2Celsius
"A podcast 2 degrees Celsius hotter" (2C) is a Brussels-based enterprise that brings about hot dialogues about everything climate. The episodes are made and edited by Francesca Fazey and Raul Cazan while the whole product is supported by Association 2Celsius (2Celsius.org).
2Celsius
METHANE. So, Where’s It All Coming From?
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In this second episode of our podcast, we delve into the complex world of methane emission sources. Join us as we look at the five main sectors that emit methane, unpack how the main ingredient of natural gas is also emitted by cow burps and get a taste of how scientists tease apart the difference. We’ll also touch on why so much emphasis is placed on the emissions from oil and gas.
Host:
The show is presented by: Francesca Fazey
Affiliation:
The show is brought to you by: 2Celsius Association
Resource List:
1. Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA)
2. International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO)
3. International Energy Agency (IEA)
5. United Nations Global Methane Pledge
6. Rocky Mountain Institute Climate Program
7. Oxford Institute for Energy Studies
9. Greenhouse Gas Laboratory, University of Royal Holloway
10. Romanian Methane Emissions from Oil and Gas
Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences, Paris
11. University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, USA
12. NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, Washington DC, USA
Contributors:
Raul Cazan, Founder of The 2Celsius Association, Bucharest, Romania
Kim O’Dowd, Campaigner at The Environmental Investigation Agency, London, UK
Dr Roland Kupers, Global Advisor to the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Methane Emissions Observatory, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Deborah Gordon, Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University; Senior Principal at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) Climate Program, Washington DC, USA
Dr Philippe Ciais, Associate Director, Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace (IPSL), Paris, France
Théophile Humann-Guilleminot, Campaign Manager, Clean Air Task Force ,Athens Greece
Dr Dave Lowry, Reader: Stable Isotope and Greenhouse Gas, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Royal Holloway, London UK
Dr Rebecca Fisher: Reader: Atmospheric Methane, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Royal Holloway, London UK
Dr Thoman Roeckmann, Professor of Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Professor Jonathan Stern, Distinguished Research Fellow, The Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, Oxford, UK
Melanie Kenderdine, Principal, Energy Futures Initiative, Washington DC, USA
Many years ago, something like ten years ago, I visited these uh research stations in the at upper altitudes in the Alps. You know, they were they were measuring concentrations of methane in the upper atmosphere, and they would keep growing and growing and growing. And at the time uh it was clear that there was a connection between uh fracking for gas in the United States in in full Obama uh presidency, you know. And uh no matter how much they were claiming that they were capturing all the methane that was leaking, uh it was mumbo jumbo because it was a lot of methane leaking into the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_05If you missed him in the first episode, that is my colleague, Raul Kazan. He's an environmental campaigner based in Romania and the brains behind this podcast. And he's also right. The fracking boom in the US that coincided with the Obama presidency was indeed leaking methane into the atmosphere. It took scientists a few years to confirm it, but by 2019, US shale gas extraction was believed to have increased global methane emissions by over a third. But how does gas extraction cause methane leaks? What are its other sources? That's the focus of this episode.
SPEAKER_00When you have a field that's largely developed for oil and you have what's called associated gas, essentially it's a problem. You need to get rid of it.
SPEAKER_04Gas is invisible, it's odorless until it's in the final stage of transmission, and it's under pressure. So its natural tendency is too leak.
SPEAKER_05And how does that all fit with the only thing many people know about methane, which is that it somehow gets burped out by cows?
SPEAKER_01So the basic process is that you have important bacteria on Earth that live under a low oxygen environment, and those bacteria like to produce methane.
SPEAKER_05If you've stumbled upon us for the first time and aren't sure where you've landed, this is Methane, a podcast about the world's second most important greenhouse gas, and I'm your host, Francesca Fazy. It might not get a lot of airtime, but methane is fast rising up the climate policy agenda. And if you're curious to know why, we'd suggest heading back to the first episode and starting there. For those of you who have been there done that, let's jump in. Where do methane emissions come from?
SPEAKER_00It's important to note there are five sectors which emit methane.
SPEAKER_05Just before we hear what they are, I introduced you in the first episode to Dr. Roland Coopers from the United Nations Environmental Methane Emissions Observatory.
