The gas could be seen rising to the surface of the ocean Monday, following what seismologists say were two explosions that didn’t appear to be caused by natural forces, such as an earthquake or underwater landslide. European security officials also said they observed Russian Navy support ships and submarines in the vicinity of the pipeline leaks Monday and Tuesday. And NATO ambassadors released an official statement Thursday, declaring that “all currently available information indicates that this is the result of deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage,” which is “causing risks to shipping and substantial environmental damage.”
In that sense, the Nord Stream incident could also signal an ominous geopolitical trend that climate advocates and security experts have warned about for years—that a warmer world could also mean a less cooperative one, driven by rising conflict over territory, resources and the permeation of isolationist and nationalist ideologies.
“Global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security interests over the foreseeable future because it will aggravate existing problems—such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions—that threaten domestic stability in a number of countries,” the Department of Defense wrote to Congress members in a 2015 report.
Officials with the United Nations reiterated those concerns last year, during the COP26 global climate talks in Scotland. Although global warming itself may not always be a direct cause of conflict, they said, it can often act as a “risk multiplier,” by exacerbating financial burdens for communities and governments dealing with extreme weather, driving displacement and undermining human rights in regions where frequent disasters are contributing to a surge in migration, as well as leaving women especially vulnerable to harm in situations where societal laws and social safety nets are breaking down.
European leaders are increasingly calling the leaks the result of sabotage, with many pointing the finger at Russia.
Is anybody telling us how much methane (i.e., natural gas) is being spewed into the atmosphere from these leaks? Does anybody in a position of power even care about that part of this?
Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:
European leaders on Wednesday vowed a “robust and united response” to any attacks on their energy infrastructure following a series of breaches in underwater pipelines that are sending tons of natural gas into the Baltic Sea.
Though investigations into the simultaneous leaks in the Nord Stream pipelines just started, sabotage appears the most likely cause.
“These incidents show that energy infrastructure is not safe,” Viktorija Cmilyte-Nielsen, speaker of Lithuania’s Parliament, told a local radio station on Wednesday. “It can be interpreted as a warning.”
Danish and Swedish authorities detected two underwater explosions Monday and reported three breaches on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines. Seismologists in Denmark and Sweden said the blasts did not appear to be caused by earthquakes, landslides or other natural activity.
Flemming Larsen, managing director of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, went a step further on Wednesday, saying the agency is “quite confident that the tremors were caused by explosions.”
According to satellite imagery reviewed by The Washington Post, a mass of methane bubbles spanning roughly 13 miles in diameter first appeared on the surface of the sea on Monday morning. The image was taken before the second blast was recorded by seismic sensors.
Andrew Baxter, a director at the Environmental Defense Fund, posted some quick calculations to Twitter, estimating that the volume of gas amounted to “107,000 tons of methane.”
Most of that gas has left the pipelines, Kristoffer Bottzauw, managing director of the Danish Energy Agency, said at a news conference Wednesday. Still, the leak will place a significant strain on the climate, he said, with the total spill similar to 32 percent of Denmark’s total emissions over a year.
Some scientists say that calculation is an overestimate because it assumes that all methane in the pipelines will be released into the Earth’s atmosphere, when some portion will certainly be absorbed into the surrounding water..
The release, while not good, is unlikely to put a statistically significant dent in the global greenhouse gas budget, Jens Greinert, head of the DeepSea Monitoring Group at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research, told The Pos
The gas leak, which prompted evacuations, occurred during the company's drilling of a waste disposal well in Alaska's North Slope.
Excerpt from this story from Politico Pro/Energy Wire:
ConocoPhillips estimates the gas leak last month on Alaska’s North Slope that prompted evacuations and throttled production released 7.2 million cubic feet of natural gas before it was contained.
The estimate, reported to regulators Friday, is the first stab at quantifying the scale of the leak as the state and company continue investigations into a definite cause.
The gas leak occurred during the company’s drilling of a waste disposal well at the Alpine oil and gas development in the Arctic, one of the largest oil fields on the North Slope.
It sparked the temporary evacuation of hundreds of personnel and trepidation in the nearby Alaska Native village of Nuiqsut, on federal lands in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), before the company reported that it had contained the leak by redirecting the fugitive gas into the existing pipeline system.
ConocoPhillips said that most of the 7.2 million cubic feet of natural gas released into the subsurface likely escaped into the air between March 4 and March 8.
California and local officials on Wednesday announced a tentative $119.5-million settlement in lawsuits filed against Southern California Gas Co. over the biggest methane leak in U.S. history.
Excerpt:
A $119.5-million settlement announced Wednesday of claims stemming from the Aliso Canyon gas leak marks the biggest action yet to deal with the health effects and climate damage of the largest release of methane in U.S. history.
