Fracking boom tied to methane spike in Earth’s atmosphere

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/fracking-boom-tied-to-methane-spike-in-earths-atmosphere/

by erentz • 7 years ago

344 111 7 years ago

nationalgeographic.com

29athrowaway2• 7 years ago

What about reservoirs, dams and arctic permafrost?

Vegetation and other organic matter in flooded areas decomposes and releases methane, large amounts of it.

Arctic permafrost contains a large amounts of methane as well, like the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

tito6• 7 years ago

From the article: "Methane released from shale gas production has a slightly different chemical fingerprint compared to methane from cow burps (not farts as commonly believed) and wetlands."

tasty_freeze2• 7 years ago

The article addresses that. Recent (biologically) produced methane has a different carbon isotope ratio than the ancient gas released from shale deposits.

tito6• 7 years ago

Asking about the difference between permafrost methane and shale gas produced methane is interesting tho. Reading the article now, lmk if you find a good answer.

29athrowaway2• 7 years ago

Methane in arctic permafrost doesn't fall into the "recent" category. It has been there for many geological eras.

ars• 7 years ago

Fracking also significantly reduced coal and oil usage in the US (and probably elsewhere).

This had dramatic effects on air quality, and some good effects on CO2 emission.

The article also mentions that most methane leaks are from a small number of operations. So my takeaway is that rather than discourage fracking, encourage it, and also require those operations to fix their equipment.

Then you get the best of both worlds.

(And before you say: No burning any fuels at all, only renawables, remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good. It's still valuable to make things better even if you can't make them perfect.)

alexrtan• 7 years ago

Also in an ideal scenario where countries move aggressively to renewables we need energy sources to put that infrastructure into place and as you say natural gas is a key part of keeping emissions low. That's why it's not good that candidates are arguing for straight out bans.

anon1m0us• 7 years ago

Fracking and the deep-well injection of its waste waters have been widely linked to earthquakes.

Yep. Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California.

https://www.npr.org/2015/04/26/402413137/oklahoma-now-has-mo...

Why do we still allow fracking?

hesdeadjim• 7 years ago

I live in the front range of Colorado. There is a fracking epidemic out here in the areas outside of the metro area.

Ignoring the "it creates jobs and grows the economy" argument, the oil and gas companies basically bribe communities to allow it. The town of Erie has a gorgeous new high school and rec center, and it is almost entirely paid for by fracking revenues. One of their summer festivals is heavily subsidized by the same industry.

Given that most people think of only themselves, I am not remotely surprised that fracking bans or setbacks fail at a state level here.

nine_k• 7 years ago

"Bribing communities" or "being socially responsible and improving lives of people around"?

bpodgursky• 7 years ago

Becase:

- Natural Gas from fracking produces less CO2 and other pollutants than oil or coal alternatives

- It's produced domestically, so you don't fund Wahhabism or other oppressive regimes by buying it

- It's produced domestically, so you don't have to burn filthy bunker oil on oil tankers just to transport it to the US

- Fracking happens primarily on rural land, and pays royalties to individual landholders. Oil drilling in Saudi Arabia pays out only to the megacorp doing the drilling.

Almost like there are tradeoffs and costs to complicated decisions like energy policy. Obviously we'd all love to be in a post-carbon future with Nuclear / Wind / Solar grids, but in the short-term, I'd much rather have a LNG-based energy economy than a coal-based one, fracking and all.

cagenut3• 7 years ago

Hi, w/r/t your "short-term" comment, please read here: https://ipcc.ch/sr15

Particularly the graph in the bottom left corner here: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1...

There is no more time left for the fracking/gas transition argument. While the argument is true in the abstract, and was true in a logistical sense 10 - 20 years ago, to continue to advance the argument after that report was published (which to be fair was only a year ago this week) is to be misinformed and spread misinformation.

We should have used nuclear and domestic gas to power the 00's and 201X's. We didn't. Its too late now. The remaining available carbon budget does not afford for a two-step transition. All investment in carbon emission producing generation needs to be replaced with investment in non-carbon-emitting generation, starting "in 2020" but honestly that's just politician talk. The real deadline is "fucking yesterday".

jcoffland2• 7 years ago

Maybe we should be fracking in California to let off fault pressure. If we could create many small earth quakes maybe we could avoid the big one.

greggman2• 7 years ago

Assuming you weren't joking, I'm only guessing but the amount of pressure fracking releases is tiny. For example assuming there is pressure for a magnitide 7 earthquake building up, to stop it you need 1000 level 4 quakes or 10000 level 3 quakes, or 100000 level 2 quakes or a million level 1 quakes. Believe fracking is even below that (and my numbers are probably off)

webdevatlurk• 7 years ago

This sounds like the seismological equivalent of bloodletting, and would be about as effective.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

The number of earthquakes is less significant than the direct impact. Mine blasts cause it regularly technically so just going by earthquake count is sensationalist.

