All posts tagged: methane

COP29: Satellites spot methane leaks – but ‘super-emitters’ don’t fix them

COP29: Satellites spot methane leaks – but ‘super-emitters’ don’t fix them

Published by skeptic

A methane plume at least 4.8 kilometres long billows into the atmosphere south of Tehran, Iran NASA/JPL-Caltech The world has more ways than ever to spot the invisible methane emissions responsible for a third of global warming so far. But according to a report released at the COP29 climate summit, methane “super-emitters” rarely take action when alerted that they are leaking large amounts of the potent greenhouse gas. “We’re not seeing the transparency and the sense of urgency that we require,” says Manfredi Caltagirone, director of the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Methane Emissions Observatory, which recently launched a system that uses satellite data to alert methane emitters about leaks. Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas to address, behind carbon dioxide, and a rising number of countries have promised to slash methane emissions in order to avoid near-term warming. At last year’s COP28 climate summit, many of the world’s largest oil and gas companies also pledged to “eliminate” methane emissions from their operations. Today, a growing number of satellites are beginning to detect …

‘Nobody ever saw anything like this before’: how methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe | Greenhouse gas emissions

‘Nobody ever saw anything like this before’: how methane emissions are pushing the Amazon towards environmental catastrophe | Greenhouse gas emissions

Published by skeptic

Controlling methane provides our best, and perhaps only, lever for shaving peak global temperatures over the next few decades. This is because it’s cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after release. Therefore if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, methane’s concentration would quickly return to pre-industrial levels. Essentially, humans have released in excess of 3bn tonnes of methane into the atmosphere in the past 20 years. Quashing those emissions within a decade or two would save us 0.5C of warming. No other greenhouse gas gives us this much power to slow the climate crisis. If the Earth keeps warming, though, reducing emissions from human activities may not be enough. We may also need to counter higher methane emissions in nature, including from warming tropical wetlands and thawing Arctic permafrost. The highest natural methane emissions come from wetlands and seasonally flooded forests in the tropics – such as the Brazilian Amazon forest I recently visited at the Mamirauá sustainable development reserve – and they are expected to rise with …

Methane emissions from gas flaring being hidden from satellite monitors | Climate crisis

Methane emissions from gas flaring being hidden from satellite monitors | Climate crisis

Published by skeptic

Oil and gas equipment intended to cut methane emissions is preventing scientists from accurately detecting greenhouse gases and pollutants, a satellite image investigation has revealed. Energy companies operating in countries such as the US, UK, Germany and Norway appear to have installed technology that could stop researchers from identifying methane, carbon dioxide emissions and pollutants at industrial facilities involved in the disposal of unprofitable natural gas, known in the industry as flaring. Flares are used by fossil fuel companies when capturing the natural gas would cost more than they can make by selling it. They release carbon dioxide and toxic pollutants when they burn as well as cancer-causing chemicals. Despite the health risks, regulators sometimes prefer flaring to releasing natural gas – which is 90% methane – directly into the atmosphere, known as “venting”. The World Bank, alongside the EU and other regulators, have been using satellites for years to find and document gas flares, asking energy companies to find ways of capturing the gas instead of burning or venting it. The bank set up …

Researchers create green jet fuel from methane emissions

Researchers create green jet fuel from methane emissions

Published by skeptic

Scientists from the University of Sydney have innovated a process for turning methane emissions into green jet fuel. The researchers have created a chemical process that utilises plasma to generate sustainable fuel from methane gas emitted by landfill sites. This novel approach not only creates green fuel to help decarbonise the aviation industry but also helps curb harmful emissions from landfills, creating a circular approach. The innovation highlights Australia’s determination to combat greenhouse gas emissions, with the nation recently joining the US, EU, Japan, and the Republic of Korea in signing the international methane mitigation agreement. Professor PJ Cullen, lead author from the University of Sydney, highlighted the significance of the breakthrough: “Globally, landfills are a major emitter of greenhouse gases, mainly a mixture of CO2 and methane. We have developed a process that would take these gases and convert them into fuels, targeting sectors that are difficult to electrify, like aviation.” “Modern landfill facilities already capture, upgrade and combust their gas emissions for electricity generation. However, our process creates a much more environmentally impactful and commercially …

Nord stream methane leaks won’t majorly affect climate, study finds – POLITICO

Nord stream methane leaks won’t majorly affect climate, study finds – POLITICO

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At the time of the leaks, Jeffrey Kargel, a senior scientist at the Planetary Research Institute in Tucson, Arizona, told POLITICO that “the leak was really disturbing.” However, while the amount of gas lost “obviously is large… it is not the climate disaster one might think,” Kargel said. Germany, Sweden and Denmark launched separate investigations into the incident. All three established it was due to a it was due to sabotage. Several countries have been publicly blamed for the explosions, with varying degrees of evidence. Ukraine has said Russia was behind the bombing, and Poland has also hinted that Moscow was responsible, which the Kremlin has denied. Earlier in March, German media reported` that German prosecutors have found “traces” of evidence indicating that Ukrainians may have been involved in the explosions that blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines. However, those reports stressed that there’s no proof that Ukrainian authorities ordered the attack or were involved in it.  An earlier report  by The New York Times had said that “intelligence suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group” sabotaged the pipelines. …

