Methane: Supercharging Nature's Solution to Reverse Climate Change

Methane is a greenhouse gas that's 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And unvortunately, methane concentrations in our atmosphere are rapidly increasing. Yet, methane may also offer a potential climate solution. With a much shorter half-life than CO2, reductions in methane pack a punch. Dr. Jessica Swanson has a plan to use methane-eating bacteria called methanotrophs to do just that.  A side benefit, she says, is that once the bacteria have gobbled up all the methane they can hold, they can be turned into useful products, like feed for animals or plastics.  Dr. Swanson spoke at one of the "Town Talks" sponsored by Telluride Science.  Moderator: Adam Chambers, Telluride Science Board Member; podcast hosts: Judy Muller and George Lewis

Transcript

Science Straight Up

Season 5, Episode 6 script

“Methane: Supercharging Nature’s Solution to Reverse Climate Change”

Dr. Jessica Swanson, computational biophysicist, University of Utah

Dr. Adam Chambers, Telluride Science Board Member, moderator

Mark Kozak, Executive Director, Telluride Science, participant

Judy Muller and George Lewis, podcast hosts

(THEME)

(JUDY) From Telluride Science…this is “Science Straight Up.”

(GEORGE) And on this episode…

(JESSICA) The current situation is that methane is a significant climate problem.

(SOUND EFX gas burner igniting…tick tick tick whoosh)

(JUDY) Methane.  People with gas appliances use it every day. It’s the prime ingredient in natural gas.  But it also contributes mightily to global warming.  Dr Jessica Swanson, a computational biophysicist at the University of Utah, has a scheme to capture methane and break it down using bacteria. She spoke about her work during one of the “Town Talks” sponsored by Telluride Science.  

(SOUND EFX crowd babble)

(GEORGE) Every summer, up to 14-hundred leading scientists from all over the world gather in Telluride to discuss new ideas, and the most vexing scientific challenges in a gorgeous setting that encourages communication, collaboration and creativity.  Moderating this session, 

Dr Adam Chambers, climate scientist and Telluride Science board member.

(ADAM) Thanks, everybody, good evening. Three years ago, Professor Swanson shifted her team's focus from fundamental and health funded research to climate change. It's pretty important that's an important piece, and methane, which she's going to tell us about tonight. So I'd really like to extend a warm Telluride. Welcome to Dr. Jessica Swanson. Thank you for coming to tell you're absolutely.I’d really like to extend a warm Telluride welcome to Dr. Jessica Swanson. (applause) Thank you for coming to Telluride

(JESSICA) Absolutely. So let’s talk about methane. three years ago, you know, I had been working on all of these health motivated and funded projects as the dominant, you know, source of funding and biophysical chemistry and I care so much about climate, I finally decided, you know, I'm gonna find a way to work on climate. And so I dug a lot. And I found this area of methane, and it has just exploded since I've been exposed to it. We're used to heating our homes with it, right natural gas we use for heating, it's a very efficient form of energy. Some of you may be familiar with the new way that we are harvesting a lot of natural gas, which is called fracking. It's pumping high pressures of liquids down into the Earth's crust and breaking it apart and allowing natural gas to flow out. So this has been a big new boom, as in terms of a source of natural gas recently for the United States. And it's actually the most efficient hydrocarbon. So if you look at per gram, the amount of energy you get out of methane compared to all the other fossil fuels is it's very efficient, you get a lot of energy. However, it's also a greenhouse gas, right? Okay, so the current situation is that methane is a significant climate problem. So most people are familiar with carbon dioxide and thinking about carbon dioxide. And it still is the major contributor to warming but methane is not far behind it. About a third of the warming today has been caused by methane. And one of the tricky things, and also useful things about methane is that it's more potent in terms of its global warming potential. So on a per gram basis, methane is about 84 times more warming than carbon dioxide.

(JUDY) A greenhouse gas that’s 84 times more potent than good old CO2.  And where does all this methane come from? According to NASA, human activity accounts for about 60 percent of it—things like use of fossil fuels and decomposition of landfills. Then there’s agriculture.

(COWS SOUND)

(JUDY)You’ve probably heard that cows emit methane.  Mostly from burping, not from the other end. 

(JESSCA) So people hear a lot about cattle. All waste that is broken down again, is going to be producing some amount of methane, and ruminants. Those are things like cows, and goats. They're digesting grass and their stomachs. And because there's too little oxygen in there, they're also producing methane as they consume grass. And so they're breathing out methane all the time. And so in agriculture, we have a lot of production.

