Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Why methane matters

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Today we’re talking about two climate blind spots: methane and short-term warming. Most of us think of global warming as a long game. How do we reach net zero by 2050? And how should we curb carbon dioxide emissions to get there? But the warming happening now and in the next few years is just as important. Short-term warming exacerbates wildfires, hurricanes and other climate impacts now. And the short-term trajectory of warming can make things better or worse in the long run. At some point before we reach net zero emissions, it’s increasingly likely that we will overshoot our 1.5 degree target. Hopefully we will come back down, but the more we overshoot, the worse the effects of climate change will be. Which is why we should bend the curve of that trajectory by tackling the causes of short-term warming. High up on that list is methane. It lives in the atmosphere for only 12 years, but in the 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere it causes about 84 times more warming than carbon dioxide. That means it’s also a powerful solution. Methane in the atmosphere right now causes about 30% of global warming to date, but cutting emissions now would actually have a cooling effect. Why? Because, unlike carbon dioxide which lasts for several hundred years, methane breaks down relatively quickly.  So how do we tackle the methane problem? In this episode, Shayle talks to Erika Reinhardt, co-founder of Spark Climate Solutions, a non-profit focused on under-addressed climate solutions. Right now Spark is focusing on methane emissions from livestock, also known as enteric methane. Shayle and Erika cover topics like: Why we should consider different time-scale standards for measuring global warming impact, such as GWP100 and GWP20 How short-lived aerosols mask the full warming impact of greenhouse gasses Methane removal, including the process of oxidation and methane sinks Different sources of methane, such as wetlands, livestock and fossil fuel production Ready-to-deploy solutions to fossil fuel methane emissions, such as flaring, detection, capture and storage How flaring may be less effective than previously thought Solutions under development for livestock methane, such as manure management, biogas digesters and feed additives like seaweed-derived bromoform  Recommended Resources: Canary: Cutting methane emissions could make a big dent in climate change, major UN report says Bloomberg: As Gas Prices Soar, Nobody Knows How Much Methane Is Leaking Inside Climate News: Feeding Cows Seaweed Reduces Their Methane Emissions, but California Farms Are a Long Way From Scaling Up the Practice Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is supported by Scale Microgrid Solutions, your comprehensive source for all distributed energy financing. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes financing it easy. Visit scalecapitalsolutions.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by CohnReznick, a trusted partner for navigating the complex and evolving financial, tax and regulatory landscape of the renewable sector. Visit cohnreznick.com to learn more.

from the studios of PostScript Media and Canary Media. I'm Shale Khan, and this is Catalyst. When we look at 2030 projected models for all different anthropogenic methane emissions, and we look at where we already have solutions, and then the Delta, where we don't yet have solutions and need them, livestock screams at you from the page. Hello, Daddy. Hello, Mom. It's a mum, ma-ma-m-m-a-m-m-m-m.

methane bomb. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale.

predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at Energy Hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital.

Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Shail Khan. I'm a partner at the Venture Capital Firm Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. Okay, so just off the top of your head, how much of the collective attention, dollars,

resources, whatever, of the global climate community do you think is focused on carbon dioxide relative to all other greenhouse gases? I'd say, I don't know, maybe 90% CO2, 10% everything else, and in that 10% it's mostly methane. But according to the global methane pledge, if you want to measure it by dollars, only 2% of global total climate financing goes toward methane today. In one sense, that's not totally crazy. If you use the typical 100-year global warming potential translation, we'll come back to this later, CO2 does represent 79% of emissions versus 11% for methane. So that's not wildly off.

But in that 100-year time frame lies the rub. Methane is, as I'm sure many of you know, a potent but short-lived greenhouse gas. It disappears faster, but it burns hot, so to speak, while it lives. So looking at it from another angle, two stats for you to consider. First, over a 20-year period, rather than 100-year period, methane traps 84 times more heat than CO2. And second, depending on how you define it, methane has contributed to up to around half, nearly 50% of net warming since the pre-industrial era today.

