 3, 4, 5 percent, etc and work out just fine economically. LNG has a 5% overhead before you even ship it.
Working on the margins of climate improvement is not worthwhile when billions of dollars to change the means of production are on the line.
Also, this has nothing to do with this company. This is not their responsibility. They should definitely do what they’re doing, but it doesn’t solve the root problem here of leaking methane into the atmosphere.
The totality of leaked methane is not just the pipeline. There’s the last mile, LNG distribution, and accidents that are not part of that number.
Operating on “but it’s .5% better” is very shaky when past predictions of huge improvements in the climate, and then zero real oversight, is how we got here in the first place. See Obama term 1 embracing fracking vs Obama term 2 expressing concern vs Biden term 1 restricting further expansion due to the environmental impact.
As others said, it mostly makes sense as seasonal energy storage. You could have these Terraform installations at storage sites, and also gas power plants in the same place.
Solvable, yes, but at least in Europe it is currently dirtier than anthracite coal due to leakages in lifetime emissions. Solvable but not solved, and we really should be looking for solutions.
no, it isn't. Over the course of a few decades, a kilogram of methane has the greenhouse impact of ~50 kilograms of CO2 because of the different absorption modes methane has that CO2 doesn't. If terraform leaks more than a few percent of their product into the atmosphere from carelessness (who cares about tracking such a low value commodity?) Then this is worse than just leaving the CO2 in the atmosphere. I really wish they'd address this fact more. Some possibilities:
-The hydrogen half is still a great way to make hydrogen for industrial processes
-The methane can be used on site of production for organic chem feedstocks
-Many new rockets are using methane as their fuel, using it at point of origin instead of transporting through leaky pipelines and trucks.
Any analysis along these lines would be reassuring that this isn't going to be a net-negative, climate wise.
You beat me to it, because I was going to say the same thing; wouldn't it only be carbon neutral if you had some means of guaranteeing that there's no leaks? It seems like converting CO2 to methane could actually make things worse...
Methane is a 30x stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. So if 4% of the converted methane leaked into the atmosphere, you would be worse off (from a climate heating perspective) than if you had done nothing.
By CO2 equivalence in the context of greenhouse gas potential [1]. And, the 30X factor is only valid if you look over scales of atmospheric persistence of 100yrs. If you look at scales of 10years (the amount of time methane persists, the GHG potential strength a over 80X.
Liquid (Cryogenic) natural gas tankers and storage emit "boiloff" gas. Some of this can be burned in the 'dual fuel' propulsion engines when combined with a small amount of diesel "pilot" fuel, but not all and I'm uncertain at what quantity. Even engines that burn NG gave methane "leak by" that escapes into the atmosphere. It's not great, and no, nobody is enforcing containment via satellites at the LNG shipping level (despite a comment to the company trary above).
Hydrogen production is a much better option for dense energy storage option.
I think the point is that methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, so if leaked, the net greenhouse impact is greater than that of the original CO2 that went into the process
Methane has a much shorter atmospheric half life than CO2-- years as opposed to millennia. It does end up getting oxidized into CO2 and H2O, just not nearly as quickly as when it's burned.
Leaks would happen to a small degree, but since a leak represents money drifting away there's a strong incentive to fix them. Methane leaks of any size are fairly easy to detect. There's been an effort to put up satellites for this purpose.
If using this technology helps us to phase out fossil fuels, it would be a huge net win. This could effectively let us repurpose all our existing natural gas storage, transport, and generation infrastructure into a battery to store surplus renewable or off-peak nuclear energy.
This could also allow renewable energy to be shipped as LNG, allowing the gigantic amounts of solar power in places like the Sahara to be harnessed and exported. The only other way to do this is extremely long distance superconducting or incredibly high voltage transmission lines that would probably be more expensive and very vulnerable.
In a similar vein, what if producing natural gas this way makes it cheap enough that companies choose to just vent it off when pursuing other fossil fuels.
Yes I think you're touching on the real potential problem here which is that natural gas is many times a byproduct of petroleum extraction, for which we found a use/market.
I grew up in Alberta and there were already gas flares all over the place in the forest at the various oil wells that dot the landscape in the foothills.
I hope the economics of this work out, but I worry it will either just lead to flaring at drill sites or would not be pursued because it can't compete on cost.
At the same time, if you're e.g. Germany and have a gas shortage, and now you can just make it domestically using excess renewable power, and not rely on LNG or Russia... Amazing.
I've been watching a YouTube channel named Climate Town that recently did a video talking about natural gas, and leakage was a focus point in the video. It's like a documentary-style comedy channel, and I quite enjoy both the content and the format. It reminds me a bit of Jon Stewart and John Oliver.
This was my thought, methane is much worse than carbon when not burned, but just released. Any claims of carbon neutrality that rely on assuming perfect storage and transport without leakage are fantasy.
If anything, when you are calling it "easily transportable" at the same time, as they do, you are actively misleading. You can't have both: it's either easily transportable and you are accepting a bunch of methane released (and thus terrible for climate change), or it's carbon neutral and you are baking in the cost of making sure it doesn't leak in transport/storage (and thus not easily transportable). They are having their cake and eating it too by claiming both.
I'd be interested in a quantitative analysis here. Methane is much worse, but sunlight has broken most of it down after a decade or so. CO2 is comparatively forever.
Presumably there's a point where the lines cross and leaking green methane is still a win. I guess it just comes down to where those lines cross and whether we deem that an acceptable goal.
But that methane "started" as CO2 in the atmosphere, so after the breakdown happens you're carbon neutral. Carbon capture and storage are still relevant topics, but "stop making the problem worse" is a good start.
