Unexplainable - The methane hunters

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Methane traps more than 80 times as much heat as CO2 over the short term. So we could make a real difference on climate change this decade if we could stop leaking so much methane into the atmosphere. But before researchers and regulators can figure out how to do that, the methane hunters need to find the leaks. For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to view show transcripts and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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For less, give AncestryDNA.A. Visit Ancestry.ca.C.T.A. today. Offer ends May 10th. Terms apply. Okay, Rebecca Lieber, climate writer, Vox, tell me a climate story. So I've talked to this woman named Sharon Wilson, who used to live in North, Texas, in this rural area on a ranch. And she moved their decades ago just falling in love with this space, this open, flat expanse. If I couldn't sleep, I could walk outside and look up and see the Milky Way.

And the first time I saw that, I thought that something had exploded in the sky. We would drive the pickup truck out into the pasture on a dark night, and we put a lawn chair in the back of the truck, and the coyotes would serenade. We would hear the coyotes yipping all around us. It was just, it was like paradise. Over time, she saw these other lights that were moving closer and closer to her property. As these towers of lights moved closer,

the stars weren't as visible from the light pollution. So I was very curious, and I drove to where the towers of lights were. She figured out they were drilling rigs, and some were being used for fracking, which is basically mining for natural gas and oil, using this high-pressure mix of water and chemicals that you inject underground. And that got her really worried about the air and water pollution and its effect on her health and her communities. I could see that they were doing things that I felt like I needed to know about, and it looked like some pretty dirty stuff.

So I got a ladder, and I set up a ladder in the bed of my truck, and I climbed on top of the ladder and took pictures and videos of what I was seeing. This led her to becoming an environmental activist, and soon she started poking around, not just near her ranch, but in the Permian Basin, which is this big, flat expanse. located in western Texas. And right now, it's one of the biggest centers for fracking in the U.S. So I would park my truck on the side of the road and just watch them and observe. We call it creeping, just creeping by these sites and observing. The first time you see it, it is just absolutely groundbreaking. Miguel Escodo is another activist who goes around with Sharon Wilson to hunt for pollution. We saw everything. We saw a compressor.

catch flames. There was a huge plume of smoke that looked like a mushroom cloud. Miguel and Sharon have been doing this for years. They're basically hunting for clues using this special tool called an infrared camera. So it's a great big camera. And when you look at the facility,

you see pipes that stick up. You see some tanks. And that's all you see. When you put the camera up to your face, then it's a whole different picture. What they're looking at is methane. This is an unlit flare. Methane is this invisible gas that you need a camera to see

unless it's on fire. And it's one of the pollutants Miguel and Sharon are most concerned about because it's really damaging for the climate. See, they're venting it. It's venting out of that pipe. On the camera, you see that there is a plume of... of gas that's just pumping out consistently through this pipe. And it's just chugging along.

It's just venting and venting and venting. The last few years, more and more people are increasingly worried about methane. Researchers have realized that in some ways, methane can be even worse for climate change than carbon dioxide. It is such a powerful actor on our climate. And it's coming out everywhere. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable. we need to talk about methane, why it's such a big problem, why researchers think limiting it could make a real dent in climate change in our lifetimes, but also why it's so hard to find.

Okay, Rebecca, before we get into finding all of this missing methane, what exactly is it? What's methane? So methane is this colorless, tasteless gas. It's the gas used in your gas stove, your gas heater, but it's also used to make fuel. The chemical symbol for methane is CH4. It's a carbon atom and for hydrogen atoms, and that's probably more than your listeners want to hear. So I reached out to Riley Duren. He's a scientist at the University of Arizona.

He also works at NASA. And for a project called Carbon Mapper. Everything you can think of that the Earth does, we monitor it. He's really into methane, and he told me that it is a pollutant just generally. It makes air pollution a lot worse. But also, it's a powerful greenhouse gas. Okay, so I know carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, like traps heat in the atmosphere. How does methane compare? Well, methane is extremely potent as a climate pollutant. It is more than 80 times more effective at trapping heat over a short period when you compare it to carbon dioxide.

80 times? Yeah, exactly, which makes it such a big problem because it's also rising and the number, to climate pollutant in the world right after that carbon dioxide. Why is it so much more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide? So Riley described it like a curtain. So if you consider greenhouse gases to be this curtain around the planet, trapping heat, some are a lot lighter than others. So methane is just this really thick blanket that's opaque and trapping that heat and warming the planet.