Which is all to say that, in my opinion, methane is underappreciated. So is nitrous oxide, by the way, which is another incredibly potent greenhouse gas, but that's a topic for future episode. More valuable than my opinion, of course, is that of Erica Reinhart, who is the co-founder of Spark Climate Solutions, which is a nonprofit that I really respect, which focuses on under-addressed areas of science and technology that have the potential for large-scale mitigation of climate harm,

particularly addressing near-term warming, which we will talk about. Erica is much more obsessed than I am with methane, which is saying something. So let's hear why. Here's Erica. Erica, welcome. Thanks so much. Good to be here. All right, so I want to start with explaining an area that is, I guess,

mainly the focus of Spark, or at least a big part of the focus for Spark, which is the concept of near-term warming, which I think people don't talk about a whole lot. Can you explain what is near-term warming and why do you care about it so much? Yeah, absolutely. So near-term warming is the warming that we're going to see over the next few decades. And the drivers of near-term warming are actually fairly different than long-term warming. Long-term warming is driven mostly by CO2, carbon dioxide. But another whole host of gases are driving our near-term warming. And near-term warming matters a whole bunch because if we look at sort of 1.5 and 2C scenarios, we see massive overshoot. And so how well we do at managing near-term warming is really dictating

how much overshoot we're going to have. How are we going to manage the peak temperatures as well as the slope of warming to those peak temperatures, which have a whole host of impacts, from hitting natural feedbacks and tipping points to extreme weather that we see. And currently, we don't have, we're not, we don't have a focus on near-term warming. We're not actively managing it as much as we are long-term warming,

and both of these are incredibly important to be aware of and managing in parallel. Part of what you're saying here is that, we've set these kind of benchmarks that a lot of folks who pay at least a little bit of attention to climate change understand those being things like net zero by 2050 or two degrees Celsius of warming or whatever it might be. And I think part of what you're saying is that those in and of themselves don't necessarily reflect the fluctuations over time in emissions. And those fluctuations over time in emissions could actually have a really big impact on what climate change does to

people and ecosystems. Is that right? That's right. And let me give you two different sort of examples. So when we talk about temperatures by 2100, let's say 1.5 degrees C. The question here is, what's the path from here to 1.5 by 2100? And what the climate model show is that there are a wide number of trajectories, some of which have what is called high overshoot and others of which have what is called low overshoot. This is how much above 1.5 do we go over the next few decades before going back down to 1.5? That trajectory matters. The longer that we spend higher, the more risk we are of direct human climate impacts, as well as natural system impacts, some of which may not be reversible and some of which will further drive warming.

The other thing that's important to understand here is that net zero by 2050 is an important goalpost on the way to being able to maintain lower temperatures. However, it's not the entirety of the story. There are many different gases here that are very important and some of which have more near-term impact. And so net zero by 2050 for CO2 is critically important for managing long-term warming, but we cannot forget about the other pieces primarily around short-love client pollutants that are going to be even stronger levers towards managing that near-term warming,

that peak temperature, that overshoot. Right. So that gets to the rub of this conversation, which is, okay, so let's just posit. We all agree that near-term warming, that the degree of overshoot matters. If we care about that, then I think, you know, the obvious thing would be, well, that just means we need to reduce emissions as fast as humanly possible. We can't wait around until the, you know, the two decades from now to make all of our emissions reductions. And like, yeah, that's obviously true. But you're saying is in addition to that, there's this other dynamic, which is that there are different greenhouse gases and they have different lives in the atmosphere.

And the shorter lived ones, which have a higher global warming potential, are in the long. term, they won't live in the atmosphere as long, but in the short term, they have a bigger impact. And so if one of the things you want to optimize for is minimizing near-term warming, actually you should be paying more attention to those short-lived pollutants as opposed to the long-term pollutants. Obviously, you need to do both, ultimately. But is that what kind of led you down the path to like, okay, one, we care about near-term warming and overshoot? So two, we should be dedicating more attention to non-CO2 greenhouse gases? That's right. And I want to make clear that this is the biggest yes and.

