14 ms·

Fracking boom tied to methane spike in Earth’s atmosphere

344 points by erentz 7y ago

29athrowaway 7y ago
What about reservoirs, dams and arctic permafrost? Vegetation and other organic matter in flooded areas decomposes and releases methane, large amounts of it. Arctic permafrost contains a large amounts of methane as well, like the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.
- tito 7y ago
  From the article: "Methane released from shale gas production has a slightly different chemical fingerprint compared to methane from cow burps (not farts as commonly believed) and wetlands."
- tasty_freeze 7y ago
  The article addresses that. Recent (biologically) produced methane has a different carbon isotope ratio than the ancient gas released from shale deposits.
  - tito 7y ago
    Asking about the difference between permafrost methane and shale gas produced methane is interesting tho. Reading the article now, lmk if you find a good answer.
  - 29athrowaway 7y ago
    Methane in arctic permafrost doesn't fall into the "recent" category. It has been there for many geological eras.
    - tito 7y ago
      Agreed! I wrote the author of the paper to get his input. If you want a copy of his response when I get it, shoot me an email tito@impossiblelabs.io (tho you may be attempting anonymity here...I can post his response to this thread in a few days if of interest.
    - tasty_freeze 7y ago
      It is a fair point, but I suspect the methane from shale is way way older than the permafrost methane. My understanding is that the carbon isotope half life is ~5000 years, so after 50,000 years it is 0.1% of its starting level and becomes useless for determining age. According to this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permafrost#Base_depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permafrost#Base_depth the first 460m of permafrost depth have formed over the past 35,000 years. The permafrost that is thawing now and releasing CO2 has been formed during that period. There is deeper permafrost which may be much older, but that isn't thawing now and releasing CO2.
ars 7y ago
Fracking also significantly reduced coal and oil usage in the US (and probably elsewhere). This had dramatic effects on air quality, and some good effects on CO2 emission. The article also mentions that most methane leaks are from a small number of operations. So my takeaway is that rather than discourage fracking, encourage it, and also require those operations to fix their equipment. Then you get the best of both worlds. (And before you say: No burning any fuels at all, only renawables, remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good. It's still valuable to make things better even if you can't make them perfect.)
- alexrtan 7y ago
  Also in an ideal scenario where countries move aggressively to renewables we need energy sources to put that infrastructure into place and as you say natural gas is a key part of keeping emissions low. That's why it's not good that candidates are arguing for straight out bans.
anon1m0us 7y ago
> Fracking and the deep-well injection of its waste waters have been widely linked to earthquakes. Yep. Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California. https://www.npr.org/2015/04/26/402413137/oklahoma-now-has-more-earthquakes-than-california https://www.npr.org/2015/04/26/402413137/oklahoma-now-has-mo... Why do we still allow fracking?
- sambull 7y ago
  A religion bent on dominionism by the party in power, and the idea that the earth was here to be exploited by humans. Just my peronsal opinion. Relevant passage: "And God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth."
  - gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
    That's straining credulity, especially considering the waning influence of religion in modern societies.
    - chachachoney 7y ago
      >> That's straining credulity, especially considering the waning influence of religion in modern societies. Not in the least. Dominionist and dispensationalist theology has had a huge influence on modern American evangelicals who in turn have a very significant influence on American politics.
      - gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
        I still disagree, but even if I did agree that religion has heavy influence, it's hard to say this is only a product of the right. Modern American government is largely a product of the victories of the Progessives (early 20th c.), which as a movement had heavy evangelical influence (read up on the social gospel). The idea that religion is somehow exclusive to the right is an oversimplification and ignores somewhat recent history. Of course evangelicals did a 180, but even so it's hard to see our relation to the environment as being mostly defined and controlled by the religious right.
warrenmiller 7y ago
They've stopped fracking in one of the UK sites now https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cuadrilla-packs-up-in-preston-and-uk-fracking-bites-dust-82gl7tt9k https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cuadrilla-packs-up-in-pre...
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Awesome. That's the only UK site isn't it? I didn't think go-ahead had actually gone through for any of the others. Mainly because even Tory party members seemed to be firmly against it.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tito 7y ago
