Greenhouse Gas Abatement that Makes Some Sense: Methane-Sniffing Drones

 

Bad old carbon dioxide is not the only gas that contributes to the earth's net heat balance by trapping heat in the atmosphere.  Another commonly used gas—methane, the chief constituent of natural gas—is more than 25 times as effective as CO2 in trapping heat.  Fortunately, methane's lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter:  about 12 years as opposed to the hundreds of years it takes for CO2 to go away.  So doing something about methane emissions promises to have much more of a near-term effect than anything we do with CO2. 

 

Enter Percepto, a company founded in Israel which recently moved to Austin, Texas to market their services of sniffing out emissions of methane and 14 other gases using artificial-intelligence (AI)-equipped drones.  Their target market is refineries and petrochemical plants, where methane and other hydrocarbon gases can escape in leaks that can take days or weeks to find by technicians walking around with hand-held detectors.

 

Percepto's system, as outlined in an article that appeared in the Austin American-Statesman, consists of a drone equipped with a wavelength-selective camera.  Most hydrocarbon gases emit and absorb characteristic infrared wavelengths, and a cleverly-designed imaging spectrometer can present the user with a photograph showing a cloud of methane made as visible as a cloud of red smoke from a cherry-bomb firework. 

 

Finding and fixing such a leak is not only good safety practice.  In 2024, the Biden administration will begin to implement the Methane Emissions Reduction Program, a combination of over a billion dollars of funding to pay for programs like Percepto's, combined with steeply increasing fines for emitting methane and other greenhouse gases.  Ariel Avitan, co-founder of Percepto, saw a business opportunity in providing large firms with a means of tracking leaks that is faster and more comprehensive than the older methods.  So now, his firm is poised to help track down leaks and other sources of methane that have previously gone undetected.

 

Percepto is to be congratulated for seeing a market niche and exploiting it.  Methane itself is not a particularly valuable gas.  When the cost of transporting it from a wellhead to the market exceeds what it can be sold for, producers typically flare it by burning it at the source.  The government is coming down hard on flares, too, which may lead to other expensive issues, as even flares don't burn 100% of the gas they consume. 

 

In an ideal world we wouldn't waste or release any methane at all through oil and gas operations.  But even if we had a magic wand to do that, it would decrease the world's budget of methane release by only 14%.

 

According to the International Energy Agency in Paris, France, the most profligate source of methane emissions worldwide is a natural one.  Methane is emitted in wetlands by natural decomposition, and unless we are willing to drain all the wetlands, there's nothing we can do about the 32% that nature produces.  The next largest source is agriculture, at 23%—think flatulent cows (there aren't any other kind).  Oil and gas come next at 14%, then coal operations and something labeled as "waste," which probably means methane produced by landfills. 

 

If anyone thinks that we're going to stop global warming by fixing all our methane leaks, this means that there is a disappointment in store.  But in the current state of climate rhetoric, few people are going to think beyond the one step that can be summarized as "Greenhouse gases bad—must stop at any cost." 

 

As I have mentioned elsewhere, the climate has slowly been warming and the ocean levels slowly rising (we're talking millimeters here) since the early 1800s.  And now that CO2 levels have risen as much as they have, whatever effect that's going to have on the climate will be with us for the next couple of hundred years, even if we stopped 100% of all human activity that emits CO2, including breathing.  And stopping the breath of the 8 billion or so humans on the planet is exactly what some "deep ecologists" would like us to do—the folks who regard humanity as some kind of evil infestation of an otherwise pristine Earth.

 

The sensible thing to do—the thing that would let most of those 8 billion people enjoy some of the benefits of modern technology that we in the U. S. have enjoyed for many decades—is to figure out how to adapt to the relatively minor and certainly gradual changes that global warming is going to make, while picking low-hanging fruit with regard to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.  If there's a six-foot hole in a dike in one place and a three-inch crack in another, the only reasonable thing to do is go after the six-foot hole first.  And if you can more easily deal with the water over the dike than fix the dike, maybe that's the best thing to do.

 

Unfortunately, the debate—or more accurately, accepted doctrine—about global warming has left such notions behind.  Most world leaders and their cadres of experts have bought into the easily-propagated notion that if we don't do really drastic and painful things about greenhouse gas emissions right now, we're all going to die horrible deaths as the globe imitates an egg in a frying pan.  The fact that highly reputable people such as Steven Koonin have shown this oversimplification to be mostly false has no effect on something that has become the mass-psychology equivalent of a kind of hypochondria.  It's like a patient that comes to a doctor with a pimple on his nose and says it's cancer and he's sure it's going to kill him.

 

We would try to talk reason to such a person, but it's easier than trying to talk sense to an international community that has bought into a severely distorted picture wholesale, and created huge institutional incentives to keep the delusion going. 

 

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad Percepto saw their opportunity and took it.  People have a right to profit from laws that, however misconceived, do some incremental good.  And it's certainly a good thing to stop methane leaks, even if it costs millions of dollars to do so.  But one can still question the reasoning behind the laws, and wonder whether succeeding generations (if there are any) will scratch their heads over the strange panic about climate change that we are currently enduring.