We need to be dramatically cutting our emissions across all greenhouse gases, and it's critically important that we do all of them in parallel. What is often not understood is that warming today, only 45% of warming today is from carbon dioxide. The other 55% of warming today is from a host of other. their greenhouse gases. And so what we see is current warming and also very near-term warming is really driven by a whole cornucopia of different types of emissions that need huge levels of attention on them

as well. Can you just briefly explain how gases act differently? What is the mechanism that causes these different lifespans and impacts? So each greenhouse gas has its own atmospheric lifetime. The reason that CO2 is so important is that its atmospheric lifetime is really, really long. And that's why it's called a stock gas. The amount of warming that's caused by atmospheric CO2 is basically based on the accumulated emissions of CO2. That's why it's so important that we not only pay attention to net zero CO2, but also our path to get there.

We want as low of cumulative emissions on our way to net zero. Other gases act differently, though. Methane, for example, is currently causing half a degree of warming. It's about 30% of current gross warming. Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of about 12 years. The reason this is so important for managing near-term warming is that by cutting methane emissions, we actually have a cooling impact on the atmosphere. So when you cut CO2, you stop warming the atmosphere even more than it already is.

When you cut methane, you eventually, over about a decadal time span, start actually bringing that warming down. It's a fundamentally different dynamic. Other gases have other lifetimes. Some of them are even faster than methane. Methane is particularly important just because of its scale. that it's a short-lived climate pollutant, and that it has that 12-year atmospheric lifetime, and there's just so much of it. There's half a degree of warming today from methane.

Okay, so let's talk about methane, which is the topic of today's episodes. I think we've gotten there now. So you briefly touched on methane's lifetime already, but let's talk about, you know, people, so in climate world, mostly what we do right now is we talk about CO2 equivalent, because we're trying to put everything in like these apples-to-apples terms. But the problem is CO2 equivalent is not a thing. Like tons of CO2 and tons of methane are not equivalent from a global warming potential perspective. It depends on the time frame, as you're saying, that you are looking at. So the most common thing is to use what's called GWP 100, which means warming potential over 100-year span.

But this is where things get complicated with methane, which is shorter-lived and much more powerful. So can you just kind of walk through methane? Let's start with talking about its global warming potential and impact, and then we'll talk about where it comes from and how to get rid of it. So what is the warming potential of methane and how do you think about it? So, as you said, there's many different ways of thinking about it. The most common ways are looking at its average impact per ton over a given time period compared to CO2. So that's what we call GWP 100 and GWP20.

GWP 100 means the average impact over 100 year time scale, and GWP20 is on average of a 20-year time scale. And so the fundamental challenge here is if you think about the impact of a unit of CO2 that's been emitted is over time for warming, it's basically a flat line. When you think about what the impact of methane is on warming after it's been emitted, it is a sharply decreasing line. There's no way of scaling these lines to make them equivalent. We're just choosing the periods over which we're averaging. And so whenever we compare things on a GWP 100 basis between methane and CO2, what we are fundamentally doing is actually making a trade-off, one that we're not always conscious of, between near-term warming and long-term warming. Because the same GWP 100 of a unit of methane compared to a unit of CET off. CO2, that methane is going to actually cause much more warming in the near term and much less warming 100 years from now. And that's why these gases are so important to manage in parallel.

We need to be managing both. However, the metrics that we currently use make that really hard. It's really hard to compare and we don't yet have good frameworks for weighing these things and figuring out how we should be managing both in parallel. So when you use a GWP 20 metric, a 20-year timeline, you are sort of balancing things more towards paying attention to and managing near-term warming. And that is what has been adopted so far for those folks who are thinking more about near-term warming,

but there are imperfections there as well. Right. You can think of it as sort of like, if you're using a GW-100 metric, you're thinking about, it's not that, I mean, you know, CO2 lives in the atmosphere for thousands of years, so it's not that long. But GW-100 is thinking toward the relatively longer-term warming. GwP-20 is thinking toward the relatively shorter-term warming. Both are valid.

