Meanwhile: https://cleantechnica.com/2024/05/03/fossil-fuel-companies-b...
Looks like another arms race. :-(
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.
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
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?
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.”
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
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.
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.
Curious. Had seen cars running on GPL (yep), but never methane. Who is the maker?
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 "Más información" 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.