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. Detectives: Making the Invisible Visible
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In this episode, we introduce our listeners to some of the world’s methane hunters, environmental detectives who use cutting-edge technology to detect and quantify methane emissions, making an invisible gas, visible. We embark on a methane hunting expedition of our own and talk to the coordinator of one of the world’s largest methane studies on the difference between estimated and measured emissions in the oil and gas sector.
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
Now with thermocameras, it's something else. You you go on the site and it's right on the spot that you see them, you know. You cannot really measure them and all that, you know, but but you you could actually, you know. But at least you see them. It's all being visualized, and I think I think this is the most important thing. It's something that does exist. You cannot deny it.
SPEAKER_05A huge part of the methane emissions challenge is that leaks are invisible, and many go undetected for years. Methane hunters or methane detectives make solving this aspect of the methane problem look cool.
SPEAKER_01We put our investigative gaps, arriving by car, scouting a bit the site.
SPEAKER_05Using a dizzying array of equipment, they not only make an invisible gas visible, but create a methane emissions map of where leaks are occurring so that they can be stopped.
SPEAKER_00You can set all kinds of targets, but you need to know at which places you can actually achieve this target.
SPEAKER_06And in this episode, so do we.
SPEAKER_07So that is literally as we're going gas leak, gas leak, yeah, gas leak. Yeah, these sources would be would be gas leak.
SPEAKER_05Welcome to the third episode of Methane, a podcast about the world's second most important greenhouse gas. Last time, we laid out the groundwork of where different methane emissions come from. Before we talk about how we can tackle those emissions, though, we need to find them first. Methane hunters do just that. In this episode of the podcast, we introduce you to some of them and some of the tools they use trying to put these pictures together.
SPEAKER_06The show is brought to you by the Two Celsius Association, and I'm your host, Francesca Fazy. Fifty years ago, methane was barely a footnote in climate concerns, certainly not in policy circles. Even by 2015, at the signing of the Paris Agreement, it hardly registered. So what changed?
SPEAKER_05The answer? Technology.
SPEAKER_06Satellites, aircraft, drones, chemical sniffers, lab instruments, but particularly thermal cameras, have in some ways quite literally opened our eyes to the scale of the methane challenge.
SPEAKER_05Methane hunters, as they are now called, are usually environmentalists, scientists, and sometimes regulatory officials who use some or all of this technology to call attention to leaking methane sources, usually on oil and gas plants. Theophil Human is one of them.
SPEAKER_01So my name is Theophil Human. I'm leading the campaign work in Europe and across the globe to help cut methane emissions and methane pollution in the oil and gas industry. I've been working to increase regulation on methane pollution in the oil and gas industry for around two to three years now. And I have been documenting using specialized type of equipment in around 10 countries since I started.
SPEAKER_05Theo is a specialist thermographer who works on detecting methane emissions for an international group called the Clean Air Task Force. The CATF has been raising awareness of methane emissions internationally for over 20 years. Theo is based in Athens in Greece, but his work takes him to sites in multiple countries. We asked him what a typical experience detecting methane at an oil or gas site was like.
SPEAKER_01We put our investigative caps, arriving by car, scouting a bit the site. As a thermographer, I know the pieces of equipment that might release methane. I will look at them firstly, turning on the camera, putting on the settings, controlling with either it's foggy or humid, uh sunny. I would try to take into account all these parameters in order to get the best shots and be sure that I visualize methane.
SPEAKER_05OGI stands for optical gas imaging. It's a thermal camera that uses the difference in energy reflected by the molecules of different gases, in this case methane, in order to make them visible like night goggles against the surrounding air. These cameras are being used by a growing number of environmental and regulatory agencies to get a visible picture of methane leaks. Even our own Raul Kazan was impressed when he first saw what cameras like this could demonstrate.
SPEAKER_02Now with thermal cameras, it's something else. You cannot really measure them and all that, you know, but but you you could actually, you know. But at least you see them. It's all being visualized, and I think I think this is the most important thing. It's something that does exist. You cannot deny it. You see it on the screen.
SPEAKER_05So, what information can these cameras give us?
SPEAKER_01The point of this kind of equipment is to do uh leak detection and repair, meaning you can spot a leak and then fix it depending on like the type of equipment in uh good timing. So I cannot calculate the quantity of methane leaving. As a thermographer with experience, we get to know if uh the emission is significant or not. But this is empirical, it's not based on any sort of calculation.
