EPA methane report further divides fracking camps

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP-Excite

By KEVIN BEGOS

PITTSBURGH (AP) - The Environmental Protection Agency has dramatically lowered its estimate of how much of a potent heat-trapping gas leaks during natural gas production, in a shift with major implications for a debate that has divided environmentalists: Does the recent boom in fracking help or hurt the fight against climate change?

Oil and gas drilling companies had pushed for the change, but there have been differing scientific estimates of the amount of methane that leaks from wells, pipelines and other facilities during production and delivery. Methane is the main component of natural gas.

The new EPA data is "kind of an earthquake" in the debate over drilling, said Michael Shellenberger, the president of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental group based in Oakland, Calif. "This is great news for anybody concerned about the climate and strong proof that existing technologies can be deployed to reduce methane leaks."

The scope of the EPA's revision was vast. In a mid-April report on greenhouse emissions, the agency now says that tighter pollution controls instituted by the industry resulted in an average annual decrease of 41.6 million metric tons of methane emissions from 1990 through 2010, or more than 850 million metric tons overall. That's about a 20 percent reduction from previous estimates. The agency converts the methane emissions into their equivalent in carbon dioxide, following standard scientific practice.

FULL story at link.


Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20130428/DA5UNT083.html

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In this Aug. 26, 2009 file photo, Kourtney Hardwick, BP Florida operations manager, looks over a methane gas well site east of Bayfield, Colo. The well pad now has three gas wells that have been drilled and are producing natural gas. A new report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has dramatically lowered estimates of how much of a potent greenhouse gas is being leaked by the natural gas industry. The EPA now estimates that in 2011 the natural gas industry released 10 percent less methane into the atmosphere than it did in 1990. The new figure comes after the EPA estimated last year that those methane admissions had risen about 15 percent since 1990. (AP Photo/Jerry McBride, File)

[kristopher]

1. Normally I have a fair amount of faith in the EPA

But if Shellenberger of the Breakthough Institute (definitely not a real environmental organization) thinks this is a good development, then I'll need to see the study itself before accepting the results.

[caraher]

6. Especially when EPA is doing such a dramatic about-face

and DOE is getting new leadership that seems to be all-in for fracking.

[limpyhobbler]

2. They're going to replace all the pipes and gaskets in America?

Seems like a fools errand designed buy time and protect the oil & gas industry.

It's leaking all over the place.

How about this. If they need to replace all their pipes and gaskets, they should stop fracking now, and go ahead and replace all their pipes and gaskets, test 'em out real good, and then get back to us when everything is not leaking.

In the mean time we'll put our investment into something genuinely clean and sustainable. Like wind and solar, or battery research, or efficiency and conservation.

And what's their plan to fix methane migration underground and into our water....nothing. They can't fix it. Fracking is inherently damaging. What are they going to do when the drilling shakes apart all our old municipal water supplies? Skip town. These are poor communities. Some places can barely afford water treatment now. We don't know what the health effects of it really are. They won't even tell us the ingredients. How about when we can't swim or fish in our lakes anymore? Are they going to pay us back for that? You can't put a price on that. Frackers be gone.

Oh and as far as "environmentalists" being divided by the natural gas question, I think they mean maybe the issue divides astro-turf Koch stooges from people who care about climate change and protecting clean water. I've never met any real life environment activist who isn't against fracking, or even one who wants to risk trying to regulate it with new gaskets. There may be some people who disagree. But the gas industry, just like the coal industry, are experts and setting up front groups and astroturfing.

[Fuddnik]

3. Funded by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors

The Breakthrough Institute was founded on the premise that the complaint-based, interest group liberalism born in the 1960s and 1970s is failing to achieve the broad social and ecological transformations America and the world need. Its founders, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, argued that if America is to realize its potential for greatness we must create a new vision and agenda relevant to the new challenges we face. Breakthrough’s tagline, “The Era of Small Thinking is Over,” represents our aspiration to break from the ever-narrowing logic of complaint-based issue organizing, which puts thinkers and advocates into thought silos.
Mission

The Breakthrough Institute is a small think tank with big ideas. Breakthrough is committed to creating a new progressive politics, one that is large, aspirational, and asset-based. We believe that any effective politics must speak to core needs and values, not issues and interests, and we thus situate ourselves at the intersection of politics, policy, philosophy, and the social sciences.
Approach

A new politics is today being born, but its shape has not yet been determined. It could define itself as small, cautious, deficit-oriented, and isolationist. Or it could become large, bold, asset-based, and internationalist. The Breakthrough Institute engages in specific national and global campaigns to trigger new “thought movements” aimed at defining the next progressive politics. These campaigns aim to do three things:

ASSET BASED APPROACH?

and more

http://grist.org/climate-policy/breakthrough-institute-gets-it-wrong-on-climate-economics-again/


Breakthrough Institute gets it wrong on climate economics — again

By Frank Ackerman

Why do those at the Breakthrough Institute insist that everyone else besides them who cares about the environment is wrong, wrong, wrong? Their latest, called “The Creative Destruction of Climate Economics,” is a swipe at those misguided souls who think putting a price on carbon emissions would help combat climate change.