It would be like counting the number of explosions in a city including car engines and every bullet fired, firecrackers, car bombs, artillery shells, and every airdropped bomb or warhead equally.

The groundwater contamination and greenhouse gas releases are more significant reason why to disallow it.

rayiner2• 7 years ago

Why do we still allow fracking?

It allows extraction of natural gas, which will have to be part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future. Natural gas plants not only emit less CO2 than the coal plants they replace, but can serve as peaker plants to back up renewables. We’re a long ways away from battery technology being able to serve that function. (The US is also not independent in terms of critical minerals needed for battery technology.)

Fracking also allows the US to be energy independent, and reduce its dependent on unstable middle eastern regimes. Thanks to fracking, the US has the most flexibility in its Middle East policy it has had in half a century.

ehnto3• 7 years ago

Is fracking sustainable? Are problems that are caused by fracking likely to get less as we get better at it, or are they likely to get worse as we try to get at riskier deposits?

SilasX2• 7 years ago

It allows extraction of natural gas, which will have to be part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future. Natural gas plants not only emit less CO2 than the coal plants they replace, but can serve as peaker plants to back up renewables.

Yes, but you kinda defeat the environmental/GHG purpose when you leak out (unburned) methane, which is an even worse GHG than CO2.

Methane isn’t good for reducing GHG emissions when the act of extracting it releases something much worse!

(Though of course an exact CBA depends on tabulating the relative amount of methane released per usable unit extracted, and its relative effectiveness as GHG ... to say nothing of the other harms of fracking.)

belorn2• 7 years ago

which will have to be part of our energy mix for the foreseeable future

That is only true as long it is cheaper than nuclear. The usage of natural gas is a mix of economic and political choices, and depending on the country you can get a very different choices.

codingdave• 7 years ago

Fracking is not the only answer. It is the cheapest answer. Traditional drilling still gets gas, but it costs more. On the flip side, fracked wells die off faster. When I worked in the natural gas industry, all the engineers told me that fracking was a great shorter-term plan, but it scared them because it would have all the younger wells drying up at about the same time as the older traditionally drilled wells, and they foresaw a bad convergence of both kinds of wells dying off at the same time coming in our future.

At the same time, it doesn't seem clear at all that methane is less harmful than CO2, so arguing that we're emitting less CO2 is only part of the story.

chachachoney• 7 years ago

> Why do we still allow fracking?

Good question. Seems like a bunch of opportunists are taking advantage of irrational fears about nuclear power.

crispinb• 7 years ago

Why do we still allow fracking?

Because our political systems are catastrophically corrupt.

Spooky232• 7 years ago

A: Because the extractors keep Senators in certain states in power or have the ability to take that power away.

mercurywells• 7 years ago

Oklahoma earthquakes stopped after they banned wastewater injection which is related to (but different than) fracking.

pr0tonic• 7 years ago

Why do we still allow fracking?

Because people want to drive cars, fly on airplanes, make use of advanced materials, and have goods shipped across the world to their doorstep in a week among other things.

The oil industry exists because people want the quality of life the use of oil enables them to have. Until we have just as cost effective alternatives to all the things the use of oil lets us have it will continue to exist.

Another poster uses Erie, CO as an example how the oil industry are bad actors. The poster fails to mention Erie is a bedroom community full of people living in big new suburban houses and driving their vehicle (very likely an SUV) into Denver for work everyday

andygates• 7 years ago

Investors buy into the notion of gas as a transition fuel.

I'm not sure we have the time for the luxury of that sort of transition any more.

warrenmiller• 7 years ago

They've stopped fracking in one of the UK sites now

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cuadrilla-packs-up-in-pre...

NeedMoreTea• 7 years ago

Awesome. That's the only UK site isn't it? I didn't think go-ahead had actually gone through for any of the others. Mainly because even Tory party members seemed to be firmly against it.

tito6• 7 years ago

Here's the publication referenced in the article: https://www.biogeosciences.net/16/3033/2019/bg-16-3033-2019....

Ideas and perspectives: is shale gas a major driver of recent increase in global atmospheric methane? Robert Howarth, Ph.D

tito6• 7 years ago

Emissions monitoring is a really interesting technology challenge. So much of it is self-reported, which means a crapshoot. Remote monitoring seems more reliable but less accurate perhaps. The highest resolution monitoring tech I know of is NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory2.

