Stop Emitting Nasty GHG Methane & It Will Disappear From Air In Our Lifetime

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Methane is so hot right now. Well, it’s making the world a lot hotter, because it’s a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and we’ve been increasing the amount we’re dumping into the air. That’s not a good kind of hot. The United States is the worst emitter of methane in the world, especially from its oil and gas industry.

Recently, I looked at the overlapping mixture of US industry greed, LNG exports shooting upward, domestic energy prices increasing, the Biden administration pause on new LNG terminals, and how that impacted an LNG exports levelized carbon assessment by a well known scientist, Robert Howarth of Cornell. The industry and some unexpected odd bedfellows were taking umbrage with his numbers.

Just prior to assessing that, I spent 90 minutes talking with Rob Jackson, another US scientist focused strongly on the methane problem. He’s spent time with instruments measuring emissions from gas stoves and furnaces in people’s homes, driving along US city streets with methane detection gear festooning his car and flying in helicopters over the Permian Basin with $100,000 flir cameras finding extraordinary leakage from oil and gas facilities. He also heads up the Global Carbon Project, which publishes annual budgets of every greenhouse gas, including methane.

Here’s the lightly edited transcript of the first half of our conversation from my podcast, Redefining Energy — Tech, as well as a link to the podcast itself if you prefer listen-listen to read-read.

Michael Barnard (MB): Hi, welcome back to Redefining Energy – Tech, sponsored by TFIE Strategy, Inc. I’m your host, Michael Barnard. My guest today is Rob Jackson, the chair of the Global Carbon Project, senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Guggenheim Fellow in the center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and out of the blue, a Djerassi program artist in residence. He’s also the author of two books, most recently Into the Clear Blue sky, available now in your preferred digital and even dead tree formats. Welcome, Rob.

Rob Jackson: (RJ): Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me.

MB: Oh, it’s a pleasure. I’ve been looking forward to this. I’ve been reading your book over the weekend and you know, I only contribute to books about climate solutions. I don’t actually publish my own books about them. So it’s been delightful to compare and contrast. I always like to start these things with who the person I’m talking with is and how they got here, because you’ve had a long and storied life already, including very early National Science Foundation awards and grants and recognitions. And then there’s the artist thing. So tell us about yourself.

RJ: Yeah, thanks for your question. Like everyone in life, I have a somewhat circuitous path to where I am. I was a chemical engineer as an undergraduate. I grew up in the petrochemical industry, at least in terms of my home and what my father did, which gives me a somewhat different view of environmental solutions sometimes than some of my colleagues. I was a chemical engineer, but I graduated from college. I went to work for the Dow Chemical company first and spent four or five years with Dow. Didn’t want to stay in the chemical industry for my career, so Dow was kind enough to give me a leave of absence. I applied to graduate school in the environmental sciences, and I took that leave and just never went back and wanted to be a professor. And here we are.

MB: Yeah, the artist thing is interesting. So tell me a little bit about that kind of art theme, because it seems to have been a long running one.

RJ: It is. I love different kinds of art. I love poetry as a form of writing. I wrote poems and published poetry before I published science books. Poetry for me is a way of remembering, of processing information and of just joy from the sound of language and the words. I also love images. Photography is something I’ve also been serious about for a long time. I take photographs. I buy photographs from people whose work I like and then from photography, you get to other sorts of visual arts. My wife is a very accomplished ceramic artist. Our home is sort of full of artists on a daily or evening basis for dinners and discussions. So I believe strongly in the sort of the fusion of science and art as a way to reach people and frankly, as a way to have a more fulfilling life myself.

MB: Well, even behind you, when we’re starting this preparation, I mean, your book is Into the Clear Blue Sky, and behind you on the wall, there’s this huge painting of a clear blue sky with white, fluffy clouds. You mentioned something there and where the artist is going to be tonight with you. So why don’t you just tell us that story before we get into the meat of the discussion?