Yeah, and warming way more than CO2 does. That seems really bad. Well, the good news is methane also dissipates a lot faster than carbon dioxide does. Methane is short-lived. It only lasts in the atmosphere about 10 years, which is much shorter than CO2, which lasts for hundreds of years. So one way to think about it is it's compressed into a short period of time at packs a really big punch. So that means that if we reduce methane emissions now, we can see an effect in our life. lifetimes, like the next 10 to 20 years, which is a big reason that people are so focused on methane. Right. And the other reason is that it just feels more tractable than CO2 right now.

Why is methane more of a fixable problem? So CO2 is this inevitable byproduct of everything we do. It just is produced from burning fossil fuels. But with methane, we're just letting a lot of gas escape into that atmosphere unnecessarily. It's basically just leaking. So where are they? Where are the leaks? Well, that's the big problem. We're still trying to figure it out.

Great. Yeah, so humanity has a methane checkbook, effectively, that is currently not well-balanced. Basically, we know for sure that methane levels are rising in the atmosphere. But where things become less certain is when you zoom in to finer and finer scale. Methane can come from a lot of different sources. Wetlands naturally vented. There's agriculture. cows, you probably have heard about cow burbs and farts.

Okay. There's your stove and your heat. There's landfills, and then there's fuel. Some countries have more or less wetlands, and others the methane emissions is driven more by agriculture or waste management. So it's really hard for scientists to pin down exactly what percentage of our methane's coming from where. But what we do know is that oil and gas production is a huge part of this pie.

And places like the Permian Basin where Miguel and Sharon do most of their investigations, that's producing a huge amount of methane. And that methane, that's escaping into that atmosphere, that's something that's under our control. This is something that we can get a handle on or maybe even stop. So how do we do that exactly? So a key thing to know is that whenever you frack and whenever you drill for gas, you are inevitably venting a certain amount of methane. ideally we're doing that in smaller quantities, but what's actually happening is we have these major super emitters. Super emitters. Yeah. About four or five years ago, multiple field studies showed that a small fraction of the infrastructure out there is responsible for a disproportionate

amount of emissions. They did a survey in California, for example. And after surveying almost 300,000 pieces of infrastructure. We found that less than 600 facilities were responsible for at least a third of a state's total methane emissions. We call those super emitters. That's the scientific term for it. Ideally, you find those leaks, you find those super emitters, and then you clean them up. Okay, great. So we got marching orders, right? Let's go clean up the super emitters. Well, it's not that simple. When we talk about the regulation of this industry, we have to talk about who has eyes on the sites? There are activists like Sharon and Miguel doing this kind of work,

but their organization has just 30 people, and only a few of them go out with these expensive cameras to film these emissions. Most of their work has to be focused on raising awareness about this issue by posting videos on YouTube and Twitter, because at the end of the day, their team isn't big enough to gather all the data they need. And frankly, neither are the teams the regulators equipped to monitor emissions, across hundreds of miles of the Permian. You have about 300,000 oil and gas wells,

and the statistic is that there is about, like, one regulator, one inspector for every 3,000 oil and gas wells facilities. But it's just a drop in the bucket. It would take an army of regulators, of inspectors, to keep this industry, just to have eyes on the facilities. Just to have eyes, we would need to hire an army. Right now, scientists are working on a whole set of new tools that can act like that army

and do the kind of work that activists have been doing on the ground just at a much bigger scale. It really is a kitchen sink problem. You have to throw every technology you can think of at it. Coming up after the break, step one, find the methane leaks. Step two, figure out a way to actually get regulators to plug them. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in and your own security channel at London Heathrow, you can glide from your car to their clubhouse, a destination in its own right in 10 minutes or less.

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like frackers. So how do scientists actually find the leaks? There are two major ways. Okay. First is sniffing the air. So imagine that you've got a laboratory in a box that sits in the back of your car, and it's running the air through a little laboratory in a box, which has lasers and all sorts of other contraptions, that's analyzing the gas that's moving through the tube. The other approach is something called remote sensing.

This is an approach that uses a spectrable. which is basically reflecting sunlight and uses all the visible and invisible colors in that spectrum to figure out what gases are present in the atmosphere on the surface of the Earth. And how are they using all of these tools exactly? So it's this whole combination of things. Riley says you can drive around with a lab in the box or leave at places to get really specific measurements. But also as organization Carbon Mapper will send up planes over the Permian Basin.