The deal between Southern California Gas Co. and city, county and state officials and prosecutors will fund a long-sought health study and numerous environmental measures intended to offset the damage caused by the leak.
But it leaves unresolved questions about the root cause of the leak, the fate of the storage facility outside Los Angeles’ Porter Ranch neighborhood, the state’s reliance on planet-warming natural gas and residents’ medical claims against the company.
The tentative agreement will resolve agencies’ lawsuits against the utility for violating the state’s health and safety laws by failing to promptly control the leak and alert authorities.
In exchange, the gas company will pay civil penalties as well as $25 million for the long-term health study and $26.5 million for greenhouse gas emissions projects. An additional $45.4 million will fund other environmental projects — some of them far from the site and unrelated to greenhouse gases.
Among the other projects funded:
$3 million to develop a real-time air-monitoring network and a symptom- and incident-reporting system
$5 million for electric school buses and mobile asthma clinics
$7.1 million to install air filtration systems at public schools in heavily polluted “environmental justice” communities of L.A. County
$5.2 million for lead paint abatement of homes near the closed Exide battery recycling plant in southeast L.A. County
Acts of sabotage in September against the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines that run from Russia to Germany beneath the Baltic Sea released more than twice as much methane as the 2015-2016 Aliso Canyon gas storage leak in California, yet will have little impact on the climate, according to a study released Friday.
While U.S. climate scientists described the 97,100 metric tons of methane released at Aliso Canyon as “massive,” the Chinese authors of the new study describe the 220,000 metric tons of methane released after explosions rocked the Nord Stream pipelines as having only a “tiny” impact on the climate.
Following the Aliso Canyon leak, the largest in U.S. history, climate scientists wrote in a study published in Science that the release would “substantially affect the State of California greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets for the year” and was “equivalent to the annual energy sector [methane] emissions from medium-sized European Union nations.”
Researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Atmospheric Physics came to a starkly different conclusion, focusing not on the actual amount of methane released from the pipelines but on how much warming that quantity would produce over a 20-year period.
Methane emissions related to the recent explosions would result in an increase in the average global surface air temperature of just 0.000018 degrees Celsius over a 20-year period, the researchers concluded in a study published Friday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
The Petal Gas Storage Station lies halfway between the winding banks of the Leaf River and the International Checker Hall of Fame. It’s a warren of pipes, wellheads and metal buildings where noisy compressors pump gas underground and then suck it back up to the surface again.
In the process, the Petal plant releases half a ton of a potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every hour—more than any other gas storage facility in the country.
Petal is one of hundreds of underground natural gas storage facilities across the United States, where operators pump gas into underground salt formations, aquifers or depleted oil and gas reservoirs, storing the gas until it is needed.
Underneath the Petal plant lies a vast dome of salt nearly two miles in diameter that formed millions of years ago, during the Mesozoic Era, when other layers of rock pushed down on the surrounding salt formation until it was squeezed upwards into a bulging dome.
A gas company began hollowing out the Petal Dome, creating the nation’s first salt cavity specifically designed for natural gas storage in 1951. Today, eight artificial caverns carved into the Petal Dome store up to 30 billion cubic feet of natural gas, fuel that provides a critical backstop for the region’s fluctuating energy needs.
The Petal storage plant is relatively small as gas storage facilities go: It ranks as the 41st largest underground gas storage facility in the country. However, its emissions of methane, the primary component of natural gas, are far and away the highest of all such facilities in the nation.
In 2020, Petal emitted 4,947 metric tons of methane, according to reports submitted by the facility’s owner, Gulf South Pipeline, and its parent company, Boardwalk Pipeline Partners, to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The emissions were three-and-a-half times higher than the methane released that year from any other U.S. gas storage facility.
The Petal facility has held onto the dubious distinction of being the largest such methane emitter for each of the last five years, according to data the companies have submitted to the EPA. In 2020, three of the seven highest emitting gas storage facilities in the country were owned by Boardwalk and its subsidiaries.
The findings mark a step forward in using space technology to detect leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas sites worldwide.
The Ohio disaster leaked as much methane as the entire oil and gas industries of some nations release in a year. Credit...Ohio State Highway Patrol
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The first satellite designed to continuously monitor the planet for methane leaks made a startling discovery last year: A little known gas-well accident at an Ohio fracking site was in fact one of the largest methane leaks ever recorded in the United States.
The findings by a Dutch-American team of scientists, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mark a step forward in using space technology to detect leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, from oil and gas sites worldwide.
The scientists said the new findings reinforced the view that methane releases like these, which are difficult to predict, could be far more widespread than previously thought.
“We’re entering a new era. With a single observation, a single overpass, we’re able to see plumes of methane coming from large emission sources,” said Ilse Aben, an expert in satellite remote sensing and one of the authors of the new research. “That’s something totally new that we were previously not able to do from space.”