Here's the publication referenced in the article: https://www.biogeosciences.net/16/3033/2019/bg-16-3033-2019.pdf https://www.biogeosciences.net/16/3033/2019/bg-16-3033-2019.... Ideas and perspectives: is shale gas a major driver of recent increase in global atmospheric methane? Robert Howarth, Ph.D
Erudite_Genius 7y ago
Methane auto-catalyzes in an oxygen-rich atmosphere such as ours. Methane, at its absolute peak concentration (due to fracking) is only 1.8 ppmv compared to carbon dioxide at 410 and water vapor at 90,000 (at 60% humidity). There IS NO climate crisis.
tito 7y ago
Emissions monitoring is a really interesting technology challenge. So much of it is self-reported, which means a crapshoot. Remote monitoring seems more reliable but less accurate perhaps. The highest resolution monitoring tech I know of is NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory2. Has anyone here studied the Orbiting Carbon Observatory? I'm curious for more details and how it might help here. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco2/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco2/index.html
- tito 7y ago
  In a similar vein, Planet Labs' satellites can count Earth's trees every day. Monitoring methane and carbon dioxide is a different beast, but still, remote monitoring FTW. https://www.planet.com/pulse/developing-the-worlds-first-indicator-of-forest-carbon-stocks-emissions/ https://www.planet.com/pulse/developing-the-worlds-first-ind...
- adammunich 7y ago
  I've been working on a project lately to explore geenhouse gas cameras. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-build-a-co2-video-camera https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-build-a-co2-video-camera I have hope that the thermopile array tech we've been seeing lately might make gas monitoring more readily available. It likely will still require cryo-cooling though.
  - Nouser76 7y ago
    Really interesting idea! I'm not very knowledgeable around greenhouse gases, and even less around the various industrial processes that release them. Would cameras like this be able to give us the amount of CO2 released in say, metric tons? Or would it be too hard to actually get precise measurements and this is better for comparing orders of magnitude?
  - rosege 7y ago
    Have you seen this new satellite that will be going up https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49799760 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49799760
- 7y ago
colordrops 7y ago
Culver City in L.A. has one of the largest, if not largest, urban fracking operations in the US. We were getting earthquakes with the epicenter right at the operation, and immediately all the local forums, such as Nextdoor, had long posts insulting and labeling anyone insinuating that the earthquakes were caused by fracking. It was very fishy.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  The best thing about conspiracy theories is that they’re good instruction manuals for readers whether the first one can ever be proved or not. Life imitates art.
yyyk 7y ago
From the article: "Ingraffea’s own research has found that a small percentage of wells are responsible for the bulk of methane emissions either through leaks or deliberate venting." Sounds like something that can be solved quickly, and without even bothering to debate fracking - hardly anyone could oppose regulating the wells involved.
- ojbyrne 7y ago
  The US government just finished loosening regulations around methane: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-administration-just-loosened-methane-003207368.html https://news.yahoo.com/trump-administration-just-loosened-me...
  - r00fus 7y ago
    Completely irresponsible on the part of this administration. Especially since most of the big industry players complained about said loosening of rules which don’t benefit them. Cui Bono?
    - Ericson2314 7y ago
      Industry unleashed a right wing anti-environmentalism beyond their control or benefit. The actions take place because of the ideology.
  - coolgeek 7y ago
    It's not "The US government". It's not the scientists in the regulatory agencies. It's the Trump Administration. It's right there in the URL, the title, and the article body. Shifting the blame - even unintentionally - from the politicians to the regulatory agencies helps further the narrative that government doesn't work, and (the ultimate, freely-acknowledged goal) that it should therefore be made small enough that it can be choked in the bathtub.
- DennisP 7y ago
  You'd think, but Trump opposes it: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082019/methane-regulation-oil-gas-storage-pipelines-epa-rollback-trump-wheeler https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082019/methane-regulati...
etxm 7y ago
Something I’m very curious about... Given* that our actions are causing climate change, what is the logic of oil companies continuing to do damage? 1. execs truly dont believe their Corp’s actions impact climate 2. theyre making piles of cash, they can buy theirselves and their descendants out of future problems The first seems naive, the second seems pretty bleak. What other logic is there for this behavior? * let’s assume it is for the question above
- im_down_w_otp 7y ago
  3. Humans are notoriously terrible at internalizing future risk for consideration in context of the liability of their current actions. i.e. "I never thought it would happen to me."
  - etxm 7y ago