SPEAKER_05If the cameras only give qualitative confirmation of leaks, how can teams like Theo's move from just spotting them to knowing how serious the level of emissions are? Well, now you have to bring in a combination of techniques.
SPEAKER_01In order to have a comprehensive approach on mass and emissions coming from a site, you will try to combine uh different types of equipment like sniffers, uh, remote sensing, airborne remote sensing, meaning a plane flying over using a spectrometer over the site or the oil field, gas fields, as well as OGI cameras to have an overall uh idea of the number of sources. You combine them in a way that someone using a spectrometer, meaning like an instrument that actually gives uh the particle million of methane every few seconds. It will give you a sort of estimate, but you won't know what's the source. An OGI, an optical gas imaging camera can give you the source but cannot give you an estimate, and it's the combination of all these tools that can give you a comprehensive and broad idea of methane emissions in the site.
SPEAKER_05But what do you do if you don't have a camera?
SPEAKER_09Okay, so on top of the vehicle, we have this thing that looks like a big claw at the front.
SPEAKER_05Dave Lowry is a professor of geoscience at the University of Royal Holloway in London. He's been studying atmospheric methane for over 30 years.
SPEAKER_09I'm Dave Lowry. I'm a reader in stabilised topes and greenhouse gases in the Earth Sciences Department at Royal Holloway.
SPEAKER_05Together with another world expert on methane, Ewan Nisbet, he set up the UK's first monitoring station for atmospheric methane right on the roof of their very own building.
SPEAKER_09And I set up the lab with Ewan Nisbet, Greenhouse Gas Lab, back in 1995.
SPEAKER_05Today, the readings from Royal Holloway provide one of the longest running records of atmospheric methane in Europe. Dave works closely with another atmospheric scientist, Dr. Rebecca Fisher, and about 10 students to help identify and understand methane sources from sites all over the world. Here's Dr. Fisher.
SPEAKER_08So we get air samples sent into our lab from a number of sites globally. I started off looking at Arctic methane. So we've got measurements coming, air samples coming from Spitsbergen, for example, part of the Spaubards archipelago, northern Norway. We have air canisters filled there several times a week, sent to our lab where we measure the methane concentration and the isotopes in the methane. We also have air samples from Ascension Island, 8 degrees south of the equator. And then more recently the Halley station in Antarctica is another site where we've been receiving air. So it's it really is global.
SPEAKER_05While Dave and Rebecca have been measuring and analysing methane from around the world for many years now, what they're really interested in showing me is this vehicle with the thing that looks like a big claw on the top.
SPEAKER_09That's an anemometer, a sonic anemometer for measuring wind speeds as we're driving along. So that's important when you're trying to calculate an emission.
SPEAKER_05The claw, or sonic anemometer, is not the only thing that's special about this vehicle. It works with a rare and expensive piece of technology called a mobile laser spectrometer. Remember the spectrometer that Theo Human mentioned? A device that can give you the actual concentration of methane within a sample every few seconds? Well, this is exactly that, except for one key advantage. It's mobile. That means you can quote unquote see methane leaks as you go through them, turning a normal car into a sophisticated mobile meth lab. Meth for methane, not that kind of meth lab. Anyway, according to Dave and Rebecca, this laser-based tech was one of the most important jumps forward in our understanding of methane emissions.
SPEAKER_09We would have to collect samples of air in flasks and hope that our knowledge of the wind and the source would allow us to predict where the emission was, and then we would bring back the tanks to the lab and make an analysis on the gas chromatograph. But as soon as the like the laser-based instruments were commercialized, we didn't need the carrier gases, and suddenly everything was mobile. We could even set up at remote sites without carrier gases, so we set up sites in in Ascension Island and in the Falklands and left instruments running and just logged in remotely to those because we didn't need the consumables.
SPEAKER_05It's a technology like this that has started to show us, not just from the top down, but from the bottom up, just how much bigger a problem methane leaks are than we had realized. And I was here for a little taste of what it was like to be a methane detective on the move. First up, a layman's explanation of how the machine works and some of the smart calculations it has to do to give a reliable reading.
SPEAKER_09So you've got to then calculate back to try and understand how much is leaking. At the back we have a GPS receiver, so that tells us the concentration of methane at at a fixed point. It's measuring methane and uh GPS coordinates ten times every second.
