Can We Tame the Methane Monster?
Hello and welcome to FacingFuture.TV. I am your host, Raya Salter. I’m a climate lawyer and activist. How can we tame the methane monster? To discuss this, I’m joined today by Dr. Bob Howarth. He is the David R Atkinson Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell University. Without further ado, welcome Bob! Welcome Dr. Howarth! >>>Thank you,
Raya! It's great to be with you today. >>>If you could help me and help us understand - you know - the threat of methane. >>>Yeah, near as much as they do carbon dioxide and that's fine. Carbon dioxide is the... it's the most important greenhouse gas, but methane's important.
If we look at the warming to date - you know - human activities warmed the planet by a little bit over 1 degree Celsius so far 1.1, almost 1.2 degrees Celsius, enough, that we're seeing major climate disruptions from that warming. Of that warming 0.75 degrees is coming from carbon dioxide and 0.5, which isn't that much less,
is coming from methane. If you're good with math, you'll add those up and it's a little bit more warming than we've observed, that's because sulfur pollution is cooling the Earth a little bit too. Bottom line is, we would be nowhere near as warm as we are today, if it were not for that methane. The most recent science from the Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change they did their first major global update to the synthesis released last summer, and they now very much highlight methane and the need to do more on methane. One of the issues is that - you know - both carbon dioxide and methane are critical greenhouse gases, but they operate on different time scales. The carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere today
will continue to have some influence for centuries to come, perhaps even a thousand years into the future, because it's taken up by the oceans and far since re-released and stays with us. Methane has a half-life in the atmosphere of only about a dozen years or so. Of the methane that we're putting in now most of it will be dissipated completely in the time period of 70 to 80 years, so it's a... while it's in the atmosphere it's 100 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
There's less of it in the atmosphere and it doesn't hang around as long. So, they're both critical greenhouse gases, but they're operating with different intensities and different time scales. >>>How do we account for methane and why does that matter? >>>Well, see, methane's a… it's a colorless, odorless gas, right? You can't see it, you can't smell it, and that means historically it's been difficult to get good measures of the concentration, but also the sources and where it's coming from, and it comes from multiple sources - you know - some of it's coming from natural sources, principally wetlands and freshwater lakes, but most of it now is coming from human activity. But a bunch of different human activities. It's coming from coal mining, it's coming from the oil and gas industry for sure, it's coming from animal agriculture. Cows burp a fair amount of methane, rice agriculture produces methane, wastewater treatment plants produce it, landfills produce it, and we have a bunch of tools we can use. We can look at time trends and we can look at spatial distributions over the planet. We also have some chemical
signals. Methane is a very simple molecule. It's one carbon atom with four hydrogen atoms around it, but they're different isotopes of carbon. The relative amount of those in the atmosphere gives us information as to where the methane is coming from. >>>Why don't we go ahead and turn to how some of this is played out in your work in New York. In New York, we have our landmark 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, some of the nation's most robust goals to reduce greenhouse gas emission. I know that you worked quite closely with the state in determining how that accounting mechanism would - you know - would be used, in particular with regard to methane.
>>>The language which is in the bill passed and I helped write going way back to 2016 or so. The issue is… well, it's twofold. It's the time frame over which you account for methane and it's also the spatial boundaries which we consider, so let me deal with the time frame first.