They're different things that we're talking about. How does that play out in these climate models, these big IPCC models and all this kind of stuff that lead to what ultimately are the goals that everybody understands, the net zero-by- 2050-type goals? Like, what's going on under the hood in these, in these, climate models. So I like to call this the greenhouse gas dance. What the models actually reveal to us is that we need to be managing all of these gases in parallel in order to manage near-term and long-term warming. However, that nuance in the models doesn't always make its way out into our common

understanding. And the reason for this is because of all the different impacts that different gases have and their different dynamics. So as I mentioned before, CO2 is a stock gas. So right now we have about 0.8 degrees Celsius of warming caused by the entire accumulation of historical CO2. And that number keeps going up as we keep net emitting CO2, and eventually, hopefully, we'll go down after we hit net zero and become net negative. We have this really high basis of warming today. A big challenge that we need to grapple with is that we have actually 1.8 degrees of warming in the atmosphere today. And you'll probably say, well, no, Erica, we have 1.2 or 1.1 and 1.3.

And that's correct. That's net warming. And the reason is that we actually have aerosols that we're emitting today that are masking about half a degree of warming. Those aerosols are also terrible for human health. And so it's really important that we stop emitting them from industrial sites and vehicles, etc. As we do so, however, more of the warming that's already been caused in the atmosphere is going to be revealed to us as that aerosol mask is lifted. These aerosols have a very short lifetime, and they're generally co-emitted with CO2.

So what that ends up meaning is that as we dramatically cut down on CO2 as quickly as we can because we know that's so crucial for long-term warming and warming in general, that we also need to shrink some of those other warming impacts in the atmosphere at the same time. And that's what methane can do for us. And so all of the models show that what we need to do, if we want to hit any of these targets, is dramatically cut down on methane at the same time as we decarbonize so that we are shrinking the cumulative impact of all these different gases.

And so the climate models are fundamentally depending on us, dramatically cutting methane by, you know, every model's different, but 70, 80% by 2050 or by 2100. And we need to make sure we don't lose that part of the narrative because that is what needs to happen, given these different interactions between gases. And so it is too late at this point to only focus on the CO2 side of things. These are both critically, critically important for hitting any of the targets that we have. All right. So to summarize our conversation so far, if I may, one, near-term warming is something we should be paying attention to. It matters in its own right. It's not the only thing that matters, but it matters.

Two, methane is a big problem when it comes to near-term warming. It's a particularly big problem when it comes to near-term warming. And thus, we should be focusing probably more attention. than we are collectively on mitigating and removing methane emissions. So let's talk about what that is going to have to look like, starting with where do the methane emissions come from? So can you just kind of give an overview of current methane emissions sources? Absolutely.

So methane emissions are currently about 60% anthropogenic and 40% natural. Most of those natural emissions were also pre-industrial, and so we really care about the elevated emissions, which right now is primarily anthropogenic. Among the anthropogenic emissions, we have about a third that comes from livestock. There's another quarter that comes from oil and gas, about 10% that comes from coal mining, another 10% that comes from rice, and another about 20% that comes from waste and wastewater. So these are very different sources by and large than CO2.

Methane usually comes either from a biogenic process or, leak or waste. On the natural side, it's mostly wetlands today, and there is concerning early evidence that these natural emissions are also increasing. So just to editorialize on this for one second. So, okay, there's one category there that I think we can be hopeful that, you know,

whether or not we're paying direct attention to methane probably will decline over time, hopefully faster than it has been historically, and that's coal mining, right? Coal mining for various other reasons, to avoid the burning of coal, which creates CO2, not methane, but to avoid the burning of coal, we're trying to move off of coal and onto other sources of energy anyway. So that one probably needs to go down as fast as possible because people don't, I don't think, always appreciate that in addition to burning coal, creating CO2, mining coal creates a lot of methane or emits a lot of methane. But that one aside, the other, I think, particularly notable thing that at least in my view,

