This is factually incorrect and has the direction of causality wrong.
Enclosed combustors are _more_ efficient than flares, and can be tested to show that they achieve complete combustion of methane (unlike flares, which do not combust all methane.) Because of this efficiency delta, enclosed combustors were introduced to adhere to new air quality regulations.
I.e. regulators forced companies to install them to improve their emissions; they aren't being installed to hide emissions.
"Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare. It’s better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare or a vapor combustor is not an improvement in reducing emissions", based on vibes from a former regulator from the linked article, is incorrect. E.g. see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679082...
Ground-based laser methane detection is sensitive enough to quantify hidden emissions, no matter how diffuse gas companies make the plume. Here's two companies operating in this space:
That's around flaring, which is a bit different. Energy companies are very likely to buy the same data. Detecting methane leaks is a _good_ thing for them, both from an "avoiding fines" perspective and also from a "this is infrastructure we _want_ to fix" perspective.
Banning routine flaring is a very good thing that needs to happen in more places. You _do_ still need to flare. There are lots of time periods where it will be required for safety reasons. But currently, it's common to simply flare methane that's produced instead of trying to use it. Methane can't be easily transported, and you need a pipeline to a populated area to use it unless you build expensive LNG facilities or slightly less expensive facilities to reinject it back into the subsurface. So remote oil fields are designed to flare off the methane that's produced alongside oil production, often for vast quantities of methane. That's "routine flaring". It's better (both from a safety perspective and a greenhouse gas perspective) than directly releasing it. However, it's far better to reinject it back into the reservoir (or another reservoir) or otherwise find some use for it than to flare it.
Routine flaring is used quite simply because regulators allow it. If you change the regulations, then companies will take the more expensive route or develop other resources. If you don't, then they're more or less legally required (read: shareholders _will_ have grounds to dismiss the CEO) to take the legal and much cheaper route of flaring methane that can't easily be sold. Can you really justify to shareholders that you're going to spend an extra several tens of billions USD to do something that isn't required and that your competitors aren't and that won't increase profits at all? The regulatory environment has to change for that to happen, but it's a patchwork and not some global thing. The EU has been leading there.
But detecting flares (even "hidden" ones) is _much_ easier than detecting methane leaks. Methane leaks are pretty damned insidious and hard to find. That's a big part of why they're so common. Hyperspectral imaging is _really_ damned cool, and while I'm certainly biased, the Tanager satellite they used there is really really neat.
Edit: Apparently that's the airborne equivalent of Tanager, not Tanager. (Same instrument design, but one is on a plane and one just launched into space not-too-long-ago.)
Venting is like an order of magnitude worse than flaring right? So until we've dealt with most of the venting there's not much benefit in going after the flaring operations right? We should encourage flaring as a way to solve venting?
Yes, enclosed flaring is better than venting. However it makes it more difficult for third-party monitoring, the linked article mentions this:
>"If you enclose the flare, people don’t see it, so they don’t complain about it. But it also means it’s not visible from space by most of the methods used to track flare volumes.”
My car runs on methane, but it's very expensive, only 20% cheaper than gas and soon it might be 1:1. Hard to store (200 bar pressure tank) and tanks have a 20 year lifespan.
Wikipedia says the burning of methane produces CO2 and water, seemingly at a 1:1 ratio between the methane and CO2 molecules (chemistry isn't my strong suit, though). CO2 is a lot better than CH4 afaik, so rather than venting it directly, this makes me wonder why we don't burn all waste methane that is currently just being vented like from these ships
Also interesting
> Compared to other hydrocarbon fuels, methane produces less carbon dioxide for each unit of heat released. [...] methane, being the simplest hydrocarbon, produces more heat per mass unit (55.7 kJ/g) than other complex hydrocarbons.
Here (Spain) you can find a bunch of CNG vehicles, although not a lot. GPL is more popular, and there is at least 2x or 3x times GPL stations than CNG stations. I think CNG is more popular for commercial drivers around the city, like taxis, vans, microbuses, and the like.
A friend has a CNG Seat Mii, that's the same as a VW Up!
Here, if you click in "Más información" on any category, you can see a list of vehicles you can buy directly to the brand ready for CNG. The site might be out of date, as the models I see there are 2 to 5 years old.
This article might benefit from a bit more numerical data:
CO₂ Radiative Forcing:
1950: Approximately 0.58 W/m² @ 310 ppm
2020: Approximately 2.13 W/m² @ 414 ppm
CH₄ Radiative Forcing:
1950: Approximately 0.25 W/m² @ 1.15 ppm
2020: Approximately 0.59 W/m² @ 1.86 ppm
Methane in the atmosphere is oxidized to CO2 with about a 6-year halflife, so:
20-year timescale: CH₄ is approximately 84-87 times more efficient than CO₂.