Historically, greenhouse gas accounting has looked at methane on a time frame of 100 years after it's emitted, so you get a pulse of methane and we look at the cumulative effect for 100 years into the future in comparison to carbon dioxide and that is sort of enshrined in the Kyoto protocol from 1992, but the science behind it was always pretty weak. I and others have been arguing for better part of a decade now that 20 years is a better time frame. It more realistically captures what methane actually does for the time it's in the atmosphere. Most of the climatic warming that's occurred that we're concerned about has happened in the last 30 years - you know - we're not… this didn't just creep up slowly over 200 years. It's a recent phenomenon and we're trying to keep the planet below 1.5 degrees of warming. We're at 1.1, 1.2. We're in a trajectory to hit that target in 10, 12, 15 years from now, so averaging it all out 100 years into the future hugely underplays the importance of methane, so the time frame is important and the CLCPA mandates that the 20-year time frame be used, so that's one aspect. The
other is geography, and traditionally, when one does a greenhouse gas inventory, you look just at the emissions which occur within your boundaries, so within the state of New York in our case and on the face of it that's logical. Why would you be looking elsewhere? But the issue is - you know - in New York we're particularly sensitive to the issue, I think. We banned fracking in the state, right? We don't develop shale gas in this state and there's good reasons for that, but we import a huge amount of shale gas, mostly from Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia. There are large methane emissions associated with that, but most of those methane emissions don't happen in New York. We're the ones using the fuel, but they happen where the gas is produced and processed, where it starts to be transported, so they're happening in Pennsylvania, and the CLCPA says, we in New York will take responsibility in our greenhouse gas accounting for emissions no matter where they occur, if they're associated with our use of energy, and that's a game changer, because - you know - the carbon dioxide emissions from using fracked gas are low compared to coal, so it looks like - you know - people talked about the bridge fuel for a while, [right, right] language has gone away. If you include the methane emissions, the greenhouse gas footprint of shale
gas is worse than that of coal and if we just look at those emissions in New York, you missed that. You have to understand what's going on in Pennsylvania to support our use of, our addiction to, that direct gas so I think that's a huge game changer and very important. It's actually a bigger difference than the time frame in terms of shifting the result. It's important when we look at the overall inventories, because using the traditional approach, where we only looked at emissions within New York and we looked at methane over 100 your time period, methane ended up being about 0.1 percent or so of our total greenhouse gas inventory and the number one
industry would be transportation. When we use this new accounting, and we take full responsibility for methane, methane is now about 30 percent of our greenhouse gas inventory, and the number one source of emissions is the heating of our homes and our commercial buildings. It's our use of natural gas, so it fundamentally changes how you look at it. >>>Is it fair to say that the CLCPA, that New York is relatively unique? >>>You know - no other states are doing this, but I think they will. I know Vermont is considering it, Massachusetts. I expect that other states will come along as they start to see the wisdom of this, and the European Union has been considering some of these changes as well. >>>What are some of the even… the national or global implications of looking at this new accounting? >>>Yeah, well, again - you know - methane is responsible for half a degree of the warming we've had to date.
Most of the warming we've seen to date is over the last 30 years. Again, we're trying to keep the planet at 1.5 degrees below that pre-industrial threshold, so methane alone has driven us a third of the way to that target and the good news, the good and bad news about methane is, it's extremely powerful greenhouse gas, it doesn't stay in the atmosphere that long, so if we can… if we can reduce our emissions, it has a really rapid response - you know - if you were to start to reduce carbon dioxide emissions now, there's a lag in the climate system of about 30 years before you really start to slow warming. You reduce methane emissions now, you slow global warming now, and the best science on that… there's a report that came out last spring, led by Drew Shindell, Professor at Duke University who I think is the world's leading expert in this. He led an effort for the United Nations environmental program, and they estimated that, globally, humans could relatively easily cut methane emissions by about 45 percent in this decade, by the end of this decade, and that… to do so would slow the rate of global warming by about 0.3/0.4 degrees Celsius by the time we came to 2040. So that's a cost-effective approach, paying attention to methane really does matter and in terms of governments that get here - you know - again New York is on the forefront of paying attention to this.
