Climate crisis: an invisible, odorless gas is pitting Texas against the Biden government

Climate crisis: an invisible, odorless gas is pitting Texas against the Biden government

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Most importantly, it also measures methane, which is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the next 20 years. You know it better as natural gas. Heating and cooking are not the only culprits of methane. Two-thirds of emissions come from vomiting cows, industrial farms and decomposing landfills. But, as any Texan will tell you, it is much easier to control the gas coming out of the soil than the gas coming out of the cows.

The “greenhouse effect” was discovered before women could vote (by a suffragette, really), but in 2021, the metaphor for indoor gardening does not correspond to emergency. Instead, imagine a baby in a hot car. Carbon dioxide is like steel and glass that retain the sun’s rays as they hit the windshield. Methane is the equivalent of turning on the heater inside the car; works much faster, but is easier to control in the long run. Planet Earth, of course, is the baby.
Without the tools of a methane hunter, you cannot see or smell natural gas, but virtually all Earth scientists reviewed agree that for life on Earth to survive in any appearance today, you must follow the dodo path along with coal and oil. Climatologists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tell us that deadly changes will only get worse until people stop using fuels that burn and leak.
But in Texas, methane is so abundant and cheap that it escaped unseen and measured until the Environmental Defense Fund and oil producers started using tools like the Picarro spectrometer. Scientific Aviation, based in Boulder, Colorado, owns this and will scent the sky for all types of customers, but only EDF makes the data public.
Mackenzie Smith, a senior scientist in Scientific Aviation, checks readings on instruments that measure gases like methane in the atmosphere.
“What we found here in the Permian Basin is that operators are wasting enough gas to heat about 2 million homes a year,” said Kelsey Robinson, project manager for EDF’s PermianMAP Project.
Sometimes methane leaks from defective equipment or from tens of thousands of orphaned wells. Sometimes, when there is no one to buy, they just burn in a practice called burning. Former President Donald Trump tried to remove all methane regulations, a move so extreme that even ExxonMobil was opposed. But until President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency can navigate the legal pitfalls left by the Trump administration’s awards for methane spills, it’s up to oil and gas companies to fix a problem that no one can see or smell.

“We found that the Permian Basin is emitting more than double that of any other oil and gas region in the United States,” said Robinson.

Banning all bans

Named after the largest mass extinction event on Earth, the Permian Basin is so flat that you could swear you can see the curvature of the Earth in the bed of a pickup. When the oily, gaseous and flammable evidence of the Great Death – the nickname given to the mass extinction event that marked the end of the Permian geological period – was found under the red earth, Midland and Odessa grew in the vena cava of the state oil industry, the setting for “Friday Night Lights” and the perfect place for Texas Governor Greg Abbott to fire the first shot in a 2021 civilian methane war.
The Permian basin, which covers most of western Texas, is flat, open and sits on a large amount of oil.
“I am in Midland to make it clear that Texas will protect the oil and gas industry from any kind of hostile attack launched from Washington, DC,” said Abbott, days after Biden signed his first round of executive orders aimed at the climate in crisis.

Then the Republican governor signed an executive order of his own, ordering each state agency to present every reason to prosecute and prevent the Biden government’s clean energy efforts. In calling for cities like San Francisco, where a movement is growing to ban natural gas heaters and new construction appliances, Abbott has promised to ban all bans.

“In Texas, we will not allow cities to use the politically correct to dictate which source of energy you use,” he said. “Therefore, I am supporting legislation that prohibits cities and counties from banning natural gas appliances.”

But as a sign of the changing times, Abbott’s fierce opposition to the Paris Agreement puts him at odds with the statements and catchphrases of Big Oil’s biggest lobbyist.

“We think the threat of climate change is very real,” Mike Sommers, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute (API), told CNN. “We support industry actions and federal government actions in the United States and around the world to address this very important issue that we know to be of an existential nature.”