100-year timescale: CH₄ is approximately 28-34 times more efficient than CO₂.
The other thing to keep in mind is the removal rate:
> "Roughly 56% of annual fossil CO₂ emissions are absorbed by natural sinks—29% by the biosphere and 23% by the oceans—while 44% remains in the atmosphere, driving global climate change. For CH₄, 90% is removed by atmospheric oxidation within roughly a decade, with a small fraction absorbed by soils."
The bottom line? If human civilization really wants to stabilize the concentration of CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere - which ideally will lead to a stabilization of global temperature and a new climate normal (certainly warmer and wetter, much like Pliocene conditions of 2-5 mya), then elimination of fossil fuel combustion as an energy source really is the only plausible option.
It's because of the high-altitude IR windows in the absorption spectrum as I understand it. If CO2 is added at 1 km it really has no effect there since CO2 absorption in these windows is mostly saturated already, but as you climb to higher altitudes ~12 km the lower pressures mean those windows clear up - but a relatively small increase in CO2 starts filling in these windows. The best source I've found for explaining this at the non-technical level is:
IPCC originally, filtered through ChatGPT-4o. The ChatGPT-o1 model is getting pretty good, I gave it this prompt and I didn't see any glaring errors in the output:
> "We want to calculate the total amount of energy required to extract 90,000 tons of natural gas from a gas field in North Dakota, move that gas by pipeline to a port on the Southeastern United States, liquify that natural gas to the LNG state, then ship that LNG by tanker ship with 90,000 ton capacity to its destination in a Polish port in Europe, then re-gasify that product so its end users can consume it. There are thus five stages in this process."
The estimate is that shipping & processing costs are about 17% of the total energy transported, which still gives LNG quite an advantage over coal in terms of CO2 emitted per kilowatt-hout generated, although wind/solar/storage is obviously much better on that metric, and LNG's upfront infrastructure costs are quite high.
Meanwhile: https://cleantechnica.com/2024/05/03/fossil-fuel-companies-b...
Looks like another arms race. :-(
This is factually incorrect and has the direction of causality wrong.
Enclosed combustors are _more_ efficient than flares, and can be tested to show that they achieve complete combustion of methane (unlike flares, which do not combust all methane.) Because of this efficiency delta, enclosed combustors were introduced to adhere to new air quality regulations.
I.e. regulators forced companies to install them to improve their emissions; they aren't being installed to hide emissions.
"Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare. It’s better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare or a vapor combustor is not an improvement in reducing emissions", based on vibes from a former regulator from the linked article, is incorrect. E.g. see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679082...
Ground-based laser methane detection is sensitive enough to quantify hidden emissions, no matter how diffuse gas companies make the plume. Here's two companies operating in this space:
Sensirion: https://www.sensirion-connected.com/emissions-monitoring
Longpath Technologies: https://www.longpathtech.com
That's around flaring, which is a bit different. Energy companies are very likely to buy the same data. Detecting methane leaks is a _good_ thing for them, both from an "avoiding fines" perspective and also from a "this is infrastructure we _want_ to fix" perspective.
Banning routine flaring is a very good thing that needs to happen in more places. You _do_ still need to flare. There are lots of time periods where it will be required for safety reasons. But currently, it's common to simply flare methane that's produced instead of trying to use it. Methane can't be easily transported, and you need a pipeline to a populated area to use it unless you build expensive LNG facilities or slightly less expensive facilities to reinject it back into the subsurface. So remote oil fields are designed to flare off the methane that's produced alongside oil production, often for vast quantities of methane. That's "routine flaring". It's better (both from a safety perspective and a greenhouse gas perspective) than directly releasing it. However, it's far better to reinject it back into the reservoir (or another reservoir) or otherwise find some use for it than to flare it.
Routine flaring is used quite simply because regulators allow it. If you change the regulations, then companies will take the more expensive route or develop other resources. If you don't, then they're more or less legally required (read: shareholders _will_ have grounds to dismiss the CEO) to take the legal and much cheaper route of flaring methane that can't easily be sold. Can you really justify to shareholders that you're going to spend an extra several tens of billions USD to do something that isn't required and that your competitors aren't and that won't increase profits at all? The regulatory environment has to change for that to happen, but it's a patchwork and not some global thing. The EU has been leading there.
But detecting flares (even "hidden" ones) is _much_ easier than detecting methane leaks. Methane leaks are pretty damned insidious and hard to find. That's a big part of why they're so common. Hyperspectral imaging is _really_ damned cool, and while I'm certainly biased, the Tanager satellite they used there is really really neat.