If we all switched to still-leaky synthetic methane today, things would continue getting worse only until the atmospheric breakdown rate equalled the leak rate. That's still a decade of things getting worse, but it's possible that the alternatives are even more problematic.
I'm not saying it's the right or wrong path, I haven't done that analysis, I'm just saying that approaches to it could use a bit more pragmatism.
Of course there is. CO2 and methane are not equally bad, methane is about 100x worse initially. After about 60-70 years the lines cross and the impact of a tonne of methane released is less than a tonne of CO2 released at the same date.
Wow that table is over my head, I spent a fair bit of time trying to unwind the acronyms but I gave up.
Can you help me understand how a gas with a lifetime of 11.8 years is having a different impact on the climate at 500 years than it did at say... 11.8 years? That's 488.2 years of being in the same state as where it started prior to the carbon capture that made the CH4.
1. 11.8 years is a halflife, not a "all the methane is gone after 11.8 years" lifetime.
2. Methane doesn't just warm the atmosphere up a little bit and then disappear with no side effects. In addition to carbon dioxide, methane decomposition creates ozone and water vapor, which are both greenhouse gases. The additional heating effects of these decomposition byproducts are also included in the global warming potential calculations.
3. We care about cumulative effects over time. GWP is "how much additional heat will the atmosphere absorb because of this gas over X amount of time", scaled relative to carbon dioxide (so CO2 always has a GWP of 1). Methane's GWP-20 is about 80, which means that if I release one ton of methane today, over the next 20 years it will absorb about as much heat as if I had released 80 tons of CO2 instead. The longer the time frame the less bad methane looks, because it mostly decomposes, but even over a 500 year time frame releasing 1 ton of methane absorbs as much additional heat as if you had released 10 tons of CO2 instead. GTP is similar to GWP except it's about how much global average temperatures will rise instead of how much heat is absorbed.
4. If you can create methane out of atmospheric CO2 for free, you can subtract 2.75 from each of the GWP numbers for methane (since you remove 2.75 tons of CO2 to create one ton of methane). This is essentially what the table is showing on the CH4-non fossil line (notice each of the GWPs on this line is 2.8 less than on the CH4-fossil line).
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Imagine I had a magical gas called timelockium. It is not a greenhouse gas (no radiative forcing), but after exactly 10 years it decomposes to an equal mass of CO2 with no other byproducts.
The GWP-10 for this gas would be zero: over the first ten years, releasing a ton of timelockium is equivalent (in terms of heat absorbed by the atmosphere) to releasing zero tons of CO2.
The GWP-20 for this gas would be 0.5: over the first twenty years, releasing a ton of timelockium is equivalent to releasing 0.5 tons of CO2. This is because it does nothing for the first ten years, and then for the next ten years it is just CO2 [1].
For longer time frames, the GWP of timelockium would approach 1. Over 500 years, emitting a ton of timelockium would be nearly equivalent (0.98) to emitting a ton of CO2.
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Now I have another magical gas, decayium. It is equivalent to CO2 for 10 years and then magically disappears. Again it has no other side effects or byproducts.
The GWP-10 of decayium would be 1--over the first 10 years it's identical to CO2. Over the next ten years it contributes nothing to warming, so the GWP-20 would be 0.5. For longer time frames the GWP of decayium would approach 0. the GWP-500 would be 0.02.
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Superdecayium is like decayium except much worse. It's equivalent to 100x as much CO2 for the first ten years and then magically disappears with no side effects or byproducts. The GWP-10 is 100. The GWP-20 is 50. The GWP-500 is 2.
This last scenario is more analogous to methane, except methane chemistry is much more complicated, with gradual decay and byproducts that are also greenhouse gases. Like superdecayium, methane's GWP decreases over longer time intervals, but even over 500 years it is still worse than an equivalent mass of CO2.
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[1] For the sake of simplicity I'm ignoring CO2 dynamics here, assuming it's just static in the atmosphere.
At 11.8 years it seemed like it would be worth considering because the total amount of anthropogenic CH4 would find equilibrium relatively soon, and that would be better, at some point, than continuing to emit new CO2 year after year.
But at 80 years... all of that infrastructure that the synthetic methane people are excited to reuse... It'll have been decommissioned by then anyway. We might as well just hold out for synthetic gasoline or double down on electric everything (both, probably).
(This is all assuming that the leak problem is unsolvable. Not sure about that.)
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You seem to know quite a bit about this stuff, so I have an unrelated question:
Things are "simple" in this case because a degree of climate temperature increase provides a basis for comparison between different gasses. But sometimes I find myself thinking about tradeoffs between climate heating and other ecological harms. Like, I should probably get a dishwasher because they use less water than washing by hand, but what's the carbon footprint of manufacturing a new dishwasher?
I suppose you could still standardize on a degree of heating, but you'd need to figure out how much wasted fresh water is equivalently harmful to a degree of heating. That's always going to be subjective to some degree, but not all subjects are created equal. I'd much rather just let some ecologists build consensus around a number and then take that number myself as an axiom.
Not that I’m aware of. Those kinds of decisions are different depending on where you are, too; some places need to worry about conserving fresh water much more than others, for example. I don’t think there’s a meaningful way to reduce everything to a single dimension.
> I don’t think there’s a meaningful way to reduce everything to a single dimension.
Not everything all at once, no. But given just two things, I figure there's a community of experts somewhere (maybe nearby even) that can balance them better than I can. I'd like a better way of somehow tapping into that.
But that CO2 is then theoretically recaptured to make more fuel, right? At least if the carbon in the methane is sourced from the atmosphere in the first place.