But as more European energy companies adopt a green transition, France’s Total has become the first oil giant to break its association with the API, citing differences over a carbon tax, subsidies for electric cars and … methane . In October, the French government stepped in to block a $ 7 billion deal, deciding that Texas’ liquefied natural gas is too dirty by its standards.

A call for more pipelines

As for Biden being an existential threat to oil and gas, Sommers seems less concerned and argues that there is no need to transition to geothermal, solar or wind power because the world will demand fuels that burn and leak for generations.

“This industry supplies about 60% of the world’s energy today,” he said. “And the trend that there will be a transition in energy. But I am also confident that this industry will last a long time.”

Signs of old and new power: an oil pump placed between wind turbines outside Odessa, Texas.

To solve the methane problem, he argues that if the United States had more gas pipelines, the industry would not have to burn so much natural gas unnecessarily.

“I think the biggest challenge we have from the point of view of emissions, honestly, is getting our infrastructure right,” said Sommers. “We need to make sure that we have pipelines to get these products to market as quickly as possible. And what that means is that we need a regulatory framework that allows these pipelines to be built.”

Kelsey Robinson of EDF has a simpler idea. “Reducing methane emissions is actually a job generator in its own right, because we need people to go out and search these places and then take steps to fix those leaks.”

“It doesn’t make sense to burn it,” said Texas state geologist Scott Tinker as we strolled the elaborate map of the Texas rock garden outside his office. “They don’t have the collection systems to collect it. So, instead of leaking methane, they burn it and leak CO2. CO2 is better as a product than methane, if you put something in the atmosphere. it would be much better to collect it. “

Scott Tinker, a Texas state geologist, agrees that it would be better to collect methane, but says progress may be slow.

After the 2008 recession, Tinker says the fracking boom took western Texas by surprise. Years of declining oil fields saw a renaissance when the new method of injecting water into shale doubled oil production and created jets of invisible methane with no way to capture it.

“The conversation is changing,” said Tinker, after pressure from the public and shareholders. “It’s happening, but it’s slow, it takes a lot of money, it requires approval for the pipelines. It takes an industry and a regulatory system that made this happen in the first place.”

Sommers insists that his API members are taking the problem seriously, with 70% of onshore producers joining the Environmental Partnership, which aims to reduce methane emissions in the oil and gas industry, he said.

“It brings together producers, large and small, to share technology and share best practices on how to reduce methane emissions,” he said. “And it’s working.”

Checking in space

But far beyond the methane problem, the only way to save life on Earth and the fossil fuel industry is to furiously develop carbon capture and storage technology on a mind-boggling scale. This would require the construction of sophisticated and expensive methane collectors around the chimneys of all petrochemical plants, power plants and steel mills in the world.

Hopes for a miraculous solution suffered a major setback this week when the Petra Nova plant outside Houston closed indefinitely. Supported by a $ 190 million grant from the Department of Energy, the four-year plant set out to capture 90% of the carbon dioxide pumped from a 240-megawatt coal-fired power plant. It was the only major carbon capture project in the United States after a $ 7.5 billion project in Mississippi was closed before it even went into operation.

Exxon Mobil says it is working on 20 new carbon capture projects worldwide, including one in Texas, as part of a new $ 3 billion investment in a business they call ExxonMobil’s Low Carbon Solutions.

This aircraft operated by Scientific Aviation is equipped with technology to measure climate-altering gases, such as methane.

But Robinson and his flying methane hunters have heard promises before. With no regulations applicable for large and small producers, she says the profit motive almost always wins.

“ExxonMobil and some of the other big producers have set some pretty high targets on how they want to maintain their emissions,” said Robinson. “But we found that here in the Permian Basin, the methane leakage rate is more than 10 times higher than many companies have set out to do.”

In the meantime, she says she will keep her small team flying, sniffing and measuring methane, while the plane will soon have some high altitude backup. Following a $ 100 million donation from the Earth Fund by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, EDF will soon launch its own methane hunting satellite.

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