9 ms·
Fertilizer plants emit 100 times more methane than reported
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Joe-Z 7y agoSo, how does this relate to our predictions about global warming? Anyone here who has insights on that?
- pjc50 7y agoI think this is both good news and bad news. Most of the global warming work is based off the amount of methane estimated to be in the atmosphere, which can be determined with sampling and spectroscopy. This particular piece of research tells us where some of that is coming from, and fortunately it's from a few concentrated sites that are under human control. We could lean on them to fix it. Chemical processing sites already try to control methane leakage because it's explosive in air. The bad news is that we probably won't. We have enough trouble with flaring: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-48051005 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-4... (my pet complaint, not only because it's a nuisance but because they've wasted in a year as much gas as I personally will use in 50,000 years, which makes reducing my personal consumption seem a bit pointless) ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((38747+tonnes+*+50MJ%2Fkg)+in+kwh)+%2F+10000kwh https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((38747+tonnes+*+50MJ%...) )
- Joe-Z 7y agoThank you for taking the time to write up some conclusions! >... makes reducing my personal consumption seem a bit pointless Although I try to not to be wasteful also I get this feeling a lot that in climate change matters the actions that individuals can set are far outweighed by consistently applied systemic changes. Makes it kind of frustrating to try to save the earth :)
- perfunctory 7y agoApart from absolute emission reductions, we shouldn't underestimate the cultural and political impacts of individual actions. Individual actions are also a form of political pressure. Don't get frustrated.
- nashashmi 7y agoRight! And let's all consider this karma. The more you waste the more the world heats up. The more effecient you become the more ideas you have on how to make market decisions towards efficiency.
- ptah 7y agoI can only imagine how badly this increases the environmental impact of meat industry if this fertiliser is used to fertilise soy fed to beef cattle which is hugely inefficient in providing protein to humans
- Nasrudith 7y agoI suspect it could ironically help still - at least if compared to non-fertilized resource useage.
- estsauver 7y agoActual paper here: https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358/ https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358... My conclusions: * A carbon tax would be nice to incentivize accountability around net- greenhouse gas contributions. * This paper does quite a bit of probabilistic inference here. They conclude, for example, that the ~two orders of magnitude difference in emissions implies the model is working. ( https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358/elementa-7-358-g4.png?action=download https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358... ) This isn't super surprising since they're trying to measure methane emissions ~a km away from the source, but should measure our expectations. Also, the whole dataset is available here (https://oneshare.cdlib.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.15146/R3WT2N https://oneshare.cdlib.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.15146/R3WT2N) if anyone is interested. Props to the authors for including it. (Disclosure: My company buys quite a bit of inorganic fertilizer every year. None of it is US sourced though as we're operating in subsaharan Africa.)
- pjc50 7y agoIf we can't have a carbon tax because of the politics, we should at least try for a ban on fracking. Every molecule of gas extracted has to go somewhere, either into the atmosphere directly or as CO2.
- mikemotherwell 7y agoWe shouldn't do anything in any direction without detailed comparisons. https://www.drawdown.org/ https://www.drawdown.org/ has a big list of things that can be done, with the benefits of each in terms of cost and carbon reduction. It would make most sense to work through the list. If you guessed what number 1 is, you're a smarter human than I am! https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-management https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-man...
- perfunctory 7y ago> We shouldn't do anything in any direction without detailed comparisons. I feel differently. We should do everything. All at the same time. We don't have the luxury of time to pick and choose anymore. Good that you brought up the drawdown project. Even the number 1 on their list is "only" like about 5% of total ghg. No single solution will be enough. So we need to try to do as much in as many sectors as possible. Including fracking.
- Robotbeat 7y agoFertilizer is a MUCH better market for clean hydrogen production than cars.
- alex_duf 7y agoYou mean we should use hydrogen to produce fertilizer? Or producing hydrogen as a by product of fertilizer? I'm not too versed in that domain but I'm curious!