RJ: The painting behind me, which listeners can’t see, is of the sky, as you mentioned, Michael. It’s by a friend, artist Sukey Bryan. Sukey does wonderful environment and climate related art, paints images of glaciers, ponds, skies, and she decorates buildings with them. She did Grace Cathedral in San Francisco recently. She decorates steps up to buildings so that when you approach the building, what you’re seeing on the flat part of the steps, the part that you don’t walk on, is an image as you approach. So you might see cascading water down the steps to a building. That’s her art. So she uses imagery to discuss and raise awareness of environmental issues. And I love her work. She’s a good friend. So I bought one of her paintings to have behind me during Zoom.

MB: It’s lovely and it’s also interesting because the subject we’re going to be talking about today is almost entirely methane. And methane is invisible to the human eye. So it’s not something that has a visual impact on us. And yet it’s a core part of your research for decades now. And, you know, a fundamental challenge. So our audience is really broad, and they tend to be nerdy. So we’re going to go nerdy on this stuff. After talking about art and visual imagery, we’re going to talk about an invisible gas. So why don’t we start with just what the heck methane is and what its chemical constituents are and why it’s important?

RJ: Sure, I can put my nerdy hat on. Methane is the smallest hydrocarbon molecule in the world. It’s a triangular pyramid. So imagine a carbon molecule at the center and then four points, each of those points being a hydrogen atom, and so its molecular formula is CH4. And methane is important for us in the climate space because it is a greenhouse gas that’s far more potent than carbon. Dioxide, it’s 80 or 90 times more potent the first couple of decades after released sort of ton for ton. And over 100 years, it’s about 30 or 35 times more potent than carbon dioxide. So while it’s in our air, it’s an extremely strong warmer. It’s kind of a superpower for warming. So that’s the bad news.

The good news is that it leaves the atmosphere much more quickly than carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases. And that means if we could reduce or eliminate emissions, starting today, we could see the atmosphere restored to pre industrial health within a decade or two, within our lifetimes even. There’s no other greenhouse gas for which that could ever happen. And if we could accomplish that, we could save half a degree C of warming or a degree F warming within ten or 20 years. It’s the strongest lever we have for slowing climate change today.

MB: That’s an important thing that I wanted to draw very early, and that’s part of the reason why methane is so important. I mean, I’m a strong supporter of the Kigali amendment to the Montreal protocol with a strong focus on carbon abatement, carbon emissions reduction. But methane, that’s like somebody in the office cranking the heat and turning on a space heater. You can just turn that down and turn on, unplug the space heater, and we get a lot more comfort a lot more quickly, and a lot less of the extreme weather, simply because, to reiterate, it’s creating more heat in our atmosphere very quickly. And that heat is energy. That energy turns into extreme weather, among many other things. We’re seeing a lot of that these days.

So that’s methane, but that’s not what it’s normally called in our society. So why don’t we talk a bit about what the heck, how we actually interact with methane and how prevalent that is.

RJ: Yeah, let’s do that. Before I do, I would like to amplify something you just said, and that is, it isn’t just methane that we need to address. We must address carbon dioxide in particular. Carbon dioxide is the most dangerous greenhouse gas. There are a trillion legacy tons of it floating around our atmosphere that will be there for thousands of years. So we have to address carbon dioxide as well. But we have a particular opportunity to. To reduce methane emissions today and buy us time for addressing CO2 and other hard to mitigate climate causing factors.

Methane, in its marketed form, of course, is called natural gas. Natural gas is 90% to 95% methane with a little bit of heavier hydrocarbons thrown in. Ethane the next biggest molecule, sometimes little benzene for heat. So what is marketed as natural gas is methane.

And that means every time natural gas is moved around the country or the planet, whether that be when it’s extracted from the ground, whether it passes through a pipeline, when it enters our homes, in the walls of our homes and runs to our furnaces, water heaters and stoves, each of those points leaks or bleeds a little bit of methane into the air around us. And that’s an inevitable consequence of using so much natural gas or methane. I don’t like the term natural gas. It’s a marketing term, frankly. So I just call it gas if the context is clear. But that’s a little confusing. In the US, gas is gas. Like our car in Britain, gas is petrol. So, know, gas. And petrol is not confusing in the UK, but it is confusing here.