SPEAKER_05And with that, it was time to get on the road and start looking for leaks. Uh where should I go? Front? Front or back? Do you want to go in the back and want to look at the data? Yes. Uh which is the best side? I I to be I don't know. Inside, the car felt like any ordinary, fairly comfortable car, except for the massive battery packs and instruments in the boot, and the wires coming over the seats. Looking at the data meant watching lines move across a tablet screen that connected to the spectrometer.
SPEAKER_08There's a baseline at roughly 2,000 parts per billion as we're driving along, and then we've just gone through some peaks. The biggest one we've been to through so far was over 3,000 parts per billion. This is making one measurement every second, so you can see as we go through a leak, we maybe see a few measurements. So for a few seconds we could be up above 3,000 parts per billion.
SPEAKER_05It was amazing to watch the methane profile around me change in real time just by driving along a suburban road in London. And concerning to see how many gas leaks were emitting steady puffs of methane all around us.
SPEAKER_07So that is literally as we're going gas leak, gas leak, yeah, gas leak. Yeah, these sources would be would be gas leaks.
SPEAKER_05I asked Rebecca how high they had seen these peaks go. How high would it go if we were next to, let's say, a gas leak on a you know a major pipeline or you know how high have you seen it go?
SPEAKER_08Probably um 10,000 um parts per billion. Um when we were when we took the instrument into a cow barn, um then it can go even higher. A hundred thousand. And women's a very big space. I know this is not the focus.
SPEAKER_05One thing our methane detection expedition brought home to me was just how much the mobility of their equipment meant. They can essentially look for and measure methane anywhere.
SPEAKER_04Where are you going for tomorrow's survey?
SPEAKER_09We're going up to to Cheshire, so it's an area we've been to once before, and um it's an area that's a mixture of sources from uh landfill sites, uh above ground gas infrastructure on the distribution network, um, and it's a site that has lots of um like oil refineries and chemical industry. So it's it's um a mixed source region.
SPEAKER_04And when you say you've been once before, is it uh a part of a regular monitoring program or you just went once before you're interested to go and see it again?
SPEAKER_09Well we're doing this as part of um um a project funded by the UK uh RI. It was initially set up to look at the effects of of fracking. Um so we surveyed to identify all the existing sources so that if there was an emission from fracking, we could identify that as an extra source because we knew where that site was.
SPEAKER_05The challenge of detecting methane with the mobile laser spectrometer isn't necessarily finding the emissions, the challenge becomes working out one source from another.
SPEAKER_09That was in the middle of um of dairy farming land, so we had cow barns, manure piles, uh, gas leaks along the main road, uh, and a big old landfill that was closed within the region, so there are lots of different sources contributing, and we use our measurement techniques to distinguish all the different ones in the region.
SPEAKER_06Those special techniques are the measurements of methane isotopes, which Dave and Rebecca happen to specialise in.
SPEAKER_05That word isotopes. Does it sound familiar? Here's Professor Philippe Sies again from the last episode. He's a climate researcher at the Climate and Environment Science Laboratory in Paris.
SPEAKER_03When 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. However, we still have some atmospheric toolkits which are called methane isotopes.
SPEAKER_05Isotopes mean two specimens of the same atom, just that one has more neutral particles or neutrons in its nucleus than the other. In the case of isotopes of methane, it's the carbon atom in the middle of the methane molecule that bears the telltale difference.
SPEAKER_08So um we're looking at methane, and depending on how that methane was formed, um, the methane can be slightly heavier or slightly lighter. Most carbon is carbon 12. What does the 12 mean? It's uh the number of um protons and neutrons within within the carbon atom. Okay.
SPEAKER_05Six protons, six neutrons.
SPEAKER_08Um but you can have uh carbon with one extra um neutron, and that's slightly heavier than the carbon-12.
SPEAKER_05Making them carbon-13, six protons, seven neutrons. These are also stable atoms, but they're a lot more rare. And it just so happens that thermogenic methane, that's the methane given off by oil, gas, and coal, has more carbon-13 than biogenic methane formed by bacteria decomposing organic matter. Philippe Siez again.
SPEAKER_03So 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.
SPEAKER_06Back to Rebecca Fisher.