SPEAKER_00So my name's Roland Coopers. Um, I'm an advisor to uh UNEP, uh UNEP's International Methane Emissions Observatory. And I've been working on this issue of methane mitigation for about 10 years.
SPEAKER_05But his knowledge of oil and gas and methane issues from the oil and gas sector goes a little further than that.
SPEAKER_00Before that, I spent a decade with Shell. I was the head of the LNG business, and at the time nobody knew what LNG was, but that somewhat changed. Um I was also the head of sustainable development for the Shell Group, so that also gave me quite a perspective. Going backwards, originally I'm a theoretical physicist, and I've always been interested in system change, and I've written a number of books on the consequences of complex systems on public policy. So I've both a practical interest in getting things done like reducing methane, but also understanding how systems work and how you can change them.
SPEAKER_05So now you know a little more about who you're hearing from. Let's find out what those five sources of methane emissions are.
SPEAKER_00So oil and gas is one, is big, is about a third. Uh waste, so landfills emit quite a bit of methane. The production of coal emits methane. And then there's also livestock, mostly cows who burp a lot of methane as they break down the grass that they eat. And then finally rice is an important source of methane.
SPEAKER_05The emissions from oil, gas, and coal are called thermogenic methane. They come from organic matter being broken down by temperature. In this case, the extreme heat created deep in the Earth's crust. Those from cows, rice, and from waste add to the world's natural sources of methane, produced by the breakdown of organic matter by certain types of bacteria. This is called biogenic methane. You do get one more type formed by the incomplete breakdown of organic matter when it's combusted or burnt, and this is called pyrogenic methane. But pyrogenic methane is relatively small in comparison to the other sources, so we're going to keep our focus here on the first two. Let's start with the thermogenic kind, methane emissions from oil, gas, and coal.
SPEAKER_00So methane, for people who don't know, is the largest component of gas. So the fossil gas that we use in our kitchens and power plants is mostly methane. There's a little bit of other gases, but the bulk of it's methane. Um so that's really it's when you think gas, think methane. It's responsible for about a quarter of the warming we experience today. So it is a very heavy greenhouse gas. But in contrast with CO2, which rightfully gets a lot of attention, it lingers in the atmosphere for a much shorter time. So after about 10 or 15 years, most of it's disappeared. But in the in the time it's there, it creates an enormous amount of warming.
SPEAKER_05And when we mine coal. How? Two ways. It either gets released deliberately or it leaks. Releasing gas deliberately as a routine part of operations is mostly an oil industry thing. And it's done in one of two ways venting or flaring. Both have been practiced routinely for over a century, and both are terrible from a climate perspective. The numbers are highly uncertain because many companies still don't measure how much they release. But the International Energy Agency estimates that around eight million tons of methane gets transferred to the atmosphere by flaring, and another eight million again by venting every year. From somebody who's been in the industry, can you just give an explanation of what is venting and what is flaring? How important are they?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the first thing is to say that these companies there are different cultures in these companies. There's an oil culture and there's a gas culture. And I've titled a chapter in one of my books, I think, called Real Men Don't Find Gas, right? There's a real machine role almost. In most places, finding gas is a nightmare because there are very few places where there's a market for gas. Whereas oil is really simple, you just put it in a ship or in a barrel and then you ship it somewhere. But but packaging gas is extraordinarily difficult and expensive. You need to build a very long pipeline or an LNG plant for tens of billions. And so what happens when you have a field that's largely developed for oil and you have what's called associated gas, essentially it's a problem. You need to get rid of it. And what you can do is you can either burn it, which is flaring, or uh you can vent it, you just let it escape to the atmosphere. Or the other thing you can do is, and sometimes it's necessary, you re-inject it into the field in order to increase the pressure to pull out the oil. But when you have this excess gas that you don't know what to do with, there's often very few options but to flare it.
SPEAKER_05Flaring looks worse. Those flames on top of the tall stacks that permanently haze the air around oil operations, those are flares. But flaring at least burns the methane, and that converts some of it into carbon dioxide. CO2 has a global warming potential that is in the short term at least 84 times lower than methanes.
SPEAKER_00The problem is Many flares are inefficient. So they don't burn a hundred percent of the gas. It varies between fifty percent and almost a hundred, which means that when they're flaring, there's still a lot of gas that escapes.