And if you look out the window of the plane with your eyes, you see literally thousands and thousands of oil and gas wells, compressor stations, gathering lines, gas processing plants. It's almost like looking at a circuit board. In order to track down all this methane, they have to fly over every single bit of territory. These surveys will last four to five hours a day, and it literally involves this mowing the lawn pattern where the airplane just flies back and forth. Which you can get kind of boring because most of the people on the plane can't see anything happening. It's just land beneath them. It turns out there's one person on board who usually is having more fun, and that's the instrument operator, because they can see in real time the spectrometer that we have on board the airplane, which is looking down through a little window in the belly of the airplane.

What it sees is very different. It's the same territory, but now it has a fireworks show on it. And that's the invisible methane that we're talking about. The instrument is actually seeing the methane plumes. And it's high enough resolution that if you were to fly lower in the airplane and look down on the facility, you could actually see where it's coming from on the facility. You could see, for example, an invisible plume of methane gas coming from a storage tank or a wellhead. Ultimately, flying plants can be a pretty effective way of finding these leaks,

but we just don't have enough of this kind of work happening to do this constantly. When we talk about cases where people can fly drones or aircraft or satellites over a facility to look at their methane emissions, those cases are still pretty limited. I mean, the fact that every time it happens, people go off and write a scientific journal paper about it just indicates how experimental it still is. But in the next few years, Riley's group wants to send up a fleet of satellites, and that will join a few other satellites that are already up there collecting this data.

This is really important because we need that bigger picture of where methane leaks are coming from and not just from oil and gas production in the Permian Basin, but all over the world. And these kinds of measurements can also give us a lot more information about methane leaks from other sources like wetlands.

So whatever technique they end up using, you know, lab in a box, spectrometer stuff on planes, or satellites, what do they end up actually doing with all that information? This is the trickiest question of what to do about it. It's not as simple as just calling the oil company up and reporting this because we don't have a ton of environmental enforcement here. The EPA is just now working on a proposal for how to cut back on methane emissions from facilities. So their regulation is still a really long way from actually enforcing more of these

cuts. And methane is not just a U.S. problem. It's a global issue. Madam President, fellow leaders, I know that all of us here at COP 26 want to be on the right side of history. So at this last climate conference in Glasgow this fall, more than 100 countries joined this side global agreement that says they're going to cut their methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Cutting back on methane emissions is one of the most effective things we can do to reduce near-term global warming and keep 1.5 degrees Celsius. They don't specify energy production, but the implied part is if you're going to tackle

methane emissions and you are a big oil and gas producer, you have to start with the energy sector. It is the lowest hanging fruit. This was a huge breakthrough just because we had so many world leaders say this is a huge problem and we have to take action, but there's still a long way to go to actually filling in those blanks of how do you cut back on methane? And a lot of big countries like China and Russia haven't even signed on. So it seems like there is some action being taken on this front, but there's also, you know, all of this unknown, like where all the methane is, and it seems like we're still really far away from where we need to be on this. Does this seem like a hopeful story to you?

Well, I think it's mixed because Miguel, that Texas activist, he is really skeptical that global leaders actually mean what they say and that plugging the leaks alone is going to solve this. Even though the rhetoric of oil and gas companies is improving, the situation on the ground in the Permian is not. Miguel's point is that just plugging leaks is thinking too small, that we need much more radical change that addresses the root of the problem, which is fossil fuel production and our reliance. This industry is inevitably,

and unavoidably dirty. But I also think it's a hopeful story because climate change can feel like this really abstract issue, but methane isn't. It's something that's concrete. And the work that Miguel and Sharon are doing combined with the satellite data coming in gives us what we need to point at the map

and say this is where methane pollution is coming from. So they're making this invisible and abstract contributor to climate change, visible and concrete. This episode was edited by Catherine Wells, Meredith Hodnott, Brian Resnick, and Noam Hassenfeld. It was produced by me, Bird Pinkerton, with some much appreciated help from Noam, who also wrote the music. Richard Seema checked our facts. Christian Ayala did our mixing and sound design. Tori Dominguez is our audio fellow, and Manding Nguyen makes everything that she touches better.

If you want to read more about methane or if you want to see some of the maps that Riley described to us, Rebecca Lieber has several in-depth pieces on our site. And if you have thoughts, you can email them to us at Unexplainable at Vox.com. Or you could leave us a review or a rating, which would be very much appreciated. Unexplanable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we're off next week, getting our upcoming series on The Senses ready. but we'll be back in two weeks.