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Biden-Harris Administration Strengthens Proposal to Cut Methane Pollution [1]

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Date: 2023-06-21  

“Stronger standards would reduce harmful emissions and energy waste from covered sources by 87 percent below 2005 levels while delivering economic benefits”

In a press release the EPA states;

“Oil and natural gas operations are the nation’s largest industrial source of methane. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide, on average, over the first 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere and is responsible for approximately one-third of the warming from greenhouse gases occurring today. Sharp cuts in methane emissions are among the most critical actions the U.S. can take in the short term to slow the rate of climate change.”

There are other sources. Coal mines, trash heaps and of course no one wants to let us forget cows!

If you follow my Regenerative Agriculture, you will be aware of the tremendous possibilities of sequestering carbon through the use of cover crops and other sustainable farming methods. If cows are raised on grass (pasture raised), the grass will store enough carbon to offset the belching of methane. Yet, as of the present, most cows are raised either in feed lots or in buildings.

The Smithsonian Magazine featured a dairy farmer who utilized an “anaerobic digester—basically, a manure-fueled power plant... Pipes move the methane into one of two engines on the farm that burns it to create heat and electricity. This provides all the farm’s heating needs. The organic matter left over after digestion is used as fertilizer on the fields, which has increased crop yields considerably.”

The EPA has an entire article concerning the use of anaerobic digesters for dairy farmers and give the examples of;

“Calgren Dairy Fuels, for instance, collects biogas from 12 dairies in Tulare County, California and upgrades it to pipeline-quality renewable natural gas (RNG), which is injected into a SoCalGas pipeline and transported to existing compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling stations.” and “Many companies and utilities are willing to pay a premium for renewable energy or carbon offsets to reduce their carbon footprint.” and “food waste or other organics may be codigested with dairy manure to increase biogas production rates, which can increase revenue from energy sales” . This process can be utilized for pork and poultry production as well. As demonstrated, the cost can be net and even produce a profit.

In addition, some land shouldn’t or even can’t be farmed. An example would be mountains where sheep and goats graze land a tractor couldn’t even traverse. In addition, some lands such as vast stretches of Africa don’t receive enough rainfall to raise crops, but will sustain livestock. In some areas the production has been increased through Regenerative Agriculture. And even in the U.S., much of our land is to steep to be used for anything except grassland for grazing.

Those wishing to ban meat need to consider that most of our methane comes from oil and gas wells and coal mines. We need to examine the past, the present and then the future as they are all interconnected. The Guardian made some interesting points;

“More than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars...About 40% of human-caused methane emissions come from leaks from fossil fuel exploration, production and transportation.”

Bloomberg did a research piece on old wells and posted the following:

“There are hundreds of thousands of such decrepit oil and gas wells across the U.S., and for a long time few people paid them much mind. That changed over the past decade as scientists discovered the surprisingly large role they play in the climate crisis. Old wells tend to leak, and raw natural gas consists mostly of methane, which has far more planet-warming power than carbon dioxide. That morning in Ohio we pointed our camera at busted pipes, rusted joints, and broken valves, and we saw the otherwise invisible greenhouse gas jetting out.”

This same type of leak comes from old coal mines, in fact, in Australia coal mines are the major source of methane leaks.

In Ohio, a man by the name of Huston owns :

“Over the past four years his Diversified Energy Co. has amassed about 69,000 wells, eclipsing Exxon Mobil Corp. to become the largest well owner in the country. Investors love him. Since listing shares in 2017, Hutson’s company has outperformed almost every other U.S. oil and gas stock, swelling his personal stake to more than $30 million.”

I don’t understand why. Many of the wells produce nothing worth capturing and he has made good on caping old wells. But the Ohio state government has an agreement with him to plug 20 a year. The owner responds with:

On average, he figures his wells have an additional 50 years in them, which means there’s no hurry to start socking away money to plug them. It also means they could be spouting pollution long past 2050, the target date set by President Joe Biden for zeroing out emissions across the economy.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/21/2176404/-Biden-Harris-Administration-Strengthens-Proposal-to-Cut-Methane-Pollution

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