    Doesn’t that acknowledge that they know it’ll happen eventually, even if it’s a few generations from now? Your username is fantastic by the way.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    This, but also: 4. Entire world is so addicted to oil that just shutting it off at this point is out of the question. We can blame oil companies and governments for not getting serious about transitioning away from oil, and yes, plenty of this is about money, but the reason such ridiculous amounts of money are involved is precisely because interruptions in supply are an existential threat to every country on the planet.
- javagram 7y ago
  Natural gas is currently replacing Coal, which is a far worse energy source both from a greenhouse gas perspective and from a health perspective (coal plant exhaust is radioactive, toxic, and is estimated to kill millions) So oil execs could perfectly well be complete believers in science and global warming and still think they are doing a good thing. It’s probably because they want to make money though and companies will do anything to make $$ as long as it’s legal enough.
viburnum 7y ago
Even now Obama is still bragging about making America “energy independent.”
sword_smith 7y ago
How is methane removed from the atmosphere and does a methane sink play a role in biology like CO2 does through photosynthesis?
- arrosenberg 7y ago
  It decomposes to CO2 and water vapor over about 10 years. The more methane we pump out, the longer decomp takes because there are fewer atmospheric hydroxyl radicals to drive the reaction. The methane cycle I'm familiar with is related to things dying and getting buried underground or in the ocean. I don't think there is any comparable process to how photosynthesis consumes CO2. There are methanogen bacteria who consume it, but that's probably not a globally scalable solution. I think it would be cheaper just to capture and store it.
  - sword_smith 7y ago
    This is really fascinating, thanks for the clarification. I know that data for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere go back at least 541m years, i.e. the whole Phanerozoic. Does a similar dataset exist for methane?
    - sword_smith 7y ago
      The biggest spike in the Phanerozoic was at the Permian extinction event 251m years ago and was caused by huge volcanic eruptions in Siberia that burned off coal deposits created in the Carboniferous era. See Figure 7 in this publication. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2007GB002985 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
  - sitkack 7y ago
    Interesting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092575351100186X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092575351... I wonder what the feasibility is in seeding the troposphere with hydroxyl radicals to accelerate the breakdown of methane?
magwas 7y ago
"While not a smoking gun," Not? Really? What else should be needed to stop that fucking faking fracking?
_edo 7y ago
> Fracking involves drilling an oil or gas well vertically and then horizontally into a shale formation. No, that's a horizontal well. Vertical wells get fracked all the time. Non-shale wells get fracked all the time. Fracking is any time you intentionally fracture rock formations with pressurized fluids. > ...studies that show fracking operations leak, vent, or flare between 2 and 6 percent of the gas produced, Howarth said. That's not fracking. That's leaking, venting and flaring. Those things may happen on wells that have been fracked but that doesn't mean they're caused by fracking. If you're opposed to methane entering the atmosphere trying to stop the breaking of rocks a mile beneath the earth's surface is a bizarre way to solve that problem. At that point you're not trying to stop leaking, you're trying to stop production and for some reason are trying to do it under the guise of stopping fracking.
- ip26 7y ago
  Stopping fracking would definitely stop leaks in the process. If the frackers are totally unwilling to tolerate & abide by regulation, then people will feel like "it can't be fixed, just shut it all down".
  - _edo 7y ago
    Stop leaks in what process? Fracking or oil and natural gas production? Do you have some evidence that more methane is being released into the atmosphere during the weeks of fracking than during the years of production?
- x220 7y ago
  Perhaps they made a mistake and just used "fracking" to refer to this whole category of extraction techniques? If they did, does it make much of a difference? These techniques have got to end because they're not sustainable practices.
  - _edo 7y ago
    It absolutely makes a difference. There's no way to properly regulate an industry without understanding it. But like I said above, people don't care about fracking because they don't even understand what it is. It's just a buzzword people use when what they really want is to stop the entire industry. Or maybe they hate how our society runs. Or they hate rich people. They're angry about something but it's almost never the practice of using water pressure to break rocks thousands of feet beneath the earth's surface.
emmelaich 7y ago
Methane is not directly related to fracking or not, it's related to any oil/gas operations. > Methane emissions occur in all sectors of the natural gas industry, from production, through processing and transmission, to distribution. They primarily result from normal operations, routine maintenance, fugitive leaks, and system upsets. https://www.epa.gov/natural-gas-star-program/primary-sources-methane-emissions https://www.epa.gov/natural-gas-star-program/primary-sources...