MB: Well, yeah, it is great marketing and it came about because it replaced town gas. You know, town gas was horrendous stuff and still is. Hong Kong is still on town gas. Singapore still has town gas systems. São Paulo, where I also lived, has a town gas system. And so they have massive vents in all the kitchens because town gas is up, you know, quite high in carbon monoxide, you know, so you can actually die from the stuff, but that’s made from coal and other fossil fuels and plants outside of town and put into the system. And it’s, you know, up to 50% hydrogen in the town gas, but that’s the unnatural gas that natural gas replaced. Yeah, but yes, completely inadvertent great marketing because natural has turned into this marketing super word, you know, like organic.

You know, it rarely means what you think it means and it doesn’t mean anything positive necessarily, but it’s got all these wonderful connotations. So, yeah, I know a lot of people who articulate a strong requirement to call it fossil gas just to, you know, which is also inaccurate, but it’s more accurate from a natural, from a marketing perspective these days. So, yeah, natural gas and natural gas, to be clear, it’s pervasive in our society, in places we don’t even think about. Like, you know, one of the things that I was reading in your book was you spend a lot of time in people’s kitchens and homes. Why don’t you tell us about that? And, you know, talk about the implications of all those supply chain that gets to kitchens and what happens in kitchens and furnace rooms in our homes.

RJ: The places where we can make the most difference to reduce warming in our lives are how we move around our transportation and our homes and buildings. And we may come to transportation later, but homes and buildings are one of the largest uses of gas. Natural gas, fossil gas, pick your term. We use gas across the United States in the 40 or 50 million homes to power our stoves. Furnaces tend to run on gas. Natural gas is a wonderful fuel. Let’s make no bones about it. It’s cleaner burning natural gas than it is burning coal, but it’s dirtier burning gas than pretty much anything else we use today. So we pipe all this gas into our homes. We run our furnaces, water heaters, and stoves with it. And when we run furnaces and water heaters, there’s a vent pipe.

So the pollution goes out of the home. But every time we turn our stove on and we stand next to our stove, we not only leak a little bit of methane into the air as a climate factor, we also create pollution in the flames of the gas that’s burning. And our studies have documented nox, nitrogen dioxide, as an asthma triggering gas. And also, we did the first studies a year or so ago measuring the benzene that’s emitted in the flames of gas stoves. So I often think we would never stand over the tailpipe of a car and just willingly breathe in all of those pollutants. And yet that’s what we do with our stoves. We stand over the stoves, meal after meal, day after day, breathing in exactly the same gases, and we try to ameliorate the risks.

There are hoods in people’s homes. Most people don’t use their hoods. They’re inconvenient, they’re loud. And I say that based on survey results. And then there are other things we can do. You can open a window. But fundamentally, burning gas in our home inevitably releases pollutants into our home. And everything else we do is to try and reduce the exposure that we get from breathing those additional pollutants. And they’re harmful?

MB: Well, it’s just to us. I mean, we’re adults, and we can theoretically make our own choices. And we’ll talk probably about cooking with gas is another horrible marketing thing which has just become prevalent. But what about the impact of those indoor pollutants from burning natural gas on kids?

RJ: The people who are most at risk from breathing these pollutants are children and the elderly, kids in particular, are at risk of asthma. NOx gases, nitrogen dioxide, triggers asthma for kids. So, you know, anything? I work with an environmental justice group in the Central Valley of California, the Central Valley Asthma collaborative. And the goal of that work, that partnership, is to take measurements in people’s homes in lower income neighborhoods to try and understand what people are breathing in sort of normal, but not a typical situation in a wealthy suburb, let’s say. So what are people exposed to, and how can we help reduce risks for those people? So that’s a collaboration that I really value, and that has led to some strong improvements in people’s lives. So kids are most at risk and the elderly are at risk.

