The methane hunters

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Okay, Rebecca Lieber, climate writer, Vox.

Tell me a climate story.

So I've talked to this woman named Sharon Wilson who used to live in North Texas in this rural area on a ranch.

And she moved there decades ago, just falling in love with this space, this open flat expanse.

If I couldn't sleep, I could walk outside and look up and see the Milky Way.

And the first time I saw that, I thought that something had exploded in the sky.

We would drive the pickup truck out into the pasture on a dark night.

And, you know, we put a lawn chair in the back of the truck and

the coyotes would serenade.

We would hear the coyotes yipping all around us.

It was just, it was like paradise.

Over time, she saw these other lights that were moving closer and closer to her property.

As these towers of lights moved closer, the stars weren't as visible from the light pollution.

So I was very curious and I drove to where the towers of lights were.

She figured out they were drilling rigs and some were being used for fracking, which is basically mining for natural gas and oil using this high-pressure mix of water and chemicals that you inject underground.

And that got her really worried about the air and water pollution and its effect on her health and her communities.

I could see that they were doing things that I felt like I needed to know about, and it looked like some pretty dirty stuff.

So I got a ladder and I set up a ladder in the bed of my truck and I climbed on top of the ladder and took pictures and videos of what I was seeing.

This led her to becoming an environmental activist and soon she started poking around not just near her ranch but in the Permian Basin which is this big flat expanse located in western Texas and right now it's one of the biggest centers for fracking in the US.

So I would park my truck on the side of the road and just watch them and observe.

We call it creeping, just creeping by these sites and observing.

The first time you see it, it is just absolutely groundbreaking.

Miguel Escoto is another activist who goes around with Sharon Wilson to hunt for pollution.

We saw everything.

We saw a

compressor station catch flames.

There was a huge plume of smoke that looked like a mushroom cloud.

Miguel and Sharon have been doing this for years.

They're basically hunting for clues using this special tool called an infrared camera.

So it's a it's a great big camera and when you look at the facility you see pipes that stick up

you see some tanks and that's all you see.

When you put the camera up to your face then it's a whole different picture.

What they're looking at is methane.

This is an unlit flare.

Methane is this invisible gas that you need a camera to see unless it's on fire.

And it's one of the pollutants Nigel and Sharon are most concerned about because it's really damaging for the climate.

See, they're venting it.

It's venting out of that pipe.

On the camera, you see that there is a plume of

gas.

that's just pumping out consistently through this pipe and it's just chugging along.

It's just venting and venting and venting.

The last few years, more and more people are increasingly worried about methane.

Researchers have realized that in some ways, methane can be even worse for climate change than carbon dioxide.

It is such a powerful actor on our climate and it's coming out everywhere.

I'm Noam Hassenfeld and this week on Unexplainable, we need to talk about methane.

Why it's such a big problem, why researchers think limiting it could make a real dent in climate change in our lifetimes, but also why it's so hard to find.

Okay, Rebecca, before we get into finding all of this missing methane, what exactly is it?

What's methane?

So methane is this colorless, tasteless gas.

It's the gas used in your gas stove, your gas heater, but it's also used to make fuel.

The chemical symbol for methane is CH4.

It's a carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms, and that's probably more than your listeners want to hear.

So I reached out to Riley Duran.

He's a scientist at the University of Arizona.

He also works at NASA and for a project called Carbon Mapper.

Everything you can think of that the Earth does, we monitor it.

He's really into methane, and he told me that it is a pollutant just generally.

It makes air pollution a lot worse, but also it's a powerful greenhouse gas.

Okay, so I know carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, like traps heat in the atmosphere.

How does methane compare?

Well, methane is extremely potent as a climate pollutant.

It is more than 80 times more effective at trapping heat over a short period when you compare it to carbon dioxide.

80 times?

Yeah, exactly, which makes it such a big problem because it's also rising and the number two climate pollutant in the world right after that carbon dioxide.

Why is it so much more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide?

So Riley described it like a curtain.

So if you consider greenhouse gases to be this curtain around the planet trapping heat, some are a lot lighter than others.

So methane is just this really thick blanket that's opaque and trapping that heat and warming the planet.

Yeah, and warming way more than CO2 does.

That seems really bad.

Well, the good news is methane also dissipates a lot faster than carbon dioxide does.

Methane is short-lived.

It only lasts in the atmosphere about 10 years, which is much shorter than CO2, which lasts for hundreds of years.

So one way to think about it is it's compressed into a short period of time.