344 points by erentz 7y ago

What about reservoirs, dams and arctic permafrost? Vegetation and other organic matter in flooded areas decomposes and releases methane, large amounts of it. Arctic permafrost contains a large amounts of methane as well, like the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.

tito 7y ago
From the article: "Methane released from shale gas production has a slightly different chemical fingerprint compared to methane from cow burps (not farts as commonly believed) and wetlands."
tasty_freeze 7y ago
The article addresses that. Recent (biologically) produced methane has a different carbon isotope ratio than the ancient gas released from shale deposits.
- tito 7y ago
  Asking about the difference between permafrost methane and shale gas produced methane is interesting tho. Reading the article now, lmk if you find a good answer.
- 29athrowaway 7y ago
  Methane in arctic permafrost doesn't fall into the "recent" category. It has been there for many geological eras.
  - tito 7y ago
    Agreed! I wrote the author of the paper to get his input. If you want a copy of his response when I get it, shoot me an email tito@impossiblelabs.io (tho you may be attempting anonymity here...I can post his response to this thread in a few days if of interest.
  - tasty_freeze 7y ago
    It is a fair point, but I suspect the methane from shale is way way older than the permafrost methane. My understanding is that the carbon isotope half life is ~5000 years, so after 50,000 years it is 0.1% of its starting level and becomes useless for determining age. According to this table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permafrost#Base_depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permafrost#Base_depth the first 460m of permafrost depth have formed over the past 35,000 years. The permafrost that is thawing now and releasing CO2 has been formed during that period. There is deeper permafrost which may be much older, but that isn't thawing now and releasing CO2.

ars 7y ago

Fracking also significantly reduced coal and oil usage in the US (and probably elsewhere). This had dramatic effects on air quality, and some good effects on CO2 emission. The article also mentions that most methane leaks are from a small number of operations. So my takeaway is that rather than discourage fracking, encourage it, and also require those operations to fix their equipment. Then you get the best of both worlds. (And before you say: No burning any fuels at all, only renawables, remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good. It's still valuable to make things better even if you can't make them perfect.)

alexrtan 7y ago
Also in an ideal scenario where countries move aggressively to renewables we need energy sources to put that infrastructure into place and as you say natural gas is a key part of keeping emissions low. That's why it's not good that candidates are arguing for straight out bans.

anon1m0us 7y ago

> Fracking and the deep-well injection of its waste waters have been widely linked to earthquakes. Yep. Oklahoma now has more earthquakes than California. https://www.npr.org/2015/04/26/402413137/oklahoma-now-has-more-earthquakes-than-california https://www.npr.org/2015/04/26/402413137/oklahoma-now-has-mo... Why do we still allow fracking?

sambull 7y ago
A religion bent on dominionism by the party in power, and the idea that the earth was here to be exploited by humans. Just my peronsal opinion. Relevant passage: "And God blessed them [Adam and Eve], and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth."
- gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
  That's straining credulity, especially considering the waning influence of religion in modern societies.
  - chachachoney 7y ago
    >> That's straining credulity, especially considering the waning influence of religion in modern societies. Not in the least. Dominionist and dispensationalist theology has had a huge influence on modern American evangelicals who in turn have a very significant influence on American politics.
    - gnusty_gnurc 7y ago
      I still disagree, but even if I did agree that religion has heavy influence, it's hard to say this is only a product of the right. Modern American government is largely a product of the victories of the Progessives (early 20th c.), which as a movement had heavy evangelical influence (read up on the social gospel). The idea that religion is somehow exclusive to the right is an oversimplification and ignores somewhat recent history. Of course evangelicals did a 180, but even so it's hard to see our relation to the environment as being mostly defined and controlled by the religious right.

warrenmiller 7y ago

They've stopped fracking in one of the UK sites now https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cuadrilla-packs-up-in-preston-and-uk-fracking-bites-dust-82gl7tt9k https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cuadrilla-packs-up-in-pre...