Breakthrough, according to its website, aims “to modernize liberal-progressive-green politics” and to accelerate the transition to an “ecologically vibrant” future. It “broke through” into well-funded fame in 2003 with its attack on environmentalists for failing to emphasize the economic concerns of ordinary Americans, such as jobs — thereby alienating the major environmental groups, who had been talking about jobs and the environment for years.

What’s wrong with pricing carbon emissions? This particular breakthrough rests on a mistaken reading of an academic paper in the American Economic Review, the most prestigious outlet for mainstream economics. That paper develops a simplified, abstract model of an economy that generates carbon emissions. Unlike some climate economics models, it assumes that public policy can affect the pace of innovation. Its conclusion, in the authors’ own words, seems quite balanced:

A simple but important implication of our analysis is that optimal environmental regulation should always use both an input tax (“carbon tax”) to control current emissions, and research subsidies or profit taxes to influence the direction of research.
====================================================================

Sounds like VooDoo climate science to me.

What's next? Reinhart-Rogoff do climate research?

[NickB79]

4. So NOAA is full of shit then?

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/01/02/1388021/bridge-to-nowhere-noaa-confirms-high-methane-leakage-rate-up-to-9-from-gas-fields-gutting-climate-benefit/?mobile=nc

Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have reconfirmed earlier findings of high rates of methane leakage from natural gas fields. If these findings are replicated elsewhere, they would utterly vitiate the climate benefit of natural gas, even when used to switch off coal.

Indeed, if the previous findings — of 4% methane leakage over a Colorado gas field — were a bombshell, then the new measurements reported by the journal Nature are thermonuclear:

… the research team reported new Colorado data that support the earlier work, as well as preliminary results from a field study in the Uinta Basin of Utah suggesting even higher rates of methane leakage — an eye-popping 9% of the total production. That figure is nearly double the cumulative loss rates estimated from industry data — which are already higher in Utah than in Colorado.

The Uinta Basin is of particular interest because fracking has increased there over the past decade.

How much methane leaks during the entire lifecycle of unconventional gas has emerged as a key question in the fracking debate. Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4). And methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned — 25 times more potent over a century and 72 to 100 times more potent over a 20-year period.

Quite the battle of titans brewing here. Unless the EPA has some serious counter-evidence to invalidate multiple studies showing high methane releases from fracking, I'll stick with the NOAA data as more definitive at this time.

[NickB79]

5. Ha, I knew it: the EPA based their revisions on industry data and studies

IE a steaming pile of shit:

The EPA said it made the changes based on expert reviews and new data from several sources, including a report funded by the oil and gas industry. But the estimates aren't based on independent field tests of actual emissions, and some scientists said that's a problem.

Robert Howarth, a Cornell University professor of ecology who led a 2011 methane leak study that is widely cited by critics of fracking, wrote in an email that "time will tell where the truth lies in all this, but I think EPA is wrong."

Howarth said other federal climate scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have published recent studies documenting massive methane leaks from natural gas operations in Colorado and other Western states.

Howarth wrote that the EPA seems "to be ignoring the published NOAA data in their latest efforts, and the bias on industry only pushing estimates downward - never up - is quite real. EPA badly needs a counter-acting force, such as outside independent review of their process."

[caraher]

7. Even accepting the new EPA figures I don't see how this changes much

In a mid-April report on greenhouse emissions, the agency now says that tighter pollution controls instituted by the industry resulted in an average annual decrease of 41.6 million metric tons of methane emissions from 1990 through 2010, or more than 850 million metric tons overall. That's about a 20 percent reduction from previous estimates. The agency converts the methane emissions into their equivalent in carbon dioxide, following standard scientific practice.

My sense had been that those earlier figures indicated a need to reduce methane emissions by something more like a factor of 2 or 3, not 20% - at least if you want to be confident that burning natural gas is better than other fossil fuels in terms of greenhouse gas emission. This is only an "earthquake" in terms of pro-extraction propaganda (and what a terrible choice of metaphor given the worries about fracking-induced seismic activity - the Breakthrough Institute needs to work harder on its messaging!).

[jonthebru]

8. What they don't want you think about is...

At one point in time the Earth's atmosphere was toxic to most living things.
It took hundreds of millions of years for the plants to filter the toxic carbon dioxide and monoxide out of the atmosphere allowing plants and animals to flourish. Hundreds of millions of years. This process sequestered the harmful elements into deposits within the earth. Once the atmosphere was breathable a process began that has culminated in this planet and its magnificent variety of life in all its aspects, another very long period of time from our perspective.
The Big Blue Ball!
What is happening now is we are taking the sequestered carbon out of the earth and spewing it back into the atmosphere. What took hundreds of millions of years will be undone, destroyed, in a relatively short period of time from whenever coal was massively mined for the "industrial revolution" to the end of our use of carbon fuels in the future. And maybe the end of our existence as well.

We have a very narrow window of opportunity to alleviate this and at the risk of sounding defeatist, without the American People waking up to their responsibility in the Stewardship of this planet, we will probably fail.