It packs a really big punch.

So, that means that if we reduce methane emissions now, we can see an effect in our lifetimes, like the next 10 to 20 years, which is a big reason that people are so focused on methane.

Right.

And the other reason is that it just feels more attractable than CO2 right now.

Why is methane more of a fixable problem?

So, CO2 is this inevitable byproduct of everything we do.

It just is produced from burning fossil fuels.

But with methane, we're just letting a lot of gas escape into the atmosphere unnecessarily.

It's basically just leaking.

So where are they?

Where are the leaks?

Well, that's the big problem.

We're still trying to figure it out.

Great.

Yeah, so humanity has a methane checkbook, effectively, that is currently not well balanced.

Basically, we know for sure that methane levels are rising in the atmosphere.

But where things become less certain is when you zoom in to finer and finer scale.

Methane can come from a lot of different sources.

Wetlands naturally vented.

There's agriculture.

Cows, you probably have heard about cow burps and farts.

Okay.

There's your stove and your heat.

There's landfills.

And then there's fuel.

Some countries have more or less wetlands.

And others, the methane emissions is driven more by agriculture or waste management.

So it's really hard for scientists to pin down exactly what percentage of our methane is coming from where.

But what we do know know is that oil and gas production is a huge part of this pie.

And places like the Permian Basin, where Miguel and Sharon do most of their investigations, that's producing a huge amount of methane.

And that methane that's escaping into the atmosphere,

that's something that's under our control.

This is something that we can get a handle on or maybe even stop.

So, how do we do that exactly?

So, a key thing to know is that whenever you frack and whenever you drill for gas, you are inevitably venting a certain amount of methane.

Ideally, we're doing that in smaller quantities, but what's actually happening is we have these major super emitters.

Super emitters.

Yeah.

About four or five years ago, multiple field studies showed that a small fraction of the infrastructure out there is responsible for a disproportionate amount of emissions.

They did a survey in California, for example.

And after surveying almost 300,000 pieces of infrastructure, we found that less than 600 facilities were responsible for at least a third of a state's total methane emissions.

We call those super emitters.

That's the scientific term for it.

Ideally, you find those leaks, you find those super emitters, and then you clean them up.

Okay, great.

So we got marching orders, right?

Let's go clean up the super emitters.

Well, it's not that simple.

When we talk about the regulation of this industry, we have to talk about who has eyes on the sites.

There are activists like Sharon and Miguel doing this kind of work, but their organization has just 30 people and only a few of them go out with these expensive cameras to film these emissions.

Most of their work has to be focused on raising awareness about this issue by posting videos on YouTube and Twitter.

because at the end of the day, their team isn't big enough to gather all the data they need.

And frankly, neither are the teams, the regulators equipped to monitor emissions across hundreds of miles of the Permian.

You have

about 300,000 oil and gas wells.

And

the statistic is that there is about like one regulator, one inspector for every 3,000 oil and gas wells facilities.

But it's just a drop in the bucket.

It would take an army of regulators, of inspectors to keep this

industry just to have eyes on the facilities.

Just to have eyes, we would need to hire an army.

Right now, scientists are working on a whole set of new tools that can act like that army and do the kind of work that activists have been doing on the ground, just at a much bigger scale.

It really is a kitchen sink problem.

You have to throw every technology you can think of at it.

Coming up after the break, step one, find the methane leaks.

Step two, figure out a way to actually get regulators to plug them.

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Before the break, Rebecca, you were talking about how methane traps more heat than carbon dioxide, around 80 times more over the short term.

And even though scientists don't know where all the methane is coming from, they're pretty sure a lot of it can be tracked down to super emitters like frackers.

So, how do scientists actually find the leaks?

There are two major ways.

Okay.

First is sniffing the air.

So imagine that you've got a laboratory in a box that sits in the back of your car, and it's running the air through the little laboratory in a box, which has lasers and all sorts of other contraptions that's analyzing the gas that's moving through the tube.

The other approach is something called remote sensing.

This is an approach that uses a spectrometer, which is basically reflecting sunlight and uses all the visible and invisible colors in that spectrum to figure out what gases are present in the atmosphere on the surface of the Earth.

And how are they using all of these tools exactly?

So it's this whole combination of things.

Riley says you can drive around with the lab in the box or leave at places to get really specific measurements.

But also his organization Carbon Mapper will send up planes over the Permian Basin.

And if you look out the window of the plane with your eyes, you see literally thousands and thousands of oil and gas wells, compressor stations, gathering lines, gas processing plants.