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Awesome. That's the only UK site isn't it? I didn't think go-ahead had actually gone through for any of the others. Mainly because even Tory party members seemed to be firmly against it.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tito 7y ago

Here's the publication referenced in the article: https://www.biogeosciences.net/16/3033/2019/bg-16-3033-2019.pdf https://www.biogeosciences.net/16/3033/2019/bg-16-3033-2019.... Ideas and perspectives: is shale gas a major driver of recent increase in global atmospheric methane? Robert Howarth, Ph.D

Erudite_Genius 7y ago

Methane auto-catalyzes in an oxygen-rich atmosphere such as ours. Methane, at its absolute peak concentration (due to fracking) is only 1.8 ppmv compared to carbon dioxide at 410 and water vapor at 90,000 (at 60% humidity). There IS NO climate crisis.

tito 7y ago

Emissions monitoring is a really interesting technology challenge. So much of it is self-reported, which means a crapshoot. Remote monitoring seems more reliable but less accurate perhaps. The highest resolution monitoring tech I know of is NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory2. Has anyone here studied the Orbiting Carbon Observatory? I'm curious for more details and how it might help here. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco2/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/oco2/index.html

tito 7y ago
In a similar vein, Planet Labs' satellites can count Earth's trees every day. Monitoring methane and carbon dioxide is a different beast, but still, remote monitoring FTW. https://www.planet.com/pulse/developing-the-worlds-first-indicator-of-forest-carbon-stocks-emissions/ https://www.planet.com/pulse/developing-the-worlds-first-ind...
adammunich 7y ago
I've been working on a project lately to explore geenhouse gas cameras. https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-build-a-co2-video-camera https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-build-a-co2-video-camera I have hope that the thermopile array tech we've been seeing lately might make gas monitoring more readily available. It likely will still require cryo-cooling though.
- Nouser76 7y ago
  Really interesting idea! I'm not very knowledgeable around greenhouse gases, and even less around the various industrial processes that release them. Would cameras like this be able to give us the amount of CO2 released in say, metric tons? Or would it be too hard to actually get precise measurements and this is better for comparing orders of magnitude?
- rosege 7y ago
  Have you seen this new satellite that will be going up https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49799760 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49799760
7y ago

colordrops 7y ago

Culver City in L.A. has one of the largest, if not largest, urban fracking operations in the US. We were getting earthquakes with the epicenter right at the operation, and immediately all the local forums, such as Nextdoor, had long posts insulting and labeling anyone insinuating that the earthquakes were caused by fracking. It was very fishy.

rolltiide 7y ago
The best thing about conspiracy theories is that they’re good instruction manuals for readers whether the first one can ever be proved or not. Life imitates art.

yyyk 7y ago

From the article: "Ingraffea’s own research has found that a small percentage of wells are responsible for the bulk of methane emissions either through leaks or deliberate venting." Sounds like something that can be solved quickly, and without even bothering to debate fracking - hardly anyone could oppose regulating the wells involved.

ojbyrne 7y ago
The US government just finished loosening regulations around methane: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-administration-just-loosened-methane-003207368.html https://news.yahoo.com/trump-administration-just-loosened-me...
- r00fus 7y ago
  Completely irresponsible on the part of this administration. Especially since most of the big industry players complained about said loosening of rules which don’t benefit them. Cui Bono?
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    Industry unleashed a right wing anti-environmentalism beyond their control or benefit. The actions take place because of the ideology.
- coolgeek 7y ago
  It's not "The US government". It's not the scientists in the regulatory agencies. It's the Trump Administration. It's right there in the URL, the title, and the article body. Shifting the blame - even unintentionally - from the politicians to the regulatory agencies helps further the narrative that government doesn't work, and (the ultimate, freely-acknowledged goal) that it should therefore be made small enough that it can be choked in the bathtub.
DennisP 7y ago
You'd think, but Trump opposes it: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082019/methane-regulation-oil-gas-storage-pipelines-epa-rollback-trump-wheeler https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29082019/methane-regulati...

etxm 7y ago

Something I’m very curious about... Given* that our actions are causing climate change, what is the logic of oil companies continuing to do damage? 1. execs truly dont believe their Corp’s actions impact climate 2. theyre making piles of cash, they can buy theirselves and their descendants out of future problems The first seems naive, the second seems pretty bleak. What other logic is there for this behavior? * let’s assume it is for the question above