most folks don't appreciate, is that there is more methane emissions from livestock today than oil and gas, which I think is interesting because on a relative basis, I do think where there's a lot of talk about methane, it tends to be focused on oil and gas, right? And we'll talk more about the solutions in those categories in a minute. But on a relative basis, we talk a lot about methane mitigation for oil and gas, and not as much about methane mitigation in agriculture except to the extent that we recognize that cow burps are a problem. And so that feels to me, I'm curious if this is your impression as well, that feels to me like a bit of an imbalance in terms of the relative impact versus relative attention paid. That's right.

There's a common misconception that methane is really only about. oil and gas. That is a crucial component of it, but it is only about a quarter. Part, there's many reasons for that focus. I think one important one to acknowledge and to continue our emphasis on is that the most ready reductions in methane do come from oil and gas. We have ready solutions there, and that is a place where we can start to bend the curve of methane. And there's some really important policy change and advocacy happening today in order to start achieving those goals. Yeah. So I want to come back in just a minute to mitigation and the different solutions in those different sectors before we do. So we just talked about all the sources

of methane emissions. I mean, I think one thing people appreciate more in CO2 worlds is the sinks. What are the natural ways in which we uptake CO2? So soil and the ocean, things like that, What does the equivalent look like in methane world? Do we have significant natural methane sinks? We do. The bad news is that they're not keeping up, and so we do see that methane is increasing in the atmosphere and accumulating there.

So the methane sink is quite different than the CO2 sync, and that the methane sink is a conversion. And so 90% of methane ends up being what's called oxidized by something called the hydroxyl radical in the atmosphere. And so this is a chemical reaction that is naturally occurring that is converting methane to CO2 and water. So it does end up as CO2. That CO2 ends up having much less of an impact in the atmosphere

than the methane did, given dramatic difference in global warming potential between methane and CO2. So 90% is oxidized through a very particular atmospheric pathway called the hydroxyl radical. The other 10% of the methane sink is a combination of some other atmospheric chemistry, as well as some soil sinks. So the phenotropes bacteria and soils also consume the methane and convert it there. But in total, those are all less than 10%. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utility

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shaping policy, and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's talk about what to do about it. And I think maybe we can start by, you know, running through the major categories of methane emissions and talk about the known and perhaps the less known or less understood potential solutions. So you alluded to oil and gas being the category where we have the most well-known mitigants. What do you view, well, first of all, where do the emissions come from predominantly? Where are we releasing methane

in the oil and gas world? And what are the big categories of solutions? So in the oil and gas sector, a large portion is leaks of natural gas pipelines. So that's an area where just getting better at leak detection and avoidance and repair can have a really massive immediate impact. There are also a number of process steps where certain machinery in the production pipeline also leaks methane. And some of those can be directly changed through. new infrastructure or sort of tightened up and improved. You mentioned coal mining before. That's a

different category where the coal mine face itself has methane in it. And so, you know, where coal mining does continue, it's really important that we either take that methane off of the coal face ahead of it being mined or treat the methane in the air. in the coal mine before it enters the atmosphere, and there's ongoing work for developing those solutions. Curious what you think of the other big category in oil and gas methane mitigation that you hear a lot about is flaring. So you mentioned leaks in things like natural gas pipelines, but this is more in natural gas extraction, where we've seen a fair amount of flaring,

but also some data and reports around methane that avoids flares and things like that. So how do you about flaring in the suite of solutions? So what flaring is, is it's the combustion of methane, and that flaring is better than not flaring should you be about to emit methane. So the purpose of flaring is to combust that methane to reduce its global warming before entering into the atmosphere. There are a number of problems here, though. One is we would rather not be emitting anything in the first place, and so we should be

