Fertilizer plants emit 100 times more methane than reported

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190606183254.htm

by rguiscard • 7 years ago

266 62 7 years ago

sciencedaily.com

Joe-Z2• 7 years ago

So, how does this relate to our predictions about global warming? Anyone here who has insights on that?

pjc503• 7 years ago

I think this is both good news and bad news.

Most of the global warming work is based off the amount of methane estimated to be in the atmosphere, which can be determined with sampling and spectroscopy. This particular piece of research tells us where some of that is coming from, and fortunately it's from a few concentrated sites that are under human control. We could lean on them to fix it. Chemical processing sites already try to control methane leakage because it's explosive in air.

The bad news is that we probably won't. We have enough trouble with flaring: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-4... (my pet complaint, not only because it's a nuisance but because they've wasted in a year as much gas as I personally will use in 50,000 years, which makes reducing my personal consumption seem a bit pointless)

( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((38747+tonnes+*+50MJ%...) )

Joe-Z2• 7 years ago

Thank you for taking the time to write up some conclusions!

... makes reducing my personal consumption seem a bit pointless

Although I try to not to be wasteful also I get this feeling a lot that in climate change matters the actions that individuals can set are far outweighed by consistently applied systemic changes. Makes it kind of frustrating to try to save the earth :)

ptah• 7 years ago

I can only imagine how badly this increases the environmental impact of meat industry if this fertiliser is used to fertilise soy fed to beef cattle which is hugely inefficient in providing protein to humans

Nasrudith2• 7 years ago

I suspect it could ironically help still - at least if compared to non-fertilized resource useage.

estsauver2• 7 years ago

Actual paper here: https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358...

My conclusions:

* A carbon tax would be nice to incentivize accountability around net- greenhouse gas contributions.

* This paper does quite a bit of probabilistic inference here. They conclude, for example, that the ~two orders of magnitude difference in emissions implies the model is working. ( https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358... ) This isn't super surprising since they're trying to measure methane emissions ~a km away from the source, but should measure our expectations.

Also, the whole dataset is available here (https://oneshare.cdlib.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.15146/R3WT2N) if anyone is interested. Props to the authors for including it.

(Disclosure: My company buys quite a bit of inorganic fertilizer every year. None of it is US sourced though as we're operating in subsaharan Africa.)

pjc503• 7 years ago

If we can't have a carbon tax because of the politics, we should at least try for a ban on fracking. Every molecule of gas extracted has to go somewhere, either into the atmosphere directly or as CO2.

mikemotherwell• 7 years ago

We shouldn't do anything in any direction without detailed comparisons.

https://www.drawdown.org/ has a big list of things that can be done, with the benefits of each in terms of cost and carbon reduction. It would make most sense to work through the list. If you guessed what number 1 is, you're a smarter human than I am!

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-man...

Angostura• 7 years ago

I think the politics will allow it - we should be fighting for a Carbon Fee & Dividend system https://citizensclimatelobby.org/basics-carbon-fee-dividend/

pas• 7 years ago

Fracking seems to be largely the cause of dropping natural gas prices which led to the phasing out of coal.

Without fracking were we closing this many coal plants?

Would other nations close this many coal plants?

Robotbeat3• 7 years ago

...unless made into plastic.

roenxi• 7 years ago

Indeed, and this article highlights a very thorny political issue - if a carbon tax was in place, would this finding mean it would have 100x the impact on food prices that was modeled?

If a carbon tax is so high that fertiliser becomes uneconomic to use (which is sorta the goal of a carbon tax at some point, to squeeze people who emit so they behave differently) that is maybe going to start impacting food prices. Somebody is going to feel that. As a political topic fertiliser needs careful handling.

fifnir• 7 years ago

would be nice to incentivize accountability

If only we could "incentivize accountability" the way we do it for poor people...

benj111• 7 years ago

Do you want to be a bit more explicit, because I cant really work out what you're referring to.

clydethefrog• 7 years ago

How would a carbon tax be implemented in the short time we still have to tackle the climate crisis? Society hasn't been able to fix all the normal tax loopholes and avoidance, why would a carbon tax suddenly be efficient?

dev_dull• 7 years ago

And even if WE did implement it quickly and efficiency, and it works as intended, how do you convinced the other countries responsible for the other 85% of global carbon emissions to care?

specialist2• 7 years ago

Punctuated equilibrium is an optimistic worldview of policy change. AKA "first a little, then a lot". Meaning big sweeping changes after long periods of apparent inaction.