im_down_w_otp 7y ago
3. Humans are notoriously terrible at internalizing future risk for consideration in context of the liability of their current actions. i.e. "I never thought it would happen to me."
- etxm 7y ago
  Doesn’t that acknowledge that they know it’ll happen eventually, even if it’s a few generations from now? Your username is fantastic by the way.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  This, but also: 4. Entire world is so addicted to oil that just shutting it off at this point is out of the question. We can blame oil companies and governments for not getting serious about transitioning away from oil, and yes, plenty of this is about money, but the reason such ridiculous amounts of money are involved is precisely because interruptions in supply are an existential threat to every country on the planet.
javagram 7y ago
Natural gas is currently replacing Coal, which is a far worse energy source both from a greenhouse gas perspective and from a health perspective (coal plant exhaust is radioactive, toxic, and is estimated to kill millions) So oil execs could perfectly well be complete believers in science and global warming and still think they are doing a good thing. It’s probably because they want to make money though and companies will do anything to make $$ as long as it’s legal enough.

viburnum 7y ago

Even now Obama is still bragging about making America “energy independent.”

sword_smith 7y ago

How is methane removed from the atmosphere and does a methane sink play a role in biology like CO2 does through photosynthesis?

arrosenberg 7y ago
It decomposes to CO2 and water vapor over about 10 years. The more methane we pump out, the longer decomp takes because there are fewer atmospheric hydroxyl radicals to drive the reaction. The methane cycle I'm familiar with is related to things dying and getting buried underground or in the ocean. I don't think there is any comparable process to how photosynthesis consumes CO2. There are methanogen bacteria who consume it, but that's probably not a globally scalable solution. I think it would be cheaper just to capture and store it.
- sword_smith 7y ago
  This is really fascinating, thanks for the clarification. I know that data for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere go back at least 541m years, i.e. the whole Phanerozoic. Does a similar dataset exist for methane?
  - sword_smith 7y ago
    The biggest spike in the Phanerozoic was at the Permian extinction event 251m years ago and was caused by huge volcanic eruptions in Siberia that burned off coal deposits created in the Carboniferous era. See Figure 7 in this publication. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2007GB002985 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
- sitkack 7y ago
  Interesting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxyl_radical https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092575351100186X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092575351... I wonder what the feasibility is in seeding the troposphere with hydroxyl radicals to accelerate the breakdown of methane?

magwas 7y ago

"While not a smoking gun," Not? Really? What else should be needed to stop that fucking faking fracking?

_edo 7y ago

> Fracking involves drilling an oil or gas well vertically and then horizontally into a shale formation. No, that's a horizontal well. Vertical wells get fracked all the time. Non-shale wells get fracked all the time. Fracking is any time you intentionally fracture rock formations with pressurized fluids. > ...studies that show fracking operations leak, vent, or flare between 2 and 6 percent of the gas produced, Howarth said. That's not fracking. That's leaking, venting and flaring. Those things may happen on wells that have been fracked but that doesn't mean they're caused by fracking. If you're opposed to methane entering the atmosphere trying to stop the breaking of rocks a mile beneath the earth's surface is a bizarre way to solve that problem. At that point you're not trying to stop leaking, you're trying to stop production and for some reason are trying to do it under the guise of stopping fracking.

ip26 7y ago
Stopping fracking would definitely stop leaks in the process. If the frackers are totally unwilling to tolerate & abide by regulation, then people will feel like "it can't be fixed, just shut it all down".
- _edo 7y ago
  Stop leaks in what process? Fracking or oil and natural gas production? Do you have some evidence that more methane is being released into the atmosphere during the weeks of fracking than during the years of production?
x220 7y ago
Perhaps they made a mistake and just used "fracking" to refer to this whole category of extraction techniques? If they did, does it make much of a difference? These techniques have got to end because they're not sustainable practices.
- _edo 7y ago
  It absolutely makes a difference. There's no way to properly regulate an industry without understanding it. But like I said above, people don't care about fracking because they don't even understand what it is. It's just a buzzword people use when what they really want is to stop the entire industry. Or maybe they hate how our society runs. Or they hate rich people. They're angry about something but it's almost never the practice of using water pressure to break rocks thousands of feet beneath the earth's surface.

emmelaich 7y ago

Methane is not directly related to fracking or not, it's related to any oil/gas operations. > Methane emissions occur in all sectors of the natural gas industry, from production, through processing and transmission, to distribution. They primarily result from normal operations, routine maintenance, fugitive leaks, and system upsets. https://www.epa.gov/natural-gas-star-program/primary-sources-methane-emissions https://www.epa.gov/natural-gas-star-program/primary-sources...