avoiding the need to be releasing anything to the atmosphere, first of all. Second, where any flaring is necessary, and sometimes this is because of accumulating pressure and pipes, and it's really used as sometimes something for safety and management, it's really important that flare be very effective. And there's been a lot of recent research that has shown that flaring has not been as effective as it has been believed to be in actually fully combusting the methane. And so even when we are flaring,

we actually are continuing to emit some methane, albeit much less than if we had vented that methane directly into the air, which would have been even more incredibly bad. Which also gets to this other category of solutions that have popped up recently, which is instead of flaring, you use that methane to power a data center,

most often a Bitcoin mine, of late or, you know, there's some new ideas around using that methane to produce other chemicals that might store the carbon within them and then either be released if they're ultimately burned or they become plastics or something like that where it's durably stored. You know, what you're avoiding there is the, is flaring. So potentially avoiding the CO2 that would have been released from the flare. but as I understand it still faces that same problem you're describing before, which is like how effective are they?

Are you getting 100% of the methane or not? Right. I mean, the goal, as we think about any of these systems, should be to minimize any type of emissions into the atmosphere directly. And also, you know, if we're going to be burning this methane, which is an energy source, then at least let's use that for some sort of energetic or material value so that somewhere else in the system we can not be burning methane somewhere else and getting that value out of it. Again, ideally, this is all towards a system where we want to not,

no longer be burning any fossil fuels for energy, but we are right now in this period where we want to be minimizing our cumulative emissions on the way to racing towards net zero CO2 and minimal methane and other short-lived pollutant emissions. All right, so let's move on from oil and gas and talk about livestock. So first of all, just outline where methane emissions come from in the global livestock population, and then let's talk about what the suite of solutions looks like there. Sure. So livestock is about a third of methane emissions today, and there are two main sources from livestock. One is basically burps. It's actually them breathing out methane from the digestive.

of track, and the other is from manure management, so they're poop. There are some solutions available today, but a lot more are needed. So in terms of currently available solutions, there are some practice changes that are implementable today that can help to decrease these emissions. Many of those have been adopted already, but there's more work to do there in continuing to develop these practices and have them be fully rolled out. One thing that's fascinating about livestock emissions is just how variable they are across any axis you might look at, be that from different cows of the same species on the same farm to different species to different geographies.

There's a lot of different knobs to tune here, and so there are some practice changes that are currently available. On manure management, that's smaller than the burp side. and there we can change how we do manure storage using things like biogas digesters in order to capture some of that methane and make use of it rather than having it go directly to the atmosphere. There's also a role for demand shifting. So as much as we don't have to have as many cows globally producing dairy and meat, that will have an impact as well. When we look at 2030 projected models for all different anthropogenic methane emissions, and we look at where we already have solutions, and then the Delta, where we don't yet have solutions and need them.

Livestock screams at you from the page. The remaining livestock emissions for which we don't yet have supply sides or production side solutions for cutting methane. is it's the largest single category of anthropogenic methane emissions that we don't yet have technical solutions for. And this is going to have to be a mix of both working to have the growth of livestock brought down because the number of livestock is still dramatically growing and also figuring out for whatever that massive remainder of livestock is that we will almost certainly have in the 2030 timeframe. How can we better minimize these, methane emissions. Right.

So what you're saying in brief is there's things that there are practice changes that we can make and are already being made and those have an impact. But it's honestly, it's sort of an incremental impact, right? If we're still going to have a billion cattle in the world, there's only so much we could do out of practice change alone. So the second question is, are we going to have a billion cattle in the world? And that's where things like alternative protein, alternative dairy come into the mix. And there, it sounds like you're saying, yeah, absolutely, we should do that.