I've never quite understood how it works with evolution, a la Stephen Jay Gould.

But with politics, it's basically memetics and attention economy. First, correctly identify the problem. Second, divine some useful plan of action. Third, crisis triggers massive response. All done in the opposition to the ever present status quo. And there's A LOT of incrementalism (experimentation).

Oregon just adopted (joined) California's carbon strategy. It's basically a complete retool of the Oregon economy. If that goes well, I expect all the other western states will rapidly join in.

FWIW, I try to study policy work, after my own efforts led to very modest results. People I know have been far more successful (marriage equality, marijuana, human trafficking, family leave, and much else).

cwkoss4• 7 years ago

How about a methane-leakage tax, separately from the carbon tax? If leaked methane is ~40x worse than CO2, shouldn't it be taxed at ~40x the rate?

estsauver2• 7 years ago

Generally speaking, a "Carbon tax" would most likely be on "Net green house gas contributions normalized to CO2 tons." Basically, I believe your objection has been thought of and is incorporated in most proposals.

Robotbeat3• 7 years ago

Fertilizer is a MUCH better market for clean hydrogen production than cars.

alex_duf2• 7 years ago

You mean we should use hydrogen to produce fertilizer? Or producing hydrogen as a by product of fertilizer?

I'm not too versed in that domain but I'm curious!

Symmetry• 7 years ago

The first step making fertilizer is making ammonia. Amonia is made with the Haber-Bosch[1] process by combining nitrogen with hydrogen. The hydrogen from that is made by combining steam and natural gas to make hydrogen and carbon monoxide[2]. The carbon from the natural gas ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. If there were more green way to produce hydrogen for a reasonable price that would knock out a significant source of global CO2 emissions.

If solar power gets cheap enough maybe it'll make sense to use the excess power at noon for electrolysis, though I don't have a good sense of the capital costs for that.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

[2]hhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming

bamboozled• 7 years ago

Wow, it took me a while to realize that this article is about fertilizer factories and not about fertilizer (actual) plants.

The brain is funny sometimes and so is this title.

oever• 7 years ago

I had the same confusion. Apparently the english name for natural fertilizer plants is 'green manure'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_manure

awakeasleep• 7 years ago

This is the kind of thing i expect from China, not the USA. I guess in some ways our cultures are not so different after all

maxxxxx• 7 years ago

i am surprised that you are surprised :)

brianbreslin• 7 years ago

Its interesting they used the google street view cars to carry the methane sensors. Anyone know what other sensors they might be carrying on street view vehicles?

Similarly to how our own phones transmit data back to Waze for traffic info, are there any other things that could be useful for us to attach to our vehicles to record?

rtkwe2• 7 years ago

There's probably all sorts of interesting things that could be done to weather and air quality monitoring if we had the low level local data points from every car on the road. It'd be way easier to catch smaller or intermittent polluters for example.

cududa• 7 years ago

They don’t share the raw data, but there are a number of projects/ third-parties they partner with that share sanitized/ cleaned up data: https://www.google.com/earth/outreach/special-projects/air-q...

This methane discovery was a result of this project

DigitalVerse• 7 years ago

All the incentives are in all the wrong places. No surprise, self-regulation isn't working. (But still very disappointing.)

gdubs2• 7 years ago

Worth noting that when you see EPA charts that show agriculture’s impact on greenhouse gases, the manufacturing of fertilizer is not included. The application of fertilizer and any evaporation into the atmosphere is what’s counted as “agriculture”. I get why the EPA separates things into categories, but one effect of that is that agriculture’s true impact on climate change is greatly misunderstood. In fact, so much of our society is shaped by how we farm, and how food gets delivered to your plate — it’s why I believe changing our agriculture is fundamental to solving climate change (practically speaking through a price on carbon).

ectospheno• 7 years ago

Fewer people on earth also fixes the problem. No, I am not advocating this. However, we should be prepared for the countries with big armies and few morals who stumble upon this particular solution once the situation becomes more dire.

gdubs2• 7 years ago

Thing is, we kicked off climate change a long time ago. Even if we cut our population in half, we’d still cook the planet at our 1970s levels of emissions.

cwkoss4• 7 years ago

We already know how to grow healthier denser more nutritional food - permaculture techniques allow trading additional labor in lieu of additional capital investment. The fundamental issue is economic: consumers are too satisfied with mediocre produce to demand higher quality. Insufficient demand to justify increased labor investment.

Fertilizer plants emit 100 times more methane than reported

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