It's almost like looking at a circuit board.

In order to track down all this methane, they have to fly over every single bit of territory.

These surveys will last four to five hours a day, and it literally involves just mowing the lawn pattern where the airplane just flies back and forth.

Which can get kind of boring because most of the people on the plane can't see anything happening.

It's just land beneath them.

It turns out there's one person on board who usually is having more fun and that's the instrument operator because they can see in real time the spectrometer that we have on board the airplane which is looking down through a little window in the belly of the airplane.

What it sees is very different.

It's the same territory but now it has a firework show on it.

And that's the invisible methane that we're talking about.

The instrument is actually seeing the methane plumes and it's high enough resolution that if you were to fly lower in the airplane and look down on the facility, you could actually see where it's coming from on the facility.

You could see, for example, an invisible plume of methane gas coming from a storage tank or a well head.

Ultimately, flying planes can be a pretty effective way of finding these leaks, but we just don't have enough of this kind of work happening to do this constantly.

When we talk about cases where people can fly drones or aircraft or satellites over a facility to look at their methane emissions, those cases are still pretty limited.

I mean, the fact that every time it happens, people go off and write a scientific journal paper about it just indicates how experimental it still is.

But in the next few years, Riley's group wants to send up a fleet of satellites, and that will join a few other satellites that are already up there collecting this data.

This is really important because we need that bigger picture of where methane leaks are coming from, and not just from oil and gas production in the Permian Basin, but all over the world.

And these kinds of measurements can also give us a lot more information about methane leaks from other sources like wetlands.

So whatever technique they end up using, you know, lab in a box, spectrometer stuff on planes or satellites, what do they end up actually doing with all that information?

This is the trickiest question of what to do about it.

It's not as simple as just calling the oil company up and reporting this because we don't have a ton of environmental enforcement here.

The EPA is just now working on a proposal for how to cut back on methane emissions from facilities.

So their regulation is still a really long way from actually

enforcing more of these cuts.

And methane is not just a U.S.

problem, it's a global issue.

Madam President, fellow leaders, I know that all of us here at COP26 want to be on the right side of history.

So, at this last climate conference in Glasgow this fall, more than 100 countries joined this side global agreement that says they're going to cut their methane emissions by 30% by 2030.

Cutting back on methane emissions is one of the most effective things we can do to reduce near-term global warming and keep 1.5 degrees Celsius.

They don't specify energy production, but the implied part is if you're going to tackle methane emissions and you are a big oil and gas producer, you have to start with the energy sector.

It is the lowest hanging fruit.

This was a huge breakthrough just because we had so many world leaders say this is a huge problem and we have to take action but there's still a long way to go to actually fill filling in those blanks of how do you cut back on methane and a lot of big countries like china and russia haven't even signed on

so it seems like there is some action being taken on this front But there's also, you know, all of this unknowns, like where all the methane is.

And it seems like we're still really really far away from where we need to be on this.

Does this seem like a hopeful story to you?

Well, I think it's mixed because Miguel, that Texas activist, he is really skeptical that global leaders actually mean what they say and that plugging the leaks alone is going to solve this.

Even though the rhetoric of oil and gas companies is improving, the situation on the ground in the Permian is not.

Miguel's point is that just plugging leaks is thinking too small, that we need much more radical change that addresses the root of the problem, which is fossil fuel production and our reliance.

This industry is inevitably

and

unavoidably dirty.

But I also think it's a hopeful story because climate change can feel like this really abstract issue, but methane isn't.

It's something that's concrete.

And the work that Miguel and Sharon are doing, combined with the satellite data coming in, gives us what we need to point at the map and say this is where methane pollution is coming from.

So they're making this invisible and abstract contributor to climate change visible and concrete.

This episode was edited by Catherine Wells, Meredith Hodnott, Brian Resnick, and Noam Hasenfeld.

It was produced by me, Bird Pinkerton, with some much appreciated help from Noam, who also wrote the music.

Richard Seema checked our facts.

Christian Ayala did our mixing and sound design.

Tori Dominguez is our audio fellow, and Manding Nguyen makes everything that she touches better.

If you want to read more about methane or if you want to see some of the maps that Riley described to us, Rebecca Lieber has several in-depth pieces on our site and if you have thoughts you can email them to us at unexplainable at vox.com or you could leave us a review or a rating which would be very much appreciated.

Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we're off next week getting our upcoming series on the census ready, but we'll be back in two weeks.

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