(JUDY( Here’s the good news:  if we can lower those    methane levels, it’s  a speedy way of combating global warming.

(JESSICA)  if you were able to decrease methane production today, you would actually due to methane hello and see cooling. Right. Now, of course, that's countering the warming from carbon dioxide. So net, we will not seem cooling, but we can have this cooling effect, to mitigate some of the warming in the near term.

(GEORGE) She proposes using methane-eating bacteria, called methanotrophs, to gobble up the stray gas. 

SOUND EFX—pac man noises) 

(GEORGE)I’m sorry, but when I first heard Dr. Swanson talk about methanotrophs, the classic arcade game Pac Man immediately came to mind.  She says we have to find new ways to make these little guys gobble up more methane faster.

(SOUND EFX—game over)

(JESSICA) For a long time, people have made bio reactors have different sorts, usually, they're vats of water with algae or something else in them. And in wastewater treatment plants, they use trickling biofilters that have these methanotrophs in them, what we need to do is basically just take that and turn it on the head on its head and make it much, much more efficient. And we think we can do that. With a few techniques. One is bioengineering making these microbes better at getting the methane in and consuming it, there's a lot of different things we can do there. The other is on the bio reactor front. So the way that these bio reactors would work is they would be modular, you could make them in any size, whatever source you have, would need a different size bioreactor. And then you would place it near landfills, oil and gas wells, coal mines, wastewater treatment anywhere, you simply blow the air in through these methanotrophs. And then the trick is getting the methane into them. So by removing most of the water and growing these bacteria on thin film trays where we can surround them by media that enhances that what we call mass transfer, it's just getting the methane in, we can significantly enhance their ability to grab onto those methane molecules and consume them.

(GEORGE) And, in the process, you can get some of your money back.

(JESSICA) Once you blow this air through, you produce more and more bacteria. What do you do with it? This is a great aspect of this approach. You can turn it into a product. Okay, the simplest thing is you simply carve the bacteria off, let them dry, and you've instantly created a single cell protein that can be used for fish feed, swine feed, and other various sources. There's already a single cell protein market. So that's developed we can tap into that it's valued at about $1,600 per  ton.

(JUDY) And you can make all sorts of other stuff from that methane-eating bacteria. Remember the movie, “The Graduate?” and what Mr. McGuire told Ben, the Dustin Hoffman character?

(FROM “THE GRADUATE”)  MCGUIRE: I wanna say one word to you. Just one word.

                                                BEN:      Yessir.

                                            MCGUIRE: Are you listening?

                                                BEN:      Yessir, I am.

                                            MCGUIRE: Plastics.

(JESSICA) We're hoping we can get to the point that we can develop even the precursors to nylons, and plastics, which would be much more valuable. Okay? And why make it valuable? How is this gonna scale if it's not market driven, right. So if we can get these bioreactors to the point that they are cost effective, and you make money off of them, that's going to take us a long ways towards hitting more and more of that pie that we were looking at before. So that's a big push is to get these things out and get them cost effective So the pieces of the puzzle are coming together, it's just a question of whether or not we can bring them together quickly enough to really have an impact. Okay, and so what the impact that we're aiming for, and this is a realistic, but aggressive timeline is that by 2030 And this would be getting them kind of to market in three to four years, that we could be removing 34 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year. I know, from personal experience, that if you care about your kids’ future, and your future and this planet, and you don't feel like you can do a damn thing about it, it's frustrating, right? And so I think everybody can have an impact. It's just a matter of figuring out how and where and when and finding a way to do it for methane. You know, homes and transportation is where we can all have a direct impact on on our contributions, right. So transportation going to electric vehicles, obviously homes, there's big support for converting away from gas powered appliances. So for the time being, I just say open your windows, get some ventilation in anytime you're cooking. It's not the methane. Methane, it's not gonna hurt you. It's the other things that are cooked up in released when you're burning with gas. So for health reasons, is maybe not a bad idea. Composting is actually a really great thing to do. So again, think about taking your food waste, putting in a trash bag, sealing that with something that blocks off all the oxygen and throwing it in landfill. You just created the perfect environment for the production of methane. Right? So that's why landfills, they produce A lot of methane and some produce so much that they're using for energy. Other ones, they just put, I don't know if you've ever seen pipes, you drive by a landfill you see the little pipes sticking up there just venting off the produce methane, right? So composting is a great way to do it. I would say one of the biggest things that people can do is just support methane mitigation policies, right, because this is what we we really need to make progress. As soon as we can get some taxes in place, emission limits in place, we need some kind of methane-based carbon credit market in place, all of these things will, will really help. And so that comes down to you know, individuals talking about it and supporting it and getting the word out. Every person you talk to, right, raises awareness. Okay, um, I think that oh, well, of course, if anybody you know, has the finances, and you can and invest in any of these technologies, by all means, do it. The state of the world is that we can't get all of this funded from government research, we get as much as we can, we're not going to get it all from policy, a lot of this is going to come from investment, and from market contributing to solutions. So we've got to have it come in from all directions. Alright, with that, I will close and thank you very much for coming. It's great to see so many people who care about the topic.