stuff, but let's be realistic about the time frame in which it could theoretically replace this global population of livestock, especially given that currently it is continuing to grow, not shrink along with global population growth and economic development and all that kind of stuff. And so if you add those two things up, they will have a non-negligible impact, but they are not the solutions alone. Yeah, I think this is a place where we kind of need to be going down and everywhere saying yes and given where we're at, right? So it's yes and carbon dioxide and methane, and within these methane sectors, it is yes and of we need to deploy the solutions that we have today. We need to

continue developing additional solutions. And in this case, there's a role for both cleaning up our supply and shifting our demand. And it's all these things working in parallel that are going to help bring these numbers down as much as possible. All right. So I want to then talk about some of the things we don't really have yet, at least not at fully mature scale, both specifically maybe for a minute on livestock and then more broadly on methane reduction and even methane removal. So in the livestock category, I mean, the other thing that has started to emerge is this class of generally feed additives for cattle that come in a couple of different forms, but the main one is what's called bromiform, which is this compound that comes from asparagus, which is this red seaweed

that's native to Australia, that has been proven to have a meaningful, though not 100% impact on cow burps, essentially, on mitigating cow burbs. What's your take on that category? So finding antimethane solutions for cows in all livestock is incredibly important and will be wildly impactful in helping to manage near-term warming. When we think about what the solutions are that we would hope to have, there's something that would be globally applicable, different geographies, different types of cow management, right, from both things that are in a barn and out grazing, be highly efficacious, right? So get as close as we can to 100% reduction of methane, and be low cost and easy for the farmer to apply so that this actually happens.

We unfortunately don't yet have any solutions that check all of those basic boxes. We have incredibly valuable work going into solutions that are going to help address a portion of that pie of emissions, but we don't yet have things that are going to take care of the vast majority. And the main reason for that is that huge numbers of cows globally are, outgrazing and are not in environments where they're being constantly fed human mixed food. And the vast majority of the solutions that we have so far today, including asperagopsis, including 3NOP, are things that we need to be feeding the cows all of the time. There are shockingly poor numbers about this globally, but it's something like 2 to 10% of

interic methane emissions that are most likely kind of in a actively fed scenario and the other 90-ish percent are not. And so that's the real prize here is finding a solution that will work at scale, at low cost, that's highly efficacious, that can be applied to grazing cows as well. Okay. Let's move on from livestock for a minute, though there are other things, other possibilities in livestock as well, as you said. We haven't found the silver bullet yet there. So there's a bunch of really interesting early work going on and various things that look closer to silver bullets

that I've starting to get a little bit excited about, but it's early days. I want to talk about the most frontier thing, which is, you know, in carbon dioxide world, there has been this vastly growing over the past few years interest and attention paid to carbon dioxide removal or CDR, which is atmospheric, drawdown of CO2. What do you think that looks like, if anything, in the context of methane? We have

methane in the atmosphere. It's a lower concentration than CO2, but it's a higher global warming potential. Is there any prospect, do you think, realistic prospect, for atmospheric methane removal? That question is the source of a lot of research right now. So the short answer is we don't yet know what solutions, if any, are going to be applicable to atmospheric levels of methane. And I think it's worth talking a little bit here about why these solutions, though, may be so important. And that is we haven't really talked about natural methane emissions yet. And there are a number of sources of risk and evidence that natural methane emissions are also increasing. So that 40% that we currently have is, as an absolute

number going up. Unfortunately, both sides, anthropogenic and natural are both going up right now. And, you know, it's there where we're looking at emissions that are impacting the atmosphere that we don't have as direct of anthropogenic controls over. You know, we can and we must cut oil and gas emissions. We can and we must find solutions to livestock. But what do we do about the possibility of dramatically increasing tropical wetlands methane emissions caused by warming and precipitation changes driven by our warming. What do we do about increasing permafrost methane emissions? These are the questions that make methane removal really interesting and a worthwhile pursuit. And there are a number of areas that are currently being researched,

but we do not yet have any solutions that will clearly work at scale safely for atmospheric concentrations, which is 2 ppm. It's a very hard problem. One thing, though, that is different about methane relative to CO2 that I find interesting in this context is that you could do full-on removal. You could imagine direct methane capture in the same way that we have direct air capture. to your point, the biggest challenge is 2 ppm. But also, you could oxidize methane. You could do atmospheric methane oxidation or something like that. And again, that turns the methane into CO2, basically, which isn't great, but is way, way better if you get the same amount of CO2 versus the same amount of methane.