MB: Well, and it’s fascinating because a lot of homes, a lot of cheap homes have cheap electric ranges and a sign of affluence, a status symbol is an expensive gas range. And so that was kind of point 1 is the affluent are intentionally harming their kids because of marketing cooking with gas. And, you know, as I know, and undoubtedly, you know, induction stoves work brilliantly and they actually are vastly more efficient. They’re incredible cooking devices. I’ve used them in, you know, places around the world when, you know, when traveling as a digital nomading in New Zealand last year, and every Airbnb had an induction stovetop. And yet you’ve kind of got this inverse thing.

Now, when reading your book over the past few days, I also noticed a different inversion in that the pipes that lead from the gas distribution network to homes show kind of a bit of an inverse from what we might expect in terms of environmental justice. I think you said the oldest pipes and the most affluent areas had the highest leakage. I want to talk a bit about that. And driving around cities in North America.

RJ: With measurement systems, I would, and I would first say that I replaced our gas stove because of the measurements that we took to develop the methods of our research studies. So I saw the pollutants rising in my home every time we flipped a burner or turned the oven on. So I got rid of the gas stove and went to induction for my family’s health. But the gas that enters our home leaks into the atmosphere. We estimated that in the US, at least, that gas is comparable to about the emissions of 500,000 cars. So it’s a strong warming component. But gas leaks all along the supply chain from sort of wells to wheels, as we say, or wells to homes starting with where it’s extracted. But as it moves through pipelines under our city streets and sidewalks, it leaks there too.

With my friend and colleague Nathan Phillips at Boston University — I interview Nathan in the book — we published the first studies of gas leaks across cities. We took brand new laser based instruments, put them in the backs of cars, and drove cities like a lawnmower, over and back, up and down, literally driving every street. In cities across Boston, Washington DC and Manhattan as well, we found thousands of leaks, particularly in these older cities. About four leaks for every road mile. And as you mentioned, it wasn’t that leaks were more common or worse in poorer neighborhoods. It was that leaks are more common in older neighborhoods, many of which tend to be wealthy. That’s because we’re still using pipelines in some cases that are more than 100 years old, that were laid in the 18 hundreds.

It’s expensive to rip pipes out of the ground and replace them. So utilities don’t like to do that if they don’t have to. So our whole gas distribution system is leaking, bleeding methane into the air at thousands of points, particularly in our older cities.

MB: And what’s interesting to me is in the United States, the last statistics I have is 4000 buildings are damaged significantly or destroyed by natural gas related fires and explosions every year in the United States. And from what you’re saying, those are going to be clustered frequently in more gentrified and richer areas of many cities. And so you’d think that the more affluent the United States would be leading the charge on degasifying their neighborhoods to reduce and degasifying their homes. And yet I find that’s back to marketing. It’s under leveraged until recently as a way to get some climate movement. Protecting the children on the other side of the world doesn’t have the same resonance as protecting your children as they approach kindergarten age. And so I just wanted to draw that out a bit. But yeah, the leakage under city streets, just briefly.

I’m not going to dwell on hydrogen, although it’s a big place. I’ve been spending a lot of time because it’s such an energetic dead end as a climate solution. It’s a climate problem on the scale of all of aviation, and yet we’re trying to expand that radically to be a nonstarter solution for energy. And the usual suspects are involved in that. But from your perspective, one of the climate solutions that’s proposed for hydrogen or for natural gas is to replace natural gas with hydrogen in the same distribution pipelines. Based upon your research and experience with ch four. And your chemical engineering background and knowledge of the diameters of the molecules, would you say that is going to lead to more or less hydrogen leaking?