(APPLAUSE)

(JUDY). The moderator, Adam Chambers, led the question and answer session that followed.

(ADAM) Sit down and have a chat.  Thank you for that great presentation. I found it interesting reading through your history a little bit that you had worked in, in kind of health funded research. And then you shifted into climate change. Was there an epiphany moment? What, what was the reason that put you into this place, and I kind of went back in my brain and I was like, you know, put your money where your mouth is. And really, your education is where your money is, right? We all respect that in Telluride Science, and to put, you know, your whole self into climate change, and dedicate your life to that, or at least this portion of your career is admirable. How did you How did you arrive at that?

(JESSICA) it was a really interesting transition. So I think since I was a little girl, I have always cared about the climate. Right? I did my first project on CFCs. I don't know how long ago, I've always known I wanted to contribute to environmental issues in some way, which is why I got the degrees I did. But I'm also a curious scientist who's driven to challenging problems. And so it's just the nature of the research domain, especially in biological sciences that the vast majority of funding comes from NIH, and it comes from health motivation, right. So as much as I wanted to work on environmentally relevant topics, it just wasn't there. Right. And so I kept pushing the science and kept tracking, you know, the wonderful things I was learning, you know, at workshops like those here. And that's all been very fun, right? And I got plenty of funding in that direction. I'm going up for tenure this coming year. I don't know if you guys know the whole tenure process, but it's like you get your first five years to prove yourself, and then they fire you or they keep you for life. So, a little bit of pressure. But I got two years into that working on these fundamental problems and health motivated problems. And I said, I don't care anymore, right? Like, I would give up tenure to work on what I care about. And so it took a big pushback, right? Like I just started looking everywhere for how am I going to shift to work on something that's important. And I actually, I was even considering leaving academia to be able to do this, right. And I started talking to nonprofits and meeting with people. And there's this great organization called spark climate solutions. And they were thinking about hiring me at the time. So so the one of the leaders gave me this paper on methane oxidation. And the first thing I thought was, why would you oxidize methane is like a valuable chemical, right? Like, couldn't you do something better? So totally eye opening, right. And as soon as I got exposed to that, and started to see the landscape and started to connect with experts in academia, I realized, oh, wow, right. This is an area where there are so many fundamental questions that need to be answered, there's so many things that I could do with exactly what we do to contribute to this. This is, you know, this is perfect. So yeah, I had to break away from my normal funding sources redirect part of my group. And that's, that's what we've been doing. Now. We're still doing those fundamental methods. I was talking about it today. And so we haven't completely separated, but a big focus has become the methane. And it's very rewarding. As I said, I think it's challenging for anyone to be in a situation where you care about something, and you can't do anything about it. Right. And one of the things that really helped me is there's a podcast called My climate journey north, if anybody's heard of this, it's wonderful. So they just bring on experts from every different area of society, who are working on climate in one way or another. And it's such great exposure to the different ways that you can take your talents, your skills, your connections, and, you know, apply them to climate, if climate is what what you care about. So that was really helpful. 

(ADAM) This afternoon, I also did a little bit of reading with the International Energy Agency, they have a global methane tracker where they track methane throughout the world. And there are the United States, for example, has 10% of global methane emissions. Number one in the world on methane emissions was China. Number two is the United States. Number three being India. Number four being Russia. And fifth, bringing Brazil, I guess, you know, given that that's, that's the bulk of methane emissions in the world, right there with those five countries? Do you see the technology being transferable to the international context?