SPEAKER_08So using a mass spectrometer, we can measure the ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 within um the methane in an air sample, and that very, very small changes um in that ratio tell us whether there is a little bit more of a biogenic source or a little bit more of a thermogenic source, the methane formed at higher temperature. What would a totally biogenic source look like in terms of acid? Um that has mostly carbon-12. They all have mostly carbon 12, but there's more carbon-12 than very little carbon-13 in a logical biogenic source. Okay. Um if that methane is formed at higher temperature, thermogenic fossil fuel gas or methane um formed during coal formation, um, then there would be um a little bit more carbon-13. Um, and if it's a combustion source, so um this could be forest fire or it could be combustion from a vehicle, um, then there would be more carbon-13 again, so it's slightly heavier.
SPEAKER_05So you're going from you'd always have more carbon-12 than more carbon than carbon-13.
SPEAKER_0899% of the carbon is carbon 12. Right. Very small um differences in the ratio depending on the source.
SPEAKER_05So you the lowest amount of carbon-13 that would suggest a biogenic source. Yes. Slightly more carbon-13 like would suggest a fossil fuel source, a thermogenic. Okay. And then slightly more again would suggest a combustion source. Today, Dave and Rebecca work in partnership with students and scientists all over the world, stepping up our baseline knowledge of methane emissions profiles in different areas using these isotopic distinctions. We speak to one of these scientists in the next segment. Back in London, my own methane detective expedition is coming to an end.
SPEAKER_08So we're now driving back into campus.
SPEAKER_052,000 parts per billion. That's not that far off the global average of about 1,900. But some of the peaks on the profile of our journey went way beyond that.
SPEAKER_04And if we look at the total journey.
SPEAKER_08Oh, we had a few. Quite a lot of peaks. We did. There was one that was above 4,000 parts per billion.
SPEAKER_04When you uh zoom out like that, it looks like a sort of, I don't know, the skyline of Dubai or something.
SPEAKER_05The difference when a simple pipe had been replaced was stark. I could see right there on the screen the very different profile that such a simple measure could achieve.
SPEAKER_08Yeah, and we had periods where there weren't many leaks at all, yeah. Um potentially because they have been here and maybe they've fixed this section, but they haven't fixed that section. There was a you know, pipeline has been replaced in that area. Probably is. You do see improvements when um pipelines have been replaced.
SPEAKER_05Oh right, so they might have just had a whole like switch that's newer. Yep. With these two areas with the peaks, if they were to replace the pipelines in those, then I mean if you if you target that well enough, you could change the overall methane profile of a large region if you just carbon dioxide. Ah yes, that was lots of traffic.
SPEAKER_04And the water's done some odd things. Oh no, no, it hasn't.
SPEAKER_08It's just been what?
SPEAKER_05We drank through rain.
SPEAKER_04No, it's all just been roughly 13,000 parts per million for the water.
SPEAKER_05A baseline of around 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide, and a baseline of 2,000 parts per billion for methane.
SPEAKER_08Yep.
SPEAKER_05Amazing, thank you. And finally, Thomas Rookman is a professor of atmospheric physics and chemistry at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. When the realization started to dawn. Internationally, that methane emissions from oil and gas could be a much bigger climate problem than we realized. Professor Rookman was charged with coordinating a huge international contingency to conduct a study of the emissions from one country's oil and gas sector in particular, Romania. The idea was simple. Romania has a centuries-long history of oil and gas production and has for many years reported its methane emissions to the United Nations. But, like most oil and gas reported emissions, these were estimated or calculated based on potentially outdated emissions factors. Actually, measuring them offered the chance to compare estimates of a country's methane emissions with actual measurements.
SPEAKER_02Could you summarize the project in a few words, please?
SPEAKER_00Yes, uh, thank you. Um the Romanian project on methane emissions from oil and gas was carried out by a large group of scientists from more than 10 European countries, also US scientists, and it was commissioned by the United Nations Environment Program. They asked our scientific group to come to Romania and carry out measurements in the oil and gas infrastructure.
SPEAKER_05Prior to the Second World War, Romania was the largest oil and gas producer in Europe. Today its output has dwindled, but its processing capacity is still significant for its Eastern European context, with over nine refineries and an extensive array of onshore and offshore infrastructure in the Black Sea. It also has ambitions to reinvigorate its energy producing credentials, with huge investments in its offshore capacity and funding from the EU for major pipeline extensions to its existing network. But much of that existing infrastructure is old and has been poorly maintained. Environmental groups and regulators are concerned about the impacts, not least, of fugitive methane emissions. Old infrastructure means leaky infrastructure, and vast networks of pipes mean vast networks of leaks too. From a scientific point of view, then Romania's situation offered a great opportunity.