Has anyone here studied the Orbiting Carbon Observatory? I'm curious for more details and how it might help here.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco2/index.html

tito6• 7 years ago

In a similar vein, Planet Labs' satellites can count Earth's trees every day. Monitoring methane and carbon dioxide is a different beast, but still, remote monitoring FTW. https://www.planet.com/pulse/developing-the-worlds-first-ind...

adammunich• 7 years ago

I've been working on a project lately to explore geenhouse gas cameras. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-build-a-co2-video-camera

I have hope that the thermopile array tech we've been seeing lately might make gas monitoring more readily available. It likely will still require cryo-cooling though.

Nouser76• 7 years ago

Really interesting idea! I'm not very knowledgeable around greenhouse gases, and even less around the various industrial processes that release them. Would cameras like this be able to give us the amount of CO2 released in say, metric tons? Or would it be too hard to actually get precise measurements and this is better for comparing orders of magnitude?

rosege• 7 years ago

Have you seen this new satellite that will be going up https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49799760

mturmon• 7 years ago

See the comments at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21183793, they address your question about satellite monitoring of CH4.

The OCO-2 spectral bands were chosen for H2O and for CO2. I don’t think they provide methane information. A successor mission concept, GeoCARB, can get methane as well: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/geocarb-a-new-view-of-carbo...

Meanwhile, there are in situ methane monitors, and in some areas, spectroscopic observations (ground based) that allow methane source localization. For very new results for the LA area, see: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018..., pdf at https://authors.library.caltech.edu/96023/1/2018JD030062.pdf

It is a very cool science/technical problem, with high potential payoff for identifying big sources.

colordrops• 7 years ago

Culver City in L.A. has one of the largest, if not largest, urban fracking operations in the US. We were getting earthquakes with the epicenter right at the operation, and immediately all the local forums, such as Nextdoor, had long posts insulting and labeling anyone insinuating that the earthquakes were caused by fracking. It was very fishy.

rolltiide• 7 years ago

The best thing about conspiracy theories is that they’re good instruction manuals for readers whether the first one can ever be proved or not.

Life imitates art.

etxm2• 7 years ago

Something I’m very curious about...

Given* that our actions are causing climate change, what is the logic of oil companies continuing to do damage?

1. execs truly dont believe their Corp’s actions impact climate

2. theyre making piles of cash, they can buy theirselves and their descendants out of future problems

The first seems naive, the second seems pretty bleak.

What other logic is there for this behavior?

* let’s assume it is for the question above

im_down_w_otp• 7 years ago

3. Humans are notoriously terrible at internalizing future risk for consideration in context of the liability of their current actions.

i.e. "I never thought it would happen to me."

etxm2• 7 years ago

Doesn’t that acknowledge that they know it’ll happen eventually, even if it’s a few generations from now?

Your username is fantastic by the way.

TeMPOraL3• 7 years ago

This, but also:

4. Entire world is so addicted to oil that just shutting it off at this point is out of the question.

We can blame oil companies and governments for not getting serious about transitioning away from oil, and yes, plenty of this is about money, but the reason such ridiculous amounts of money are involved is precisely because interruptions in supply are an existential threat to every country on the planet.

javagram• 7 years ago

Natural gas is currently replacing Coal, which is a far worse energy source both from a greenhouse gas perspective and from a health perspective (coal plant exhaust is radioactive, toxic, and is estimated to kill millions)

So oil execs could perfectly well be complete believers in science and global warming and still think they are doing a good thing.

It’s probably because they want to make money though and companies will do anything to make $$ as long as it’s legal enough.

yyyk• 7 years ago

From the article:

"Ingraffea’s own research has found that a small percentage of wells are responsible for the bulk of methane emissions either through leaks or deliberate venting."

Sounds like something that can be solved quickly, and without even bothering to debate fracking - hardly anyone could oppose regulating the wells involved.

ojbyrne• 7 years ago

The US government just finished loosening regulations around methane: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-administration-just-loosened-me...

r00fus• 7 years ago

Completely irresponsible on the part of this administration.

Especially since most of the big industry players complained about said loosening of rules which don’t benefit them.

Cui Bono?

coolgeek• 7 years ago

It's not "The US government". It's not the scientists in the regulatory agencies. It's the Trump Administration. It's right there in the URL, the title, and the article body.

Shifting the blame - even unintentionally - from the politicians to the regulatory agencies helps further the narrative that government doesn't work, and (the ultimate, freely-acknowledged goal) that it should therefore be made small enough that it can be choked in the bathtub.

DennisP• 7 years ago

You'd think, but Trump opposes it: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082019/methane-regulati...

magwas• 7 years ago

The well operators would oppose. You know, a component of oil-arms lobby, those guys who made the Iraq war.

abernard12• 7 years ago

"hardly anyone could oppose regulating the wells involved."

This issue has been going on for a long time, even without fracking.

The issue always is access to natural gas pipelines. The natural gas comes up with oil production no matter what. Absent access to a pipeline, the well is "flared" and the natural gas is burned off.