- Symmetry 7y agoThe first step making fertilizer is making ammonia. Amonia is made with the Haber-Bosch[1] process by combining nitrogen with hydrogen. The hydrogen from that is made by combining steam and natural gas to make hydrogen and carbon monoxide[2]. The carbon from the natural gas ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere. If there were more green way to produce hydrogen for a reasonable price that would knock out a significant source of global CO2 emissions. If solar power gets cheap enough maybe it'll make sense to use the excess power at noon for electrolysis, though I don't have a good sense of the capital costs for that. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process [2]hhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming
- alex_duf 7y agoThat makes lots of sense! Thanks you I know that at least on Orkney Island they have surplus energy that they use to produce hydrogen http://www.surfnturf.org.uk/ http://www.surfnturf.org.uk/ Though I'm sure we're talking about completely different orders of magnitude
- Robotbeat 7y agoIndeed. Unlike cars which really want mechanical energy or electricity (with hydrogen just being one way to provide that electricity... at lower efficiency than battery-electric), fertilizer production already needs hydrogen, with methane being an indirect way to provide that hydrogen. Instead of trying to compete one-to-one against natural gas for thermal applications or battery-electric for electric ones, you can compete on turf that requires hydrogen fundamentally, saving the investment in a steam reformer. So if you have hydrogen already, instead of needing an extra capital investment (like a fuel cell in a fuel cell car), you actually can reduce capital investment (the steam reformer). Also, it's large and centralized (large, centralized hydrogen plants have a cheaper relative capital cost and tend to be more efficient) and there are even ammonia pipelines carrying the ammonia to the Midwest from Texas (with world-class wind AND solar potential and plenty of land), so you don't have to deal with hydrogen storage and distribution issues. It's a way better spot for wind and solar produced hydrogen to compete than in mobile fuel cell applications where you have to solve a bunch of other problems (fuel cells, distribution, hydrogen storage cost and safety to the uninvolved public, small electrolysis facilities with requisite lower efficiency and higher specific capital cost) while simultaneously having to compete with the low price of electricity and natural gas.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bamboozled 7y agoWow, it took me a while to realize that this article is about fertilizer factories and not about fertilizer (actual) plants. The brain is funny sometimes and so is this title.
- oever 7y agoI had the same confusion. Apparently the english name for natural fertilizer plants is 'green manure'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_manure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_manure
- awakeasleep 7y agoThis is the kind of thing i expect from China, not the USA. I guess in some ways our cultures are not so different after all
- maxxxxx 7y agoi am surprised that you are surprised :)
- brianbreslin 7y agoIts interesting they used the google street view cars to carry the methane sensors. Anyone know what other sensors they might be carrying on street view vehicles? Similarly to how our own phones transmit data back to Waze for traffic info, are there any other things that could be useful for us to attach to our vehicles to record?
- rtkwe 7y agoThere's probably all sorts of interesting things that could be done to weather and air quality monitoring if we had the low level local data points from every car on the road. It'd be way easier to catch smaller or intermittent polluters for example.
- cududa 7y agoThey don’t share the raw data, but there are a number of projects/ third-parties they partner with that share sanitized/ cleaned up data: https://www.google.com/earth/outreach/special-projects/air-quality/ https://www.google.com/earth/outreach/special-projects/air-q... This methane discovery was a result of this project
- rtkwe 7y agoYeah, I was imagining that on an even wider array of cars though, imagine the resolution and constant pollution monitoring we could get if the same sensors were on 1-10% of cars?
- DigitalVerse 7y agoAll the incentives are in all the wrong places. No surprise, self-regulation isn't working. (But still very disappointing.)
- gdubs 7y agoWorth noting that when you see EPA charts that show agriculture’s impact on greenhouse gases, the manufacturing of fertilizer is not included. The application of fertilizer and any evaporation into the atmosphere is what’s counted as “agriculture”. I get why the EPA separates things into categories, but one effect of that is that agriculture’s true impact on climate change is greatly misunderstood. In fact, so much of our society is shaped by how we farm, and how food gets delivered to your plate — it’s why I believe changing our agriculture is fundamental to solving climate change (practically speaking through a price on carbon).
- ectospheno 7y agoFewer people on earth also fixes the problem. No, I am not advocating this. However, we should be prepared for the countries with big armies and few morals who stumble upon this particular solution once the situation becomes more dire.
- gdubs 7y agoThing is, we kicked off climate change a long time ago. Even if we cut our population in half, we’d still cook the planet at our 1970s levels of emissions.
- cwkoss 7y agoWe already know how to grow healthier denser more nutritional food - permaculture techniques allow trading additional labor in lieu of additional capital investment. The fundamental issue is economic: consumers are too satisfied with mediocre produce to demand higher quality. Insufficient demand to justify increased labor investment.