SPEAKER_05This is usually because the quality of the flaring process itself isn't always that good. Any number of factors can reduce the burning efficiency of flares from the age of equipment being used to the weather.
SPEAKER_00You know, the numbers are unclear because there's so few measurements. We're only getting to the era of empirical measurement now, right? Uh there's one paper that has measured almost all US flares. It's the only place where it's comprehensively surveyed, and the average efficiency in the US is 91%.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
SPEAKER_00It's pretty good. Terrible. Really? It's terrible, right. It could it could be 99.8. So there's 9% of the gas is is vented, and they're huge volumes.
SPEAKER_05I suppose, yeah, percentages matter when you're talking about the volumes that you're talking about.
SPEAKER_00The volumes are enormous, and so if we could get all of the world's flares to more than 99%, it would have an enormous climate contribution instantaneously.
SPEAKER_05And there have been huge moves afoot already in recent years to ban non-emergency flaring in the oil and gas industry. Policymakers often suggest that unwanted gas should be captured and sold into the market instead of flared. But for oil producers, often in the middle of nowhere, it doesn't always work.
SPEAKER_00I mean, let's take the US. The US flares an enormous amount of gas. It is by far the most efficient and liquid gas market, and yet also there they can't manage to get their the gas to market.
SPEAKER_05For Dr. Cooper's regulating flaring efficiency so that more methane gets burnt off is far more likely to achieve results.
SPEAKER_00I think there should be equal focus on flaring well as on eliminating flaring. It's actually not that hard to get to 100% flaring efficiency. I mean it costs, you know, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to tweak your flare to get to to 100% almost 100% flare efficiency. It costs untold billions to put out the flare and bring the gas to market. Literally, by the end of this year, technically you could get all US flares at 99.8%. There is no way by the end of this year you could get all that, eliminate the flares and get the gas to market. So my view is let's do both, right? Let's immediately improve the efficiency of all flares and look at eliminating them in the medium to long term. And even better is eliminating the use of fossil fuels entirely, which is where I need to go to anyway.
SPEAKER_05While inefficient flaring is bad enough, venting or allowing the gas to simply escape is even worse from a climate warming perspective. Instead of converting methane into CO2 with yes, some methane left over in the plume, now you really are delivering the whole volume of methane with its far higher climate impact straight into the atmosphere directly. Venting happens frequently for safety reasons too, but it's sadly also a long-running feature of routine operations on oil and gas infrastructure.
SPEAKER_00So there are two kinds of venting. There's routine venting, and that should be completely eliminated instantly and replaced with high efficiency flaring. And then there's security venting, is basically, you know, if there's a pressure overbuilt in some part of the system, sometimes there's a security valve that pops and gas is released. You know, that's largely unavoidable because it's a safety mechanism. But those are relatively small volumes. So there's emergency venting, which is just part of the safety of the plant. But routine venting should be absolutely stopped instantaneously. But one of the unforeseen consequences of these campaigns against uh flaring is that we know of a number of companies that have said, sure, we'll turn off the flares and we'll just vent the gas. Which makes the problem almost a hundred times worse from a climate perspective, right? If if you know, if you turn it from a vent to high efficiency flare, the climate impact is reduced 84 fold. So it's a huge climate improvement. And so this is a really unforeseen consequence of this strong campaign against flaring is that people some companies say, okay, we'll just vent it, then we'll get these NGOs off our back.
SPEAKER_05Monitoring deliberate venting and flaring of methane gas from the extractive sector is one thing. But as anyone who has opened a gas hose will know gas can leak by accident too. Someone else who keeps a close watch over methane emissions from the oil and gas industry is Professor Deborah Gordon, based at Brown University's Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs in the US.
SPEAKER_04So I think the first very simple thing for someone to understand is methane is mostly gas. The gas that we produce, and gas is invisible, it's odorless until it's in the final stage of transmission, and it's under pressure. So its natural tendency is to leak.
SPEAKER_05Gas leaks, also known as fugitive methane emissions, can occur at any stage of the production line, moving from one transport vessel to another, extracting, reheating, and ultimately end use too.