This has been happening in Nigeria and other countries internationally for decades to due to gas rights disputes.

The question people should ask themselves is why oil & gas companies would voluntarily leave money on the table, and the answer is "they wouldn't." However, if you look at New York right now, and natural gas policy over the last 10 years, it has been actively hostile to building the pipelines that would prevent this resource from being wasted. The reality is the people "opposed" to fixing this problem are the people who force the oil production to happen without allowing the resource to be consumed.

sitkack2• 7 years ago

If they can't store it, they shouldn't be allowed to vent or flare it, plain and simple.

CalRobert• 7 years ago

If the state refuses to let me sail trash barges in the river that hardly means it's their fault I decided to dump all the trash in the river.

anigbrowl• 7 years ago

the people who force the oil production to happen

Pipeline opponents are not 'forcing oil production to happen'.

MertsA• 7 years ago

Flaring it isn't even the main problem. If it's burned up, it's just CO2, releases of Methane are much more problematic as it's a much more potent greenhouse gas.

Maarten88• 7 years ago

Sounds like something that can be solved quickly

Then how do you think they could compensate the damage done and extract the methane back out of the air?

My definition of "solving" may be a bit different from yours. And most probably, not even your definition of a solution will be implemented. Tragedy of the commons at work.

ip262• 7 years ago

Well, the good news is methane is fairly short lived in the atmosphere. About a decade. So it is very potent but if we stop emitting it, levels will fall on their own.

kaonashi• 7 years ago

The companies doing the extracting will oppose it, and I'm sure you'll find their voices carry farther.

sword_smith3• 7 years ago

How is methane removed from the atmosphere and does a methane sink play a role in biology like CO2 does through photosynthesis?

arrosenberg• 7 years ago

It decomposes to CO2 and water vapor over about 10 years. The more methane we pump out, the longer decomp takes because there are fewer atmospheric hydroxyl radicals to drive the reaction.

The methane cycle I'm familiar with is related to things dying and getting buried underground or in the ocean. I don't think there is any comparable process to how photosynthesis consumes CO2. There are methanogen bacteria who consume it, but that's probably not a globally scalable solution. I think it would be cheaper just to capture and store it.

sword_smith3• 7 years ago

This is really fascinating, thanks for the clarification.

I know that data for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere go back at least 541m years, i.e. the whole Phanerozoic. Does a similar dataset exist for methane?

sitkack2• 7 years ago

Interesting,

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

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092575351...

I wonder what the feasibility is in seeding the troposphere with hydroxyl radicals to accelerate the breakdown of methane?

_edo4• 7 years ago

Fracking involves drilling an oil or gas well vertically and then horizontally into a shale formation.

No, that's a horizontal well. Vertical wells get fracked all the time. Non-shale wells get fracked all the time. Fracking is any time you intentionally fracture rock formations with pressurized fluids.

...studies that show fracking operations leak, vent, or flare between 2 and 6 percent of the gas produced, Howarth said.

That's not fracking. That's leaking, venting and flaring. Those things may happen on wells that have been fracked but that doesn't mean they're caused by fracking.

If you're opposed to methane entering the atmosphere trying to stop the breaking of rocks a mile beneath the earth's surface is a bizarre way to solve that problem. At that point you're not trying to stop leaking, you're trying to stop production and for some reason are trying to do it under the guise of stopping fracking.

ip262• 7 years ago

Stopping fracking would definitely stop leaks in the process.

If the frackers are totally unwilling to tolerate & abide by regulation, then people will feel like "it can't be fixed, just shut it all down".

_edo4• 7 years ago

Stop leaks in what process? Fracking or oil and natural gas production?

Do you have some evidence that more methane is being released into the atmosphere during the weeks of fracking than during the years of production?

x2202• 7 years ago

Perhaps they made a mistake and just used "fracking" to refer to this whole category of extraction techniques? If they did, does it make much of a difference? These techniques have got to end because they're not sustainable practices.

_edo4• 7 years ago

It absolutely makes a difference. There's no way to properly regulate an industry without understanding it.

But like I said above, people don't care about fracking because they don't even understand what it is. It's just a buzzword people use when what they really want is to stop the entire industry. Or maybe they hate how our society runs. Or they hate rich people. They're angry about something but it's almost never the practice of using water pressure to break rocks thousands of feet beneath the earth's surface.

emmelaich• 7 years ago

Methane is not directly related to fracking or not, it's related to any oil/gas operations.

Methane emissions occur in all sectors of the natural gas industry, from production, through processing and transmission, to distribution. They primarily result from normal operations, routine maintenance, fugitive leaks, and system upsets.

https://www.epa.gov/natural-gas-star-program/primary-sources...

Fracking boom tied to methane spike in Earth’s atmosphere

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