RJ: Well, certainly more hydrogen leaking. We can’t expand the hydrogen economy and not see additional leakage. Hydrogen is, in some sense, the champagne of fuels. The beauty of hydrogen, and the reason it gets so much attention is that when it’s burned its products, its combustion products are water. So hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water. So in that sense, it doesn’t have the other pollutants that you see. That’s in a perfect situation. Hydrogen is also the world’s smallest molecule, so any pipeline that leaks, methane will leak even more hydrogen proportionally, because it’s better at getting out of things. Hydrogen also tends to make gaskets and other things brittle in pipelines. So it’s. I think there’s a place for. For hydrogen. In my mind, the place for hydrogen is in large industrial sources.

In the book, I chronicle the world’s first green steel manufacturing facility in Sweden. They use clean hydropower to produce hydrogen on site, and they use that hydrogen to replace all the coal that previously went into steel manufacturing to heat the ovens, and also to strip carbon out of the. Out of the iron ore. So, to me, that makes more sense than fitting out millions of hydrogen vehicles or putting a little bit of hydrogen into millions of miles of hydrogen pipelines that we know is going to leak and affect climate change.

MB: Yeah. And it is interesting, hydrogen. I mean, we’re talking a bit about natural gas fires and explosions, and hydrogen is just more likely to explode. It’s just the nature of the molecule. But once again, not a hydrogen discussion, a methane discussion. So we’re using it in homes, we’re overusing it at homes. We’ll get to the solution space, because there’s clear solutions for this space as well. But I want to keep going. So you mentioned upstream, we’ve talked about the distribution side, but then there’s transmission, processing, extraction, and especially in the United States recently, that’s become much more. We’ve achieved much greater awareness of the challenges in the United States. I know your research, unlike people like Bob Howarth’s, has been less focused on the extraction side of the industry, but you did come from that as well.

So I’m sure you’re au courant with the literature. So why don’t you tell us about the challenges in the United States, as you see them, with natural gas extraction or even methane leakage from other forms of fossil fuel extraction? Because that’s a big part of the equation.

RJ: It is a big part. Fracking has been tremendously successful in getting oil and gas out of the ground. I and my colleague Abner Vengosh at Duke did the first studies of fracking and drinking water containers contamination more than a decade ago now. So I do follow the literature closely. Every time we extract a fossil fuel, whether that fuel be gas, oil, or coal, some methane leaks into the atmosphere associated with that. So the best way to reduce methane leakage across our homes, pipelines, and oil wells is simply to use less fossil fuels. That’s intuitive. But there are a lot of new ways that scientists are understanding large leaks. We call these leaks superemitters in the nerdy scientific space. So these would be the hundreds to thousands of kilograms per hour of methane leaking into the air.

I’ve studied these leaks from helicopters, almost like a restaurant inspection. You can show up across an oil and gas field and film operations with an infrared camera that helps you visualize the leaks unannounced. You don’t need permission to show up. And hence the restaurant inspection analogy. You’re just there and you see who’s leaking and how much. And those studies done with the Environmental Defense Fund showed that oil producing basins of the United States leaked a lot more of the methane or the gas into the air. That kind of makes sense if you’re in the Bakken or in the Permian in Texas, and you’re focused and making your money on oil at $50 or $100 a barrel, the methane is almost a distraction to those operators.

So in the Bakken and other places, we often flare methane, just burn it, because there’s not a pipeline to get it to market, which no one likes, but that’s the reality. So we found that oil producers leaked a lot more methane into the atmosphere than companies that were focused on producing gas itself. So you can do that by helicopter, you can do that by driving on land. The best way, the new way to do that is using drones or especially satellites. I’m really excited about two satellites that just launched this year, methane sat and carbon Mapper. I just attended the carbon mapper launch at SpaceX station Vandenberg Air Force base a month or so ago. These satellites target superemitters from space.