SPEAKER_04So coal leaks methane, but from the mine. Gas leaks methane everywhere in the supply chain, potentially, from the production, from the well, from the actual extraction site, through all of these gathering lines and transmission lines, and then also in terms of the utility and home appliances, and if you add liquefied natural gas from liquefaction terminals, from ships, regasification, and pipelines at the other end. So the gas supply chain is very complex, way more complex than coal. And we haven't successfully yet mastered it. And it's growing in its reach and it's leaky, and it's variably leaky all over the place.
SPEAKER_05The scale of the total gas leak problem, we don't really know. On average, from what satellites have found, what would you say are this the current gas leakage rates that we're seeing?
SPEAKER_04The leakage rates are hugely varying, which to my mind, and I started my career in the in this industry, is the story of this industry. High variance, very high variance, both in terms of operators, in terms of resources and what they are into the ground, and now in terms of methane leakage, the leakage rates that have been cited in studies that we have in the paper, and we cite them all, are from 0.6% to 66%. So that's a thousand-fold difference. Who who is leaking, who is leaking their gas, 66% of what they're like extracting? Who is doing that? It's a great question. And I think it's it's it might be a relatively limited number of producers, but they're still important. It turns out that that 66% came from offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico in state waters. And what's happening there is that these are oil platforms. Now, this is really common in the UK and the North Sea on the UK side. These are oil platforms that were designed sometimes 30 or 40 years ago to produce oil. They're not designed to contain the gas and they don't have takeaway capacity for the gas. So over time, as the fields might become more gassy, and these resources change underground as you produce them, you don't have anything to do with the gas but to throw it into the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_05Getting a handle on quantifying these emissions is harder than it might seem. In fact, it's only recently with some mammoth investigation efforts that scientists have been able to start putting some accurate numbers together. This might seem like it's academic, but it has ramifications when it comes to trying to mitigate. Roland Cooper's again from IMAO, the International Methane Emissions Observatory. If it's between leaks, venting and flaring in terms of emissions, do you do we have any sense of which contributes most?
SPEAKER_00We have a sense, but they're based on these emission factors that we're trying to get rid of. We're trying to get people to measure. I mean, our chief scientist says that, you know, half of the emissions can be fixed by a guy with a wrench. And and and this is a powerful image because it's actually true. A lot of this is is really silly stuff. Valves that are open that should be closed. And of course, you know, when you get to the second 50%, it becomes harder, right? You have to swap out, you have to have different equipment and design, etc., and it becomes more difficult. But the initial reductions tend to be really easy.
SPEAKER_05So, the challenge? Leaks need to be found to be stopped. Emissions need to be monitored and quantified. And since methane is colourless, odorless, and otherwise undetectable without equipment, that requires a massive detection effort. Methane hunters, as they are now called, are usually environmentalists, scientists, or regulatory officials who use a range of sophisticated technology to call attention to methane leaks. Next up, we meet some methane hunters and find out about some of the equipment they use to spot methane one leak at a time. But before we get there, there's a whole other category of methane that has nothing to do with energy at all. All of the methane emissions from energy are thermogenic. There's another kind. Biogenic methane. To talk us through this and how methane gets produced and recycled naturally, I'd like to introduce you to Philippe Siez. I spoke to him about the natural and biological sources of methane. And even though all CH4 does the same thing when it reaches the atmosphere, we also talked a little about the tricks scientists can use to tell the difference between methane from the different origins. When we're talking about emissions from agriculture, like from livestock and rice, those seem like very uh different kinds of agricultural products. What is it that they have in common that creates these methane emissions?
SPEAKER_01They have in common the same bacteria because uh what is producing methane is specific bacteria. They live in the guts of livestock animals when they digest grass. There is no oxygen in the guts of the animals, and this is favorable for the bacteria living in their body to produce methane that escapes to the atmosphere.
SPEAKER_05In most common preconceptions, it's cow farts that generate the methane. But burps are actually the bigger problem, caused by a process called enteric fermentation. Plus, there's cow manure, around a quarter of the methane from cows, emanates from the decomposition of their waste. And here's the thing, cow numbers have risen from 410 million to almost 1.5 billion over the past 130 years. According to one study in the US, one cow can emit up to 220 pounds or 100 kilograms of methane every year. It isn't just cows, of course. Sheep and goats have these methane-producing bacteria in their stomachs too. Every ruminant does. But because the number of cows on the planet is so large and each cow is so big, cows produce more. More, in fact, than all other ruminants combined. So that's livestock. What about rice?