 

Sources:  The article titled "Company using AI to detect gas leaks" appeared on page 1F of the Sunday, Aug. 27, 2023 edition of the Austin American-Statesman.  The International Energy Agency's website https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/methane-and-climate-change provided me with statistics about methane lifetime and sources.  Physicist Steven E. Koonin's book Unsettled? was published in 2021 by BenBella Books, Dallas.

The Only Climate Change Book You Need to Read

 

Say the phrase "climate change" to a certain class of generally well-educated and well-placed people, and you will hear how it is the most significant existential threat to humanity, how we should all go around despairing that we as a world community are not doing enough to avert the climate apocalypse that is coming, and that we face either the alternative of doom for humanity or a radical change in political, social, and economic arrangements to avert it.  If you think I'm kidding, take a look at publications like the New York Times or The New Yorker or indeed, most mainstream media. 

 

I've written here on climate change occasionally, but by and large I have taken an agnostic position on it.  A wise teacher I know tells his students that worrying a lot about something you can't personally do anything about is a waste of time, and that's why I haven't expended a lot of mental energy on the topic.  But I did come across a reference not too long ago to a book by Steven E. Koonin entitled Unsettled:  What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters.  Having read the book, I'm now convinced that my attitude toward climate change is the right one, and I now have one of the best-placed persons in the world to back me up.

 

I can't imagine a better-qualified person to write this book.  Koonin's professional career began at Caltech, where he was a professor of theoretical physics, then vice president and provost for several years.  He left academia to become chief scientist for the international energy company BP, and then went into government and was President Obama's Undersecretary for Science in the U. S. Department of Energy.  He now holds positions at New York University.  So he is a product of academia, industry, and government, and has seen all three from the inside as a leader and participant.

 

Perhaps it is his early training as a physicist that makes him cut through the sound bites, breathless stories about polar bears, and even the periodic Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, and go straight to the peer-reviewed, observation-based data and ask the question, "How sure are we that this alleged climate catastrophe is going to happen?"  The answer suitable for a 1000-word column is, "Not sure enough to turn the world upside down."  Koonin has never met a piece of hype he couldn't see through to get to the raw data that it was allegedly based on. 

 

The first part of the book examines the accuracy, consistency, and meanings of the climate data on which the IPCC and other climate-change reports are based.  Take rising sea levels, for example, which have inspired pictures of the Statue of Liberty wading in the Atlantic up to her waist.  One overarching point he makes in this section is that climate is something that can't be determined without taking long-term averages, ideally over periods of 20 to 30 years or more, while weather is what's going on outside your window right now.  For one thing, global sea level has varied as much as 100 meters (that's about 330 feet) over the last half million years, falling as ice ages take up water and rising as they end.  We're currently right at the end of the last melting period, as it turns out.  A plot of the last 24,000 years shows a rise of about 120 meters followed by a nearly flat period over the last 5,000 years—in other words, during the historic era.  The bottom line here is that it's much too early to tell if the rise in carbon-dioxide levels due to fossil-fuel use is going to make much of a difference in the average sea level.  The true climatological answer won't be known in any of our lifetimes. 

 

And it's basically the same or worse for any of the other climate tragedies that have become boogeymen to scare children with over the last twenty years or so.  The worst aspect of the distortions and false terrors concerns violent weather:  hurricanes, tornadoes, and so on.  By two different measures, the frequency of tornadoes in the U. S. is probably going down, not up, although with modern Doppler radars it is easier to detect them than it used to be.  And the annual fluctuations in something called the "power dissipation index" in the North Atlantic, which is correlated with hurricanes, are bigger than any so-called upward trend. 

 

After showing how the actual data reveal that the IPCC, governments, and journalists have hyped climate change with cherry-picking, tendentious interpretations, and sometimes outright lies, he examines why this whole mess has come about.  He concludes it is a combination of publish-or-perish pressure on scientists, desire for click-bait headlines on the part of the media, and a public that is poorly informed on even basic procedures of science.  The "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality of yellow journalism has only gotten worse via the Internet and its penchant for 280-character summaries of topics that deserve a book like this one. 

 

Although Koonin doesn't mention the following factor, I think a contributing aspect to the climate-change hype is the gradual secularization of Western culture.  Modern science arose from the Christian conviction that the universe was designed by an intelligent Being and was therefore capable of being figured out, because it follows logical rules.  If most people no longer hold that view, it is an open question as to how long they will insist on looking at the data themselves, as Koonin does, versus being swept up in a public-relations fantasy that is based on greed for power and wealth rather than disinterested respect for knowledge.  I don't think it's a coincidence that many of the so-called "climate change deniers" (which does not include Koonin) have a Christian background.  Yes, there are Christian ignoramuses too, but just because an idiot takes a certain view of a thing doesn't mean the view itself is wrong.

 

Before you listen to another word on climate change, read Koonin's book.  You'll never think about it the same way again.

 

Sources:  Steven E. Koonin's Unsettled:  What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters was published in 2021 by BenBella Books, Dallas, Texas.