So they’ll find the biggest emitters anywhere, not just in the US, and we have more than our share, but China, Russia, places that we can’t fly and access. So that will help. They’ll give us earlier warning about large leaks. There won’t be an Aliso Canyon natural gas storage field that leaked for months before it was really recognized and detected, even after people were reporting symptoms to local authorities. So they will help us find large emitters, and if the information is used properly, they’ll help us reduce those emissions, either through pressure on companies or through regulators who take advantage of the information. So we’ll be able to see these leaks in a way that we have never seen them before. We’ll be able to see them globally. And I’m really excited about those new technologies.

MB: Yeah, it’s very exciting, but from a military analogy perspective, we need defense in depth for methane. We need multiple types of sensors at multiple different time scales because satellite resolution, even with the Orbital Sidekick — I’ve spoken to the CEO of orbital methane satellite commercial company Orbital Sidekick, who, you know, sells side scanning orbital hyperspectral camera data to identify methane leaks to the fossil fuel industr, they’ll be able to track 4000 kilometers of pipeline from space in a pass — their maximum resolution is something like 10 meters. And the other ones you mentioned, Methane SAT is at like 30 meters or 25 or 50 meters. Some larger numbers.

When I was facilitating an EU-Canada methane mitigation dialogue with the fossil fuel industry funded by the EU in Calgary earlier this year, one of the discussion points was how different measurement systems have different challenges. One of the leading organizations who was in the extraction industry, who was working really hard on abatement and elimination of leaks, she was saying that one of their biggest leak points was thief hatches in the top of the tanks. And the thief hatch is just a small hatch, which is an overpressure hatch. Basically, if pressure goes up, it’s a relief valve for the pressure so the tank doesn’t explode. But you can’t see those from the ground. So the service they had at inspecting all their facilities every 30 days was ground level.

You know, optical OGP cameras, I think they’re called, I’ve forgotten the name for it, but it’s an infrared camera that can detect methane in the atmosphere. They couldn’t see the thief hatches, so they couldn’t identify the source of the leak for them.

RJ: That’s really interesting. So flir is the company that sells these cameras. It’s $100,000 to have a camera that can visualize these leaks. And in our helicopter study to build on what you just said, 90% of the leaks or emission sources that we saw from the air were from tanks. And generally the tops of tanks, hatches and pressure release valves, just as you said, Michael. So, yes, and we don’t, we can’t rely just on satellites. Satellites will help us get the really big sources that are the most important. But we need sensors at the site scale. Companies need early warning if there’s a leak on their well pad. And there are other companies trying to build kind of low cost early detection systems like that.

We need drones, you know, drone systems that can be automated in an automated way, fly pipelines and facilities, because people’s time is expensive. And frankly, when a company sends a team of operators to film their facilities with this expensive infrared camera, it’s not necessarily in the company’s interest for those operators to find every leak or to work hard to see every leak. So I think an independent source of information on operations is always helpful.

MB: I occasionally talk with Sharon Wilson, who I’m sure you’re familiar with, goes by the tag methane hunter. And she and her NGO just run around the permian basin with a flir camera taking pictures of leaks and embarrassing pretty much everybody within the process. She’s certainly not a believer that satellites are a magic bullet in this regard. As I said to her now, you can run, but you can’t hide with big methane leaks. A big methane leak will lead to tighter inspection closer to the ground. Certainly the rise of unmanned aerial vehicles that are electric, that are very low cost camera platforms is radically increasing our ability to do high resolution surveillance with lidar platforms and flir platforms of those things.

And the FAA is not leading, but is not lagging terribly and outside of visual range operation of commercial drones, believe it or not, there’s a tree planting CEO. I spoke to Grant Canary, who flies swarms of pre programmed heavy lift drones five at a time across burnt out areas in the United States, planting pucks with little seedlings in them. And he and his team basically pioneered the FAA approvals of out of line of sight drone operation. And I’ve spoken to similar people who are doing similar types of stuff with drone spraying and seeding of crops, for example. So they’re starting to get some more attention. And that leads to, you know, the greater ability to do these inspections. But it’s a case by case, and you have to do notice to airmen applications for each application.