SPEAKER_01Rice is very similar. It's the same kind of bacteria, simply they live at the bottom of the soil. The soil is flooded, and it's the same story. There is no oxygen. There is organic matter at the bottom of the rice paddies, and the bacteria eat it and they produce methane that you know makes small bubbles and escapes to the atmosphere from the rice paddies. So the basic process is that you have important bacteria on Earth that live under a low on oxygen environment, and those bacteria like to produce methane.
SPEAKER_05So, three preconditions bacteria living off organic matter and an absence of oxygen. These bacteria, also known as methanogens, as in methane generating, are responsible for the methane emissions in landfill sites too, and from liquid wastes like sewers. It's not the waste itself that gives off methane, it's bacteria feeding on the organic waste, old food basically, or vegetation as it's decomposing. In normal conditions, the digesting of organic waste happens aerobically, as in with oxygen, and it's performed by your standard run-of-the-mill all-around us bacteria. But they've evolved to give off CO2 because the carbon that they're chomping down on reacts with the oxygen in the air around them. They take that oxygen away and there's nothing left to make CO2. So those microbes move out. And what I think of as the more hardcore oxygen-defying methanogens take over.
SPEAKER_01Most of the bacteria, most of the microbes which live in the soil, they emit CO2. And when you have no oxygen, those uh CO2 emitting bacteria cannot live, and they leave place to methane emitting ones that have the capability to live in low oxygen environments, and those are producing methane.
SPEAKER_05So that's the difference, a low or a high oxygen environment.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And there is no oxygen in the guts of the ruminants and also at the bottom of the rice bodies. And uh generally also in wetlands, wetlands are also waterlogged, there is no oxygen, and this is the reason why natural wetlands beyond rice bodies, which are like agricultural wetlands, are also emitting wetlands.
SPEAKER_05Wetlands can take many forms. Swamps, lakes, rivers, marshes, estuaries, even waterlogged soils in forests count as types of wetland. From a CO2 storage and a biodiversity perspective, these ecosystems are priceless. But at the same time, they are also one of the world's largest sources of methane.
SPEAKER_01Methane is produced at the bottom of wetlands which are permanently flooded system because of those famous bacteria that uh, you know, like low oxygen environment.
SPEAKER_05Wetland methane emissions and natural sources in general are fascinating in their own right, not least because they are incredibly sensitive to the rising temperatures that are being caused by climate change already.
SPEAKER_01Methane is uh in particular methane from wetlands, it's very sensitive to climate change. You have a processed bacteria which is emitting uh emissions. It depends on temperature, and if you change the temperature, if you change the precipitation, uh you know nothing prevents emissions to increase. Uh there is no, you know, strong limit to uh uh the amount of carbon that can be produced and released at methane in uh in wetlands. There is a lot of carbon as a substrate for bacteria to eat. So the process is not going to be limited by the exhaustion of food for bacterias. It's only going to be limited by uh temperature and precipitation conditions.
SPEAKER_05This creates a worrying threat of methane feedback on the climate, which we look at with Philippe and others in more detail in a whole episode on the topic later on. But as far as our own human-driven sources of biogenic methane, there's something we need to acknowledge. We can't control these methanogens and stop them feeding on buried or waterlogged bio waste where they find it. We can only limit the environments in which they thrive, reduce the organic waste they use for food, or turn their deoxygenated environments into oxygenated ones. Here's Dr. Roland Cooper's again on some of the strategies that are being thought through to deal with these problems.
SPEAKER_00On waste, there's a practical solution which is to run pipes through landfills and suck out the methane and either flare it or use it. The structural solution long term is keeping organic waste out of landfills because it's the organic waste that rots and create the methane. So if you don't put it in there in the first place, but you use it to compost and other things, then you you actually have no more methane emission issue. Um there's one country, for example, uh South Korea has done that very successfully. They separate almost all organic waste from and none of the organic waste goes into landfill, so the landfills have no methane emissions. So this is but but that's obviously not a trivial task, right? It's easier said than done to roll this out across the population.
SPEAKER_05Agricultural and waste methane emissions barely feature in regulatory and policy plans to cut our methane emissions. Why? I put that question to some of our contributors who work in methane industry.