Scientists also said the new findings reinforced the view that methane emissions from oil installations are far more widespread than previously thought.
The blowout, in February 2018 at a natural gas well run by an Exxon Mobil subsidiary in Belmont County, Ohio, released more methane than the entire oil and gas industries of many nations do in a year, the research team found. The Ohio episode triggered about 100 residents within a one-mile radius to evacuate their homes while workers scrambled to plug the well.
New technologies are gearing up to find fugitive methane leaks
- By Thomas Fox , The Conversation -
A suite of new technologies may soon be patrolling for fugitive — invisible but harmful — natural gas leaks from the oil and gas sector. Our recent study suggests that drones, aircraft, trucks, fixed sensors and even satellites may be poised to help find gas leaks quickly, preventing damage to the environment and human health.
To date, hunting for leaks has been restricted to using a few handheld sensors. These methods are slow and expensive. Now, regulators in Canada and the United States want to let companies decide which technologies to use.
An invisible threat
Leaking natural gas is invisible to the human eye and is a serious environmental concern. Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is a greenhouse gas 86 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years. Fugitive emissions also pose a safety concern: natural gas mixed with air can be explosive. To top it off, hazardous and carcinogenic substances are often emitted alongside methane.
Production of natural gas is booming in North America, due largely to developments like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. Advocates of natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal, often describe it as a transition fuel that can help mitigate climate change.
This view may be optimistic. To be an improvement, natural gas must be combusted. If emitted to the atmosphere during production or distribution, climate benefits over coal can be reduced or even reversed.
For natural gas to live up to its reputation as a gentler alternative to other fossil fuels, leaks must be found and repaired.
Not all leaks are equal
Locating methane leaks is a serious challenge. There are over two million oil and gas wells across North America, and leaks are common. Fortunately, most leaks are tiny. Overall emissions are often dominated by a small number of large leaks: about five per cent of sources account for half of all emissions.
These sources, sometimes called super-emitters, are the low-hanging fruit of emission reduction efforts. Currently approved leak detection methods are slow and expensive, restricting how often leaks can be sought, found and repaired. New screening technologies, such as aircraft, drones and trucks, are usually less sensitive than traditional methods, but may offer a solution for finding big leaks fast.
An optical gas imaging camera records the infamous Aliso Canyon gas leak in 2015. This super-emitter released over 97 million kilograms of methane and led to the relocation of over 11,000 local residents. Most super-emitters are nowhere near this large.
The new tech on the block
Recent laws in Canada are among the first to recognize the use of new technologies in leak management programs. Specifically, oil and gas companies may develop custom alternative programs if they are at least as effective as traditional methods.
These laws will take effect in January 2020, and a growing number of start-up companies are lining up to find leaks. Taken together, these solution providers offer an impressive variety of leak management services. However, very little is known about the performance of these new methods — are they really as good as the established methods?
These unknowns pose a challenge to producers, who must decide what technologies to use, and to regulators, who must decide what technologies to approve. Our recently published open-access article addresses some of the biggest questions preventing adoption of these new leak detection technologies.
In our research, we found that most technologies can detect leaks, but that they differ significantly in their strengths and limitations. Aircraft, for example, can survey dozens of facilities in a day, compared to just a few for conventional handheld methods. However, aircraft are much less sensitive and are unable to detect small and medium-sized leaks.
Drones, which continue to excite innovators and lure investors, can find leaks but are labour-intensive because most systems require pilot oversight.
Satellites have not yet been shown to reliably detect leaks. However, new satellites are being developed and launched, and they may soon play a role in leak management. The Environmental Defense Fund is launching its own satellite, designed to monitor oil and gas facilities and make the results public to keep oil and gas companies accountable for their emissions.
The promise of screening technologies lies in survey frequency. If super-emitter leaks are found quickly, we can prevent them from leaking for months or years before being found. But what if screening technologies aren’t actually finding the biggest leaks?
A fixed-wing UAV screening system being launched from a catapult.
What we don’t know can hurt us
In the past, if leaks were missed during a routine inspection, no one would know. A missed leak could continue in silence, while regulators and industry would believe nothing was wrong.
In the future, it will be harder for companies to hide these leaks from the public. Many new technologies do not require site access and can be operated by anyone, including government compliance officers and nonprofit organisations.
There is a need to carefully evaluate the performance of prospective technologies. Our study only scratches the surface of learning about what role new technologies will play. More targeted research is needed, with efforts already underway.
All technologies miss leaks, but how big are the ones we miss, and when are we most likely to miss them? These are the questions that will guide the selection of new leak management systems.
Thomas Fox, PhD Candidate in Geography, University of Calgary
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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