So is that different in terms of this, the balance equation around the difficulty of doing it because it's so dilute versus the need? So when we talk about what the methane sinks are, they are all oxidative pathways. And so methane removal actually basically means methane oxidation. So when I talk about needing to find solutions for 2PM atmospheric level methane, all of those solutions would be oxidative pathways, and it's still incredibly hard. There are, again, a number of methods that are being researched in this area, different types of catalysts, different types of biological systems, sort of taking inspiration

from the soil sink that we do have today naturally in the methane system. But even there, this is all very, very early research at this time, which if it pans out, could be critically important for helping to be able to take us off of potential feedback loops in the climate system. But at this stage, this is all really early scientific research, and there are not yet any atmospheric methane removal techniques that are deployable. All right. So final question for you, then. If I can attempt to summarize a big part of what Spark focuses on, it's sort of identifying where are there gaps in research and development and science and technology for things that we're going to need answers to in a climate context. Where do you view?

as the biggest need right now? Like, where are the gaps that you think are most glaring in terms of where research has been done versus where it needs to be done? So the two areas that we're focused on are on the anthropogenic side, livestock and teric emissions. So that's the single largest category of anthropogenic emissions for which we don't yet have technical solutions. And so innovation is going to be absolutely required here. Among many other sectors, I just want to say methane is a sector that is, it is an innovation sector, and it hasn't necessarily gotten the innovation attention yet, but because it's a very different set of sources than CO2 outside of the oil and gas sector, and that our attention to it is much more recent,

this entire area is ripe for innovation. We have, you know, we have still, we haven't talked about, but we have big questions about how do we improve rice management to, you know, further decrease. 10%. That 10% is not small. And so this is a huge area for innovation. The first piece that we're biting off is around Interic, just given the relative size. And the second area we're focused on is atmospheric methane removal. It has the potential to be incredibly important in terms of how we manage natural feedbacks that we are, that there's evidence that we're starting to see and we may see more of. And that we really view as part of building out our risk mitigation portfolio.

We need a huge variety of solutions here primarily on the emissions reduction side, but there are natural sources that may need to be addressed as well. And these are decade-long research questions that if we don't start asking and working on today, we certainly won't have a decade from now. But if we do, we might have some of the pieces that we'll need in the future and be really glad we did it. All right, well, both of those are categories that in part thanks to you, but also more generally, I have become obsessed with on enteric and the possibility of atmospheric methane removal. So as these things develop, we will have another chat about them when there's some more specific solutions to run through. But in the meantime, Erica, this was a great whirlwind overview of, I don't know, we covered like 70% of methane emissions.

Maybe less, actually. We didn't really talk about the natural stuff. It's a big thing. It's a big thing, unfortunately. Thank you for doing it. Sure thing. This has been fun. Thanks so much.

Erica Reinhart is the co-founder and board director of Spark Climate Solutions. What did you think? First of all, did you get the Cherry Bomb song reference at the beginning? This was an area of active debate between my wife and I. First of all, how old are you? And second of all, did you get that reference? More importantly, what did you think of the actual episode? Methane is a gigantic category.

and we covered a little bit of it. So tell us what else we should talk about. I mean, rice patties, for example. We barely got there, and it's a huge thing. So always welcome your feedback. Send us a voice memo or an email at Catalyst at postcripta audio.com. You can find the show on Twitter at At CatalystPod. You can find me there, too.

And if you like the show today, as always, go over to Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review. This show is a co-production of PostScript Media and Canary Media. Head over to canarymedia.com for links to today's topics. And as always, PostScript is supported by Prelude Ventures, a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs to address climate change across a range of sectors including advanced energy, food and ag, transportation and logistics, advanced materials and manufacturing and advanced computing. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing by Greg Vilfranc and Sean Marquand, theme song by Sean Marquand. Our managing producer is Cecily Meza Martinez. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.