Edit: Apparently that's the airborne equivalent of Tanager, not Tanager. (Same instrument design, but one is on a plane and one just launched into space not-too-long-ago.)
Venting is like an order of magnitude worse than flaring right? So until we've dealt with most of the venting there's not much benefit in going after the flaring operations right? We should encourage flaring as a way to solve venting?
Yes, enclosed flaring is better than venting. However it makes it more difficult for third-party monitoring, the linked article mentions this:
>"If you enclose the flare, people don’t see it, so they don’t complain about it. But it also means it’s not visible from space by most of the methods used to track flare volumes.”
My car runs on methane, but it's very expensive, only 20% cheaper than gas and soon it might be 1:1. Hard to store (200 bar pressure tank) and tanks have a 20 year lifespan.
Wikipedia says the burning of methane produces CO2 and water, seemingly at a 1:1 ratio between the methane and CO2 molecules (chemistry isn't my strong suit, though). CO2 is a lot better than CH4 afaik, so rather than venting it directly, this makes me wonder why we don't burn all waste methane that is currently just being vented like from these ships
Also interesting
> Compared to other hydrocarbon fuels, methane produces less carbon dioxide for each unit of heat released. [...] methane, being the simplest hydrocarbon, produces more heat per mass unit (55.7 kJ/g) than other complex hydrocarbons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
That's called flaring it, and it's discussed upthread. Good intuition though.
Curious. Had seen cars running on GPL (yep), but never methane. Who is the maker?
Here (Spain) you can find a bunch of CNG vehicles, although not a lot. GPL is more popular, and there is at least 2x or 3x times GPL stations than CNG stations. I think CNG is more popular for commercial drivers around the city, like taxis, vans, microbuses, and the like.
A friend has a CNG Seat Mii, that's the same as a VW Up!
Here, if you click in "Más información" on any category, you can see a list of vehicles you can buy directly to the brand ready for CNG. The site might be out of date, as the models I see there are 2 to 5 years old.
https://gasnam.es/catalogo-vehiculos-gnc-biognc-gnl-biognl/
I’m curious why you say it is expensive if cheaper than the alternative of gasoline?
This article might benefit from a bit more numerical data:
Methane in the atmosphere is oxidized to CO2 with about a 6-year halflife, so:20-year timescale: CH₄ is approximately 84-87 times more efficient than CO₂.
100-year timescale: CH₄ is approximately 28-34 times more efficient than CO₂.
The other thing to keep in mind is the removal rate:
> "Roughly 56% of annual fossil CO₂ emissions are absorbed by natural sinks—29% by the biosphere and 23% by the oceans—while 44% remains in the atmosphere, driving global climate change. For CH₄, 90% is removed by atmospheric oxidation within roughly a decade, with a small fraction absorbed by soils."
The bottom line? If human civilization really wants to stabilize the concentration of CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere - which ideally will lead to a stabilization of global temperature and a new climate normal (certainly warmer and wetter, much like Pliocene conditions of 2-5 mya), then elimination of fossil fuel combustion as an energy source really is the only plausible option.
> CO₂ Radiative Forcing:
That's an interesting scaling. For a ~30% increase in ppm, it's ~400% in W/m^2
It's because of the high-altitude IR windows in the absorption spectrum as I understand it. If CO2 is added at 1 km it really has no effect there since CO2 absorption in these windows is mostly saturated already, but as you climb to higher altitudes ~12 km the lower pressures mean those windows clear up - but a relatively small increase in CO2 starts filling in these windows. The best source I've found for explaining this at the non-technical level is:
https://history.aip.org/climate/Radmath.htm#L_0165
Great info. What's the source for this data?
IPCC originally, filtered through ChatGPT-4o. The ChatGPT-o1 model is getting pretty good, I gave it this prompt and I didn't see any glaring errors in the output:
> "We want to calculate the total amount of energy required to extract 90,000 tons of natural gas from a gas field in North Dakota, move that gas by pipeline to a port on the Southeastern United States, liquify that natural gas to the LNG state, then ship that LNG by tanker ship with 90,000 ton capacity to its destination in a Polish port in Europe, then re-gasify that product so its end users can consume it. There are thus five stages in this process."
The estimate is that shipping & processing costs are about 17% of the total energy transported, which still gives LNG quite an advantage over coal in terms of CO2 emitted per kilowatt-hout generated, although wind/solar/storage is obviously much better on that metric, and LNG's upfront infrastructure costs are quite high.
Could you ask it to add latest estimate for leaks in methane infrastructure used along the way?
IIRC these estimates were low in IPCC reports vs where they are now.
He who smelt it dealt it.