The Download: AI’s gaming prowess, and calculating methane emissions

The Download: AI’s gaming prowess, and calculating methane emissions

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The news: A new AI agent from Google DeepMind can play different games, including ones it has never seen before such as Goat Simulator 3, a fun action game with exaggerated physics. Unlike earlier game-playing AI systems, which mastered only one game or could only follow single goals or commands, this new agent is able to play a variety of different games, including Valheim and No Man’s Sky.  How they did it: Researchers were able to get it to follow text commands to play seven different games and move around in three different 3D research environments. They trained it on lots of examples of humans playing video games, alongside keyboard and mouse input and annotations of what the players did. Then they used an AI technique called imitation learning to teach the agent to play games as humans would. Why it’s a big deal: It’s a step toward more generalized AI that can transfer skills across multiple environments—and this sort of knowledge transfer between games represents a significant milestone for AI research. Read the full …

Why methane emissions are still a mystery

Why methane emissions are still a mystery

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The key is contrails, thin clouds that planes produce when they fly. Minimizing contrails means less warming, and changing flight paths can reduce the amount of contrail formation. Read more about how in the latest from my colleague James Temple.  Keeping up with climate   New rules from the US Securities and Exchange Commission were watered down, cutting off the best chance we’ve had at forcing companies to reckon with the dangers of climate change, as Dara O’Rourke writes in a new opinion piece. (MIT Technology Review) Yes, heat pumps slash emissions, even if they’re hooked up to a pretty dirty grid. Switching to a heat pump is better than heating with fossil fuels basically everywhere in the US. (Canary Media) Rivian announced its new R2, a small SUV set to go on sale in 2026. The reveal signals a shift to focusing on mass-market vehicles for the brand. (Heatmap) Toyota has focused on selling hybrid vehicles instead of fully electric ones, and it’s paying off financially. (New York Times) → Here’s why I wrote in …

Methane emissions are triple what government thinks, study finds

Methane emissions are triple what government thinks, study finds

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American oil and natural gas wells, pipelines and compressors are spewing three times the amount of the potent heat-trapping gas methane as the government thinks, causing $9.3 billion in yearly climate damage, a new comprehensive study calculates. But because more than half of these methane emissions are coming from a tiny number of oil and gas sites — 1% or less — this means the problem is both worse than the government thought but also fairly fixable, said the lead author of a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The same issue is happening globally. Large methane emissions events around the world detected by satellites grew 50% in 2023 compared to 2022, with more than 5 million metric tons spotted in major fossil fuel leaks, the International Energy Agency reported Wednesday in its Global Methane Tracker 2024. World methane emissions rose slightly in 2023 to 120 million metric tons, the report said. “This is really an opportunity to cut emissions quite rapidly with targeted efforts at these highest emitting sites,” said Evan Sherwin, lead …

Oil & gas methane pollution is higher than government and industry estimates

Oil & gas methane pollution is higher than government and industry estimates

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Flares burn off methane and other hydrocarbons at an oil and gas facility in Lenorah, Texas in 2021. New research shows drillers emit about three times as much climate-warming methane as official estimates. David Goldman/AP hide caption toggle caption David Goldman/AP Flares burn off methane and other hydrocarbons at an oil and gas facility in Lenorah, Texas in 2021. New research shows drillers emit about three times as much climate-warming methane as official estimates. David Goldman/AP The oil and gas industry may be emitting about three-times the amount of climate-warming methane than government estimates show, according to a new study in Nature. Methane is the main component of natural gas, and it is also produced when extracting crude oil. Methane is among the greenhouse gasses heating the planet, and it is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The study’s researchers used airplanes to gather 986,238 measurements of methane emissions from six domestic oil and gas production areas. The data include about half the country’s onshore oil production and 29% of natural gas production. Then …

Methane leaks from US oil and gas are triple government estimates

Methane leaks from US oil and gas are triple government estimates

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A methane plume in California detected by an airborne spectrometer NASA/JPL-Caltech Major oil and gas-producing regions in the US are leaking much more methane than current estimates suggest, according to nearly a million aerial measurements of the potent greenhouse gas. “Our study used the largest such dataset that’s ever been assembled,” says Evan Sherwin at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who conducted the research while at Stanford University. He and his colleagues combined data from numerous aerial surveys that used infrared sensors to measure methane leaking from wells, pipelines… Source link