[HN Gopher] Solving methane mysteries with satellite imagery
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Solving methane mysteries with satellite imagery
Author : ltrg
Score : 104 points
Date : 2024-10-03 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.datadesk.eco)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.datadesk.eco)
| 28304283409234 wrote:
| Meanwhile: https://cleantechnica.com/2024/05/03/fossil-fuel-
| companies-b...
|
| Looks like another arms race. :-(
| jofer wrote:
| That's around flaring, which is a bit different. Energy
| companies are very likely to buy the same data. Detecting
| methane leaks is a _good_ thing for them, both from an
| "avoiding fines" perspective and also from a "this is
| infrastructure we _want_ to fix" perspective.
|
| Banning routine flaring is a very good thing that needs to
| happen in more places. You _do_ still need to flare. There are
| lots of time periods where it will be required for safety
| reasons. But currently, it's common to simply flare methane
| that's produced instead of trying to use it. Methane can't be
| easily transported, and you need a pipeline to a populated area
| to use it unless you build expensive LNG facilities or slightly
| less expensive facilities to reinject it back into the
| subsurface. So remote oil fields are designed to flare off the
| methane that's produced alongside oil production, often for
| vast quantities of methane. That's "routine flaring". It's
| better (both from a safety perspective and a greenhouse gas
| perspective) than directly releasing it. However, it's far
| better to reinject it back into the reservoir (or another
| reservoir) or otherwise find some use for it than to flare it.
|
| Routine flaring is used quite simply because regulators allow
| it. If you change the regulations, then companies will take the
| more expensive route or develop other resources. If you don't,
| then they're more or less legally required (read: shareholders
| _will_ have grounds to dismiss the CEO) to take the legal and
| much cheaper route of flaring methane that can't easily be
| sold. Can you really justify to shareholders that you're going
| to spend an extra several tens of billions USD to do something
| that isn't required and that your competitors aren't and that
| won't increase profits at all? The regulatory environment has
| to change for that to happen, but it's a patchwork and not some
| global thing. The EU has been leading there.
|
| But detecting flares (even "hidden" ones) is _much_ easier than
| detecting methane leaks. Methane leaks are pretty damned
| insidious and hard to find. That's a big part of why they're so
| common. Hyperspectral imaging is _really_ damned cool, and
| while I'm certainly biased, the Tanager satellite they used
| there is really really neat.
| jofer wrote:
| Edit: Apparently that's the airborne equivalent of Tanager,
| not Tanager. (Same instrument design, but one is on a plane
| and one just launched into space not-too-long-ago.)
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Venting is like an order of magnitude worse than flaring right?
| So until we've dealt with most of the venting there's not much
| benefit in going after the flaring operations right? We should
| encourage flaring as a way to solve venting?
| yvoonne wrote:
| Yes, enclosed flaring is better than venting. However it
| makes it more difficult for third-party monitoring, the
| linked article mentions this:
|
| >"If you enclose the flare, people don't see it, so they
| don't complain about it. But it also means it's not visible
| from space by most of the methods used to track flare
| volumes."
| yvoonne wrote:
| Ground-based laser methane detection is sensitive enough to
| quantify hidden emissions, no matter how diffuse gas companies
| make the plume. Here's two companies operating in this space:
|
| Sensirion: https://www.sensirion-connected.com/emissions-
| monitoring
|
| Longpath Technologies: https://www.longpathtech.com
| w1 wrote:
| This is factually incorrect and has the direction of causality
| wrong.
|
| Enclosed combustors are _more_ efficient than flares, and can
| be tested to show that they achieve complete combustion of
| methane (unlike flares, which do not combust all methane.)
| Because of this efficiency delta, enclosed combustors were
| introduced to adhere to new air quality regulations.
|
| I.e. regulators forced companies to install them to improve
| their emissions; they aren't being installed to hide emissions.
|
| "Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a
| typical flare. It's better than venting, but going from a flare
| to an enclosed flare or a vapor combustor is not an improvement
| in reducing emissions", based on vibes from a former regulator
| from the linked article, is incorrect. E.g. see
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679082...
| techwiz137 wrote:
| My car runs on methane, but it's very expensive, only 20% cheaper
| than gas and soon it might be 1:1. Hard to store (200 bar
| pressure tank) and tanks have a 20 year lifespan.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Curious. Had seen cars running on GPL (yep), but never methane.
| Who is the maker?