>>>This is fascinating and I’m understanding that it's both - you know - like a fearsome… a fearsome thing to understand - you know - how big this problem is, but that it also presents in a way… if we focus on the sector of some real near-term opportunities, this again makes me think of how are we going to tame this monster, in particular regard to the energy sector? The fossil gas industry has been using this idea that - I think - is very much in the popular understanding that natural gas is cleaner burning and is something that is a tool to help us achieve emissions reductions. What is your view on that? >>>I personally think we should just be moving away from using gas and all other fossil fuels as quickly as possible, and I think that's the most effective way to solve this problem and that's - you know - that's what the CLCPA mandates for New York. >>>That sort of gets me to my next couple of questions in terms of solutions that are being proposed. There's this idea of hydrogen as a solution, green hydrogen
and blue hydrogen. I know, this is something that you've worked on. Could you explain, help us understand what is green hydrogen? What is blue hydrogen? And why does this…? >>>Yeah, no, it's a really interesting topic and to be honest, I had never heard of blue hydrogen until you and I were on the climate action council, and I started hearing people suggest that blue hydrogen might be part of our solution - you know. We should move away from fossil gas and perhaps we should replace it with this blue hydrogen, so I started… oh, after about the summer of 2020 into the fall of 2020, I started - you know - asking expert colleagues what they knew about blue hydrogen and greenhouse gas footprint and looking myself for the literature and - you know - all of my colleagues said they didn't know anything about it, and there and you look at the literature and there really was absolutely no literature, so industry was promoting this blue hydrogen idea as a fuel of the future that was either zero emissions or low emissions, depending on who you're listening to, and we'll get… we'll go… >>>Tell us what is blue hydrogen. >>>Well, blue hydrogen… it's the invention of the public
relations folks of the oil and gas industry. To be blunt, the terminology was first originated by the French gas company Air Liquide in 2015, pretty recently, and it started to make its way into the rest of Europe and into English-speaking countries in about 2017, 2018. There's a group called The Hydrogen Council which has been hugely instrumental in that, and the Hydrogen Council is a lobbying group that was first established in 2017 by British Petroleum, French oil giant ‘Total’ and others, and they promoted this idea of blue hydrogen, so hydrogen, if you look at hydrogen in the world today, 96 percent of it comes from fossil fuels and in Europe and in the United States and Canada, it's coming entirely from natural gas. In China they make hydrogen from coal, but still globally it's 96 percent from fossil fuels, so it's got a… it has a really large greenhouse gas footprint. The invention of the industry… this was this idea of we call that by the way ‘gray hydrogen’ which - you know - who wants to market ‘gray’ hydrogen? If you make it from coal, it's called brown hydrogen, even harder to market. The invention of the industry was to come up with ‘blue hydrogen’, which is to take this gray hydrogen and apply carbon dioxide capture and storage to the carbon dioxide that's emitted when we produce this hydrogen from the methane and so that's why they're saying it's a low emission, zero emission fuel. The idea is producing hydrogen
from natural gas, but you're capturing the carbon dioxide so - you know - that sounds good. In the end there was no peer-reviewed literature supporting that. In fact, it was a low emissions fuel, so I started - you know - taking that on directly as a research challenge, pretty heavily, oh, about a year ago now, actually not that long ago, and there are two issues: one is you can't use natural gas without having some methane escape to the atmosphere and again, it doesn't happen at the facility; it happens where the gas is being produced and processed and transported et cetera. So, when you use this natural gas as your feedstock,
it's also your energy source that you burn to produce that high pressure, and temperature, pressure and temperature to do it, so you have a lot of use of natural gas there. It's a lot of methane emissions associated with it and industry is doing nothing to try to reduce that. Then you come to the carbon capture. Well, I wasn't really an expert in carbon capture, so I brought in my colleague Mark Jacobson who's an engineer at Stanford, who is an expert in it, and he and I co-authored the paper in the end. Bottom line is that there are only two facilities where
people have ever tried to make this blue hydrogen, and from the carbon dioxide that's produced they are… they actually capture in the neighborhood of 85 percent of that, but some of it's still emitted from the actual breakdown of some methane into hydrogen carbon dioxide, but of the gas that's burned to produce all of that heat and pressure they haven't even tried to capture it. So, overall, there's a huge amount of carbon dioxide that's coming out and then you look at the possibilities. Carbon dioxide is hard stuff to capture, so if you look at the power plants where they've tried to do it, the industry norm is if you're capturing 55, 60 percent, you're doing well, and of course it takes more energy to do that, and there's more emissions associated. We went through the accounting and determined that the greenhouse gas footprint of this blue hydrogen is actually worse than if you were to simply burn natural gas or coal. In fact, so it's not a low emissions fuel, it's public relations, it's green washing, quite frankly, it's a way to make it seem like you're cleaning up the problem with fossil gas and you're actually aggravating it. >>>What I’m hearing is clearly a global fossil fuel industry seeking to stay in business by...