So it’s a bunch of regulatory stuff that goes along with just to keep people safe. But yes. So defense and depth, even in that case, the up, typically they have the downwind cameras at the edge of facilities, but if the wind shifts, they don’t see it. So they really need this defense in depth from space to air to ground, and multiple different timescales to actually track methane in the space. It’s non trivial this way. I would describe it.

RJ: Yeah, I fully agree with that. And maybe also want to bring up a different point that we haven’t emphasized enough. I’m excited about all of these technologies. I do think they’ll help us clean up the energy sector, and in some cases companies will make money by being cleaner, so everyone wins. Those new technologies with satellites and such will not help us much with larger sources of methane, like agriculture. And they also don’t help us with the fundamental carbon dioxide emissions that come from burning gas as a fossil fuel. So we can clean up the methane supply chain, reduce methane emissions and leakage. We need to do that. That’s really important because gas is the fastest growing fossil fuel in the world.

But every time we burn gas, whether we call it clean or not, we’re releasing carbon dioxide into the air on top of the. The methane leakage, or really the methane leakage is on top of the core warming that comes from burning a fossil fuel. So, satellites will help us reduce methane emissions, but new technologies do nothing to stop the fundamental warming that comes from fossil fuel use.

MB: Well, it’s actually worse than that. So did you see the International Council on Clean Transportation’s FUMES project results that came out late last year?

RJ: I’m not sure if I have. I followed some of them, but I don’t remember.

MB: This is fugitive, unburnt methane emissions from ships. That’s what FUMES turned into. I spend a lot of time in maritime and aviation decarbonization, as well as energy decarbonization. So I’ve kind of got that weird cross lateral thing. So the ICCT established a study three years ago, got it funded, and they followed a sampling of LNG burning ships. They monitored the smokestacks with both drones and fixed cameras. And what they found was that methane slippage from methane burning engines was 6.5% or 6.4% instead of 3.5%. And that slippage is just the amount of methane you put into an engine that just doesn’t get burnt and comes out the end. One of the great secrets is it’s just wastage. And so that 6.4% eliminates any carbon benefits, any theoretical carbon dioxide benefits, in terms of warming from those engines, it actually over swaps them.

And I did the calculations recently. Even the 3.5% slippage eliminates carbon dioxide emission benefits.

RJ: Yeah, that’s such an interesting example because we measured methane slippage in homes, the stoves and appliances were talking about earlier every time. I think almost literally, this is true. Every time we go in and take detailed measurements of processes like this, whether it be ships or appliances or pipelines, the emissions are higher than both the industry and the EPA says they are or should be. And that’s true in the Permian basin. The numbers for leakage in the Permian are just shocking. They range from sort of 3% to almost 10% of all the methane being extracted leaking to the atmosphere. I mean, that’s a waste of money and a travesty by all counts. So we tend to underestimate the amount of leakage that’s happening all the time. Ships are interesting. This methane slip issue with engines is also true in power plants.

And shipping is also talking about hydrogen and ammonia. And they’re looking for a replacement for gas, which is a replacement for diesel and other things. But all of these other fuels have additional climate consequences too. So we tend to underestimate how. We tend to overestimate how well we do things at cleaning our infrastructure and keeping pollution out of the air consistently.

MB: Well, yeah, the LNG industry has been very good at marketing to ships, especially ships that carry passengers because it stinks less than maritime resid. But back to power plants. There’s a really interesting thing that came out of the study which I think you’ll find fascinating and ironic. So the Shell representative said when we actually started measuring our methane emissions from our operations, we found something we didn’t expect. Our single biggest source was the engines we were burning methane in to power our operations, the slippage was incredibly high and so we actually had an expectation of what our priority tactics would be for methane reduction. But instead we’re electrifying everything as our primary priority. And that’s back to exactly your point. Job one with methane emissions reduction in the fossil fuel industry is to stop using fossil fuels as rapidly as possible.

And you come back to that in your book over and over again. It’s, you know, we’ve got to stop digging the hole that we’ve been digging since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.