| tecleandor wrote:
| Here (Spain) you can find a bunch of CNG vehicles, although
| not a lot. GPL is more popular, and there is at least 2x or
| 3x times GPL stations than CNG stations. I think CNG is more
| popular for commercial drivers around the city, like taxis,
| vans, microbuses, and the like.
|
| A friend has a CNG Seat Mii, that's the same as a VW Up!
|
| Here, if you click in "Mas informacion" on any category, you
| can see a list of vehicles you can buy directly to the brand
| ready for CNG. The site might be out of date, as the models I
| see there are 2 to 5 years old.
|
| https://gasnam.es/catalogo-vehiculos-gnc-biognc-gnl-biognl/
| lucb1e wrote:
| Wikipedia says the burning of methane produces CO2 and water,
| seemingly at a 1:1 ratio between the methane and CO2 molecules
| (chemistry isn't my strong suit, though). CO2 is a lot better
| than CH4 afaik, so rather than venting it directly, this makes
| me wonder why we don't burn all waste methane that is currently
| just being vented like from these ships
|
| Also interesting
|
| > Compared to other hydrocarbon fuels, methane produces less
| carbon dioxide for each unit of heat released. [...] methane,
| being the simplest hydrocarbon, produces more heat per mass
| unit (55.7 kJ/g) than other complex hydrocarbons.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
| Tyr42 wrote:
| That's called flaring it, and it's discussed upthread. Good
| intuition though.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I'm curious why you say it is expensive if cheaper than the
| alternative of gasoline?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This article might benefit from a bit more numerical data:
| CO2 Radiative Forcing: 1950: Approximately 0.58
| W/m2 @ 310 ppm 2020: Approximately 2.13 W/m2 @
| 414 ppm CH4 Radiative Forcing:
| 1950: Approximately 0.25 W/m2 @ 1.15 ppm 2020:
| Approximately 0.59 W/m2 @ 1.86 ppm
|
| Methane in the atmosphere is oxidized to CO2 with about a 6-year
| halflife, so:
|
| 20-year timescale: CH4 is approximately 84-87 times more
| efficient than CO2.
|
| 100-year timescale: CH4 is approximately 28-34 times more
| efficient than CO2.
|
| The other thing to keep in mind is the removal rate:
|
| > "Roughly 56% of annual fossil CO2 emissions are absorbed by
| natural sinks--29% by the biosphere and 23% by the oceans--while
| 44% remains in the atmosphere, driving global climate change. For
| CH4, 90% is removed by atmospheric oxidation within roughly a
| decade, with a small fraction absorbed by soils."
|
| The bottom line? If human civilization really wants to stabilize
| the concentration of CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere - which
| ideally will lead to a stabilization of global temperature and a
| new climate normal (certainly warmer and wetter, much like
| Pliocene conditions of 2-5 mya), then elimination of fossil fuel
| combustion as an energy source really is the only plausible
| option.
| ahnick wrote:
| Great info. What's the source for this data?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| IPCC originally, filtered through ChatGPT-4o. The ChatGPT-o1
| model is getting pretty good, I gave it this prompt and I
| didn't see any glaring errors in the output:
|
| > "We want to calculate the total amount of energy required
| to extract 90,000 tons of natural gas from a gas field in
| North Dakota, move that gas by pipeline to a port on the
| Southeastern United States, liquify that natural gas to the
| LNG state, then ship that LNG by tanker ship with 90,000 ton
| capacity to its destination in a Polish port in Europe, then
| re-gasify that product so its end users can consume it. There
| are thus five stages in this process."
|
| The estimate is that shipping & processing costs are about
| 17% of the total energy transported, which still gives LNG
| quite an advantage over coal in terms of CO2 emitted per
| kilowatt-hout generated, although wind/solar/storage is
| obviously much better on that metric, and LNG's upfront
| infrastructure costs are quite high.
| guerby wrote:
| Could you ask it to add latest estimate for leaks in
| methane infrastructure used along the way?
|
| IIRC these estimates were low in IPCC reports vs where they
| are now.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > CO2 Radiative Forcing:
|
| That's an interesting scaling. For a ~30% increase in ppm, it's
| ~400% in W/m^2
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's because of the high-altitude IR windows in the
| absorption spectrum as I understand it. If CO2 is added at 1
| km it really has no effect there since CO2 absorption in
| these windows is mostly saturated already, but as you climb
| to higher altitudes ~12 km the lower pressures mean those
| windows clear up - but a relatively small increase in CO2
| starts filling in these windows. The best source I've found
| for explaining this at the non-technical level is:
|
| https://history.aip.org/climate/Radmath.htm#L_0165
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