it's almost replicating that - you know - the clean coal idea that we knew was great. >>>It's like the clean coal idea. It's like the gas as a bridge fuel idea and - you know - those ideas are all passe, but this is the latest invention. Yeah, we have blue hydrogen and - you know - it's misleading beyond what I’ve even said, because there's an implication that you can put the stuff into the gas distribution systems and use that pipelines, and people can continue to use it into the future. That's just not true. The… you can mix a little bit of hydrogen in with natural gas and the existing pipeline systems, say, we would have here in New York state, but not more than 10, 20, maybe 30 percent, no more than that. It's too corrosive. It would break down the pipes so you simply can't do it. You still mostly have to use fossil gas in the system and also,
as you increase the hydrogen - you know - your gas furnace, your gas stove, your gas water heater, aren't designed to handle that. [right, right]. So, you would need to get a new furnace, a new water heater, a new stove, if you actually went to a high amount of hydrogen and - you know - they are very misleading in how they promote that. They make it seem like these are interchangeable fuels. They're not. >>>What were the… what were the implications? I know that your work on that blue hydrogen issue got a lot of attention and like you said, didn't seem like there was a lot in the literature, and I think that the fossil industry was kind of getting away with promoting this narrative. What were the implications of kind of exposing what was going on there? How is this news… >>>Our paper only came out last August, which is pretty recent, and there's a lot of momentum; that industry has gotten going behind this idea of blue hydrogen, so as it turns, I wasn't aware of this until our paper came out, but I really annoyed a huge number of people, in the United Kingdom in particular, because they were just coming out with their new 10-year energy plan to meet climate goals and all in advance the COP26, right? And it, blue hydrogen, plays a big role in that because it's zero emissions or low emissions they said, and - you know - their report was coming out the same week that our paper was published, that - you know – they… it's like kicking a hornet's nest. They were really mad at me over that. There's also a fair amount of momentum in the European Union
for forces that think that maybe blue hydrogen has a rule and that's still kind of playing out and there's some in the United States - you know - the quote-unquote ‘bipartisan Infrastructure Bill’ that passed in the fall gives pretty big subsidies to blue hydrogen. I hope there really isn't much scientific debate about what we've done - you know - people were annoyed, but other scientists are looking at and go… Well, yeah, and we - you know - there are input assumptions. We make the assumption that three and a half percent of the natural gas that's developed escapes unburned, is methane. That's – well - supported by science, but some people think it can be less, some people more, and in terms of the carbon capture of the gas that you're burning, we assume for our default assumption that 65 percent of the carbon dioxide can be captured. Industry says they might be able to get to 90 percent. They've never demonstrated that, but we
did a sensitivity analysis saying, okay, you can do 90 percent. And okay, you can reduce methane emissions down to one and a half percent and it's still worse than natural gas - you know - so it's our conclusions are quite robust across the range of any reasonable input data you'd want to use. There are a few other papers that are starting to come out now and they'll - you know - they quibble a little bit with some of our details, but they're reaching the same conclusions we are. Okay, that's a very robust conclusion and I hope eventually that will have some influence in the policy world but - you know - you're up against very powerful, very powerful lobbying forces. >>>What's the difference between blue hydrogen and green hydrogen? >>>Okay, well, blue hydrogen again… it's just... it's this misleading marketing thought that you can take fossil fuels and somehow
not have methane emissions associated with it and somehow actively capture all that carbon dioxide and you can't, so it's just… it's misleading. It shouldn't be used. It shouldn't be explored. We really are better off just using the fossil gas directly, we really are. Just that's the context. Green hydrogen, again, is the hydrogen that's made from using a 100 percent renewable electricity. Electricity is coming from wind, hydro, solar, and then you're electrolyzing water and turning into hydrogen and oxygen and the - you know - the greenhouse gas consequences of that are quite low, because it's renewable energy. The whole process of making the hydrogens inefficient,
so even it's green, truly green, the energy source is 100 percent renewable, but it's still not particularly efficient, so it's not necessarily a good use. So, let's think of where it might be good and where it might be bad. I’ll start with where it's bad. Some are suggesting that we use green hydrogen to heat our homes and commercial buildings. Well, that's just really a bad idea, because you're taking the renewable electricity you're converting into hydrogen, there's a loss of energy associated with that. Then you have to… hydrogen's hard to transport and store; it is corrosive. If you need really fancy high quality stainless steel to handle it. You can't compress it very easily, that takes a lot of energy. So,
it's not particularly conducive to moving it around. You can't use our existing gas pipeline system. It's not built for that. So, you can't really get to people's houses, but let's say, you could take care of that all and you could, and you could burn it in something like our current gas furnaces. Those still are pretty inefficient and so you end up… you… if you were to do that
and you solved the transportation problem, at best you'd get about 0.4 units of heat energy for the one unit of electricity that you put into the system to make the hydrogen in the first place. You're losing 60 percent of the energy. So let me contrast that with using a ground source heat pump, high efficiency, where we're putting in electricity. It's extracting heat from the
groundwater around the building and so it actually has an efficiency higher than 100 percent. People can't possibly be more than that, but it's because you're extracting energy from the environment. So, for that one unit of electricity, you put into the heat pump, you're getting out four, maybe four and a half units of heat energy, so for the same amount of electricity you're getting 10 times more heat in your home, if you go with a heat pump than if you somehow miraculously use hydrogen.