(JESSICA) Absolutely. This has to be something that goes global, you can only have so much of an impact if you're only hitting us emissions, right. Which is part of the motivation for getting something that is that is market driven. As soon as you start making a profit on these things, it's going to be much easier to distribute it globally, right? We're also trying to be really smart about how we finance it, you know, does this go into a startup does a company start to develop this, because we don't want any one company to grab this and lock it down and try and own it, right? We want this to be broadly deployed, that's the only way you're going to have the impact that that we really hope to have. So yeah, you gotta go global. One thing I kind of alluded to I didn't explain clearly is, you know, once you get these things efficient enough, you could start to attach them to existing air handling devices, right. So anywhere you have HVAC systems, you could have a little unit attached to it. Now you're starting to go after atmospheric methane, you could also start to put them next to natural sources that have increased emissions. Right. So that opens up, you know, just from what we have already planned out, you could have a broader impact once you get these things efficient enough.

(GEORGE) There was a question from Telluride Science Executive Director Mark Kozak.

(MARK) What would you say in your effort to get it to a commercialization level, like, what is the big hurdle right now? Like the biggest one?

(JESSICA) Yeah, yeah, yeah. What we're looking at is we just want 3 million for the next three years to get it from lab to prototype. I mean, the good thing about this is there's there's nothing mysterious, we know what's going to work. It's just a matter of making it efficient. So we need hands on deck and time that we can focus in the lab on really optimizing not only the bio engineering, so the biology, but the interface between the bioreactor and the bacteria. So the biotic abiotic interface. And at that point, once we get it efficient enough, I think it'll take off just a matter of getting it there. I mean, it's one of these things that you see so much potential, but if it just sits in the lab as ideas, it dies on the vine. Right. And that would be the worst-case scenario.

(QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE) Jessica, isn't there a contradiction between using market driven forces to to let loose on this problem, and keeping the technology open to all comers? That hasn't worked very well, in other areas.

(JESSICA) I’m so hopeful  that people in the business world will help us figure it out. Hopefully, you know, it's a technology that you could just start licensing out and multiple companies could take it on, and then maybe it gets deployed broadly through multiple companies owning it, right? That's certainly what we're aiming for. I think that's, it's critical, right? Because you're not going to have an impact. If you just isolate it down and somebody owns it. They don't distribute it.  

(AUDIENCE MEMBER) After all, we're trying to save the world. Right? 

(JESSICA) Yeah. Jeez.

(QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE) this would be a pretty lucrative investment for a lot of the emerging, like, environmental startups and companies. Why do you think there is kind of this gap in funding for a project that might be as lucrative as this one? And we're kind of does this new kind of environmental industry view your project?

(JESSICA) Yeah, I think it's really just taking off it's, it's it's kind of steamrolling is getting more and more attention. I think that the hesitation so far has been people just don't know how to make it efficient enough to make it economically viable. And they don't want to spend a lot of money and lose a lot of money doing this. Right. And so until you prove that efficiency, I think it won't take off, which is really why we're trying to get to the prototype to give people the numbers that will I think, allow it to take off. I think that's been the the limitation I went to this great meeting on greenhouse gas removal that the Bezos Earth fund funded. It was Stanford D.O.E. Bezos Earth fund. And it was a really interesting meeting because everybody in the world of of greenhouse gas mitigation, how can we pull carbon out of the atmosphere there was they're talking about the challenges that they face and looking at, you know, we're going to need to throw trillions of dollars at this to accomplish what we need to accomplish. So I think that I think hopefully, you're right, that this is one solution that can be market driven. It can be profitable. So So for goodness sake, it's like the low hanging fruit let's let's make it work, right, because a lot of the other ones don't have a product attached. And we’re going to have to do ‘em.

(ADAM) Well, Telluride, let’s thank Jessica Swanson

(APPLAUSE)

(THEME)

(GEORGE) And a big thank you to Telluride Science Board Member Adam Chambers for moderating this session, and to our sponsors Alpine Bank and the Telluride Mountain Village Owners’ Association.  Our session was recorded live by the doctor of decibels himself, Dean Rolley.  Mark Kozak is Executive Director of Telluride Science and Cindy Fusting is managing director.

(JUDY) Annie Carlson runs donor relations and Sara Friedberg is lodging and operations manager. For more information, to hear all our podcasts, and if you want to donate to the cause, go to telluride science-dot-o.r.g.  I’m Judy Muller.

(GEORGE) And I’m George Lewis, inviting you to join us next time on Science Straight Up. (THEME MUSIC UP AND THEN FADE OUT)