SPEAKER_00And so since Romania is so important, it also reports high emission rates to the United Nations. The question is, is that true and what are these reports based on? So they asked us to use our new techniques that we have developed to come to Romania, and there we visited many locations, and we first tried to find out how many of them actually emit methane. So you can see that from the outside, or can measure from the outside what are the components that are emitting the methane, how much methane is emitted, and that's what we have finished now and compared it to what actually the countries report. But we have now quite a good idea on all these aspects. So what is leaking, where is it leaking, how much is leaking, and how does it compare to the national estimates?
SPEAKER_05Some of the technology used included drones and aircraft that could survey sites from the air, chemical detectors called sniffers to assess minute changes in methane concentration, thermal cameras that can make the gas plumes of methane suddenly visible. Even satellites can now detect large methane plumes from leaks, vents, or flares from space. Combining all these findings and then running them through still more sophisticated instruments for analysis created one of the most comprehensive measurement studies to date of methane emissions from an oil and gas industry. And what did they find? You've probably guessed already.
SPEAKER_02And is it scary? I mean the the emissions are higher than you have expected, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes, the emissions are higher than what is reported to the International Energy Agency and also the United Nations.
SPEAKER_05How high? Looking just at oil, the study found methane emissions of 5.5 kilograms per hour per site. That's about 120,000 tons per year. Compare this to the reported emissions. 46,000 tons is what Romania reported to the United Nations for the same period. 23,000 is what the IEA had calculated. What's more, the study found that almost three-quarters of the detected emissions were from gas being vented. When it came to leaks, there were over 230 leaks identified that hadn't been accounted for. But here's the positive angle.
SPEAKER_00That means that what the EU thought in the past years on what they had already achieved in Romania is not achieved yet. It also means that now we have the chance, since we know now from the measurements, how high the emissions are, now we have the chance to actually reduce these emissions and help the EU or well, Romania and the EU to fulfill some of the obligations that we have to do in the Paris Agreement and this global methane pledge, for example.
SPEAKER_05It highlighted the fact that to fix the problem, you do need to know what and where the problem exists first. And this is something Professor Rookman has found time and time again in his other methane studies as well.
SPEAKER_00You cannot easily extrapolate from one region to another. You have to go to the regions and actually measure what you find. We have measured in total in Europe in 11 cities, and we find that all cities are different, for example. So there's no, we have been in Bucharest as part of our project here in Romania. We have measured methane emissions in Bucharest. We found quite a number of gas leakages, but we also find quite some methane emissions from the wastewater system. That was quite special from Bucharest. In comparison, for example, to Utrecht, where I live, where we find very little wastewater emissions, but the most of the emissions are dominated by the fossil fuels. So in Bucharest, the emissions are overall larger, but also a larger fraction is coming from biological or microbial sources. We have also measured in in Paris, and in Paris we found out that actually gas boilers and restaurants have higher emission rates, which is different from Romania. We haven't found that very much here. So each city also needs to know what is the best way to reduce the emissions. You can set all kinds of targets, but you need to know at which places you can actually achieve this target. So you need to know again where the emissions are and how large they are, and at which place which emissions are most important. And also then the feasibility options, so what is technologically possible. So our role as scientists is to help guide this process, this political process in the end, because we want to find out. Well, we want we want to provide data, solid scientific data that can be used as the basis of this policy, of these political goals.
SPEAKER_05So, fellow methane hunters, that rounds off the first half of our podcast, where we've covered the main human sources of methane and the threat from its invisible leaks, many of which are lurking all around us. But before we open a new chapter on tackling these emissions, one more investigation into the origins of methane emissions awaits, for which we need to turn to the biggest source, the Earth itself. When we look at the cycles of greenhouse gases on our planet, we face a sobering reality. Natural processes release staggering amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Why should we be concerned? The answer lies in the ominous concept of methane climate feedbacks, a cycle of events that can accelerate climate change to unprecedented levels. From permafrost to wetlands, we'll uncover the hidden mechanisms driving methane emissions in nature and confront the looming specter of methane climate feedbacks head on.