It's just a really bad idea to even go down that whole track so that's… let's put that behind us. One use for hydrogen, green hydrogen, might be to store electricity so - you know – we… the wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine. We need to store electricity. When we're producing surplus electricity, why not use it to store hydrogen and then you can feed the hydrogen back into the electric grid. And if you do it through a fuel cell instead of burning it, then the emissions are fairly low. So, it's… that's fine. I think there's nothing wrong
with that at all, but we should be very careful to determine that that's the best and most cost effective way to store the electricity. And there are other things we could do. You can use flywheels to store the energy, to momentum you can compress or liquefy air and then feed it back to a turbine and regenerate it. You can pump water and store it and run it back, so hydrogen is one way we can store renewable electricity and it might be the best, but that really hasn't been demonstrated. I think we should all have a real open mind and go into that. Other uses of hydrogen that people talk about are in terms of what we call really hard to decarbonize things, so ship transport or - you know - jet airplanes. And hydrogen may have a role there, but again, I think there's a lot of… there's excessive hype, let me phrase it that way: I’ve been paying close attention since our paper came out last summer and watching all the responses. Hydrogen is essential to do everything, people say. Well, that really hasn't been demonstrated. There's a lot more hype than fact behind it, so let's take
aviation. You can't take hydrogen, and I mean, you can actually take a jet engine and run it on hydrogen instead of jet fuel, that's possible. What you can't do is run a jet airplane on it, because you can't store enough hydrogen on the airplane to make any difference, certainly not in the wings, where the jet fuel is, because you need to liquefy in order to get enough on board. You'd have to displace all of the passengers in the plane with our current aircraft,
so you're talking about designing a totally different type of aircraft, if you're going to do that. And then people say, well, you could instead of burning in the jet engine, you could turn into electricity using fuel cells, and then run electric props or something, and that's true, but it's… you're probably better off using batteries if you're gonna go the electric route, and there are in fact electric planes now, and they're improving, they're running longer distances, so maybe hydrogen will catch up, but I don't think that's a proven fact, so I and… green hydrogen is going to be... until we have a surplus of renewable electricity, which is decades into the future. Right now, we need every drop we have to displace fossil fuels. We need to
be really careful how we use that green energy, and we want to make sure that we do so in the most efficient and cost-effective way, and it's not clear to me that hydrogen is going to be that in most cases. >>>It sounds like there are some areas that don't make any sense at all and there are some areas that could potentially have promise and there's sort of more of learning and research and cost effectiveness and - you know - how beneficial it'll be that we need to take really hard looks at. >>>Yeah, I think that's exactly right, and I - you know - I don't want to be overly negative. I do… I have friends who work on hydrogen research, and they say: Oh, you're being way too negative; look at this, this might be a good use. It might be, but let's be careful. >>>What is 'renewable
natural gas'? >>>Well, renewable natural gas is methane, but it's coming not from fossil sources, but rather from biological sources, and I actually support the responsible use of it, but we've done the calculations for the state of New York and if you take the wastewater treatment plants and the landfills and we also take all of the cow manure and make methane out of that, the total amount of methane that you might produce statewide is in the neighborhood of one and a half, two percent of the amount of fossil gas that we currently use. It's a small resource. It doesn't mean we shouldn't use it, but we should be careful not to pretend that it's going to replace our use of fossil gas now, and I think… industry… I don't know if it's deliberate or not, but they confuse people on that; they make it seem like they can continue to use their pipeline infrastructure again with this renewable natural gas. You can't. It's just not a large enough resource. I think - you know - the CLCPA is a great law and if we follow through and meet the goals of that law, it's going to just be incredible for our state and we can set an example for the world, but - you know - we need to be clear-eyed and hard-nosed about reaching those targets, and we shouldn't be misled by what you call ‘fault solutions’ and I agree they can easily be false solutions and waste time and energy. >>>So, that brings me to the question, what should we be doing right now if we wanted to cut these emissions and get where we need to be as fast as possible? >>>Beneficial electrification of heating, beneficial electrification of transportation, together with these very cost-effective renewables, the future is in electricity, the real challenges are educational and counteracting misinformation and thinking creatively about funding mechanisms, but also creatively about the transitional challenges. >>>So, I hear it. We've got the tools to do it. We
need to be thoughtful about how we do it, and we need to… we need to move away from fossil gas. >>>Absolutely, and if New York can make it work then - you know - we'll be just… be an incredible educational experience for the rest of the world to watch us. Right? So... >>>I agree. Well, thank you so much Dr. Howarth, and thank you, thank you so much for joining us at FacingFuture.TV, as we discuss how we can tame the methane monster. Thank you! you
2022-02-06 16:16