SPEAKER_00I focus on oil and gas strongly. We also look at the others. Because it's a very different system. The oil and gas industry is is constituted of very large companies that have access to technology who are well capitalized. So they have a lot of agency to fix this. If you if you want to get you know hundreds of millions of rice farmers to change their habits, and you know, it's a very different kind of problem. The solutions may be known, but the theory of change is very different. So this is the reason we focus on uh most strongly and first and foremost on oil and gas, but we shouldn't forget these other sectors.
SPEAKER_05And Kim O'Dowd, a methane campaigner at the Environmental Investigation Agency. Why is tackling agriculture and waste so much harder?
SPEAKER_03And what would need to happen for us to be able to start tackling that? For agriculture, it's complicated. When we talk about agriculture methane, we have to think mostly of countries in the global north where we overconsume meat. And it's difficult to talk about this subject because people don't want to be told that they should eat less meat, for example. It touches more on personal habits than energy, for example, where it's just companies. We can look into technical solutions for agriculture, but from research, we know that the actual way to reduce math animation from the agriculture sector is just reducing our consumption of meat in developed countries. And putting that into policies is very complicated. And it's not impossible, and countries have taken steps towards that, uh, notably the Netherlands, who is trying to promote alternative proteins and trying to kind of balance animal protein and plant-based proteins. Um, so it's possible, but we just need more, I guess, more idea, but also just a bit of um courage. I don't know if courage is the right term, but I mean it's it's a tricky thing. We don't need to all become vegetarian vegans. That's not what we're saying. Just we need to reduce methane. Uh we just need to reduce uh meat consumption, align with what the World Health Organization actually recommends. So it's not just a climate issue, but it's also a health issue. And we we need to communicate around those things to show that there's enormous co-benefits in reducing methane in the agriculture sector.
SPEAKER_05And finally, here's what my own colleague, Raul Kazan, had to say about it when I challenged him on whether or not it was fair for the oil and gas industry to bear the brunt for the world's methane problem.
SPEAKER_02My response is the following. Uh this is a part-to-hole relationship. I mean, uh the industry or energy production has to has its own part. Uh agriculture has its own part, and waste has its own part. So everybody have uh their parts, their of responsibility.
SPEAKER_05So there you have it. The main anthropogenic sources of methane, and a little on its biggest natural source too. Before we finish and head into the next episode, there's one more question on methane from its different sources that you might be wondering, and that's worth answering here. How do we know which emissions come from where? Obviously we can track that certain activities like drilling for oil, transporting gas or mining coal give off methane, but how do we know how much of the rise is due to which source? Here's Philippe Sears again with a quick version of the answer from the records that we have, from atmospheric records, knowing where the methane is coming from, agricultural sources, livestock, rice, or oil and gas, for example, leaks, how do we can you track in the atmosphere where the where that methane has come from?
SPEAKER_01Uh it's a good question. We would like to, but uh when we see methane increasing uh just with the concentration signal, we're not able to split it into, oh, this is agriculture, this is waste, this is uh oil and gas. Uh for this uh we have to use uh inventories, so we have to use reconstructions of the activity of uh humans in the past, like uh how many livestocks were there in the last century and how much gas we have extracted. However, we still have some atmospheric toolkits which are called methane isotopes because uh there are a few uh heavier carbon atoms. Methane is CH4, there is one carbon atom and it's surrounded by four hydrogen ones. And sometimes this carbon atom is a bit uh heavier. Uh it contains uh 13 uh neutrons instead of 12 normally. And this abundance of methane isotope uh tells us unfortunately not about oil and gas versus agriculture, but it tells us about all the bacterial processes, or everything which is produced by bacteria means wetland and livestock and rice together, versus everything which is produced by oil and gas, because oil and gas has a distinct isotopic color, isotopic label compared to bacterial production, which happens both for livestock and rice and wetlands. So it's not able to separate rice from wetlands or livestock from rice, but uh it can classify the emissions into two categories: the uh bacterial uh processes and the uh leaking of oil and gas uh and also coal mines, uh coal extraction is also emitting methane. So this is very useful to have those additional like isotopic data.
SPEAKER_05We'll leave Philippe for now to get on with his dinner and a clearly very hungry cat. But if all of that talk of isotopes got your head spinning, don't worry. It's something we'll unpack a little more when we head out hunting for methane in the next episode.