- FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Hosts White House Methane Summit to Tackle Dangerous Climate Pollution, while Creating Good-Paying Jobs and Protecting Community Health The White House
- White House launches methane emission task force to boost leak detection Reuters
- Green Groups Tell Biden to Stop Approving Fossil Fuel Projects If He Really Wants to Cut Methane Common Dreams
- White House holds methane summit, launches task force The Hill
- Feds Launch Effort to Reduce Methane from E&P Stripper Wells Natural Gas Intelligence
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Methane
Rocket Report: Meet the Blue Origin Space Rangers; methane rocket fails in debut
Enlarge / Image taken from the Hakuto-R spacecraft after it separated from the Falcon 9 upper stage, which can be seen at right.
Canadensys/ispace
Welcome to Edition 5.21 of the Rocket Report. This the final edition of the Rocket Report for 2022. I will be taking about 10 days off for the holiday season this year, so the next newsletter will not be published until January 5. The good news? Ars and I have big things planned for coverage of space in 2023, so stay tuned for announcements about that. In the meantime, I hope everyone has an enjoyable holiday season!
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Almost time to get charged up for Electron. After more than two years of delays, NASA and Rocket Lab are finally ready to conduct the first Electron launch from Wallops Island in Virginia on Friday, Space News reports. The latest delays were caused by a poor weather forecast for Thursday, and then a need to close out final documentation. The launch is now targeted for no earlier than Sunday, December 18. The mission will place into orbit three satellites for HawkEye 360, which operates a constellation of spacecraft that perform radio-frequency surveillance.
What does the F in FTS stand for, anyway? … The main delay was caused by a new autonomous flight termination system required for Electron launches from Wallops. David Pierce, director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, said the final safety certification of what’s called the NASA Autonomous Flight Termination Unit was originally scheduled in time to support a mid-2020 first launch from Launch Complex-2. But during final checks of the software, engineers discovered numerous errors in the code. Eventually, Rocket Lab wants to launch the Neutron rocket from Virginia. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Who is ready for Blue Origin Space Rangers? Variety reports that a production company co-founded by Michael Strahan, who flew to space on New Shepard in December 2021, is working with Blue Origin to develop an animated space adventure series for kids. It will be called “Blue Origin Space Rangers.” Stop laughing. I’m being serious over here.
Coming soon to Amazon Prime? … The show will include appearances of an animated Jeff Bezos as well as Strahan, a former NFL star. That might make it worth tuning in to, at least once. According to the producers, the show will “create multiple touchpoints for kids and families to explore, learn and deliver a one-of-a-kind space experience.” I’ll try to be positive and say it’s great to try to get kids interested in STEM. But I certainly hope this is not a distraction to all of the other work on Blue Origin’s plate.
After another delay, ABL slips to January. At the beginning of this month, ABL Space Systems provided a clear and detailed update on its multiple attempts to launch the RS1 rocket from Kodiak, Alaska. (This kind of transparency is much appreciated.) Then, on December 8, the company tried again, only to observe “unexpected electrical interference in our avionics system” shortly before the launch attempt.
Time needed for fixes … “The issue has only presented during live propellant ops, not dry vehicle testing or in the lab. This indicates a thermoelectrical or thermomechanical root cause,” the company stated on Twitter. “The team is implementing fixes and working towards a launch attempt during our next launch window opening on January 9.” Best of luck to ABL as it continues to press toward the debut of RS1.
Wetland emission and atmospheric sink changes explain methane growth in 2020
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New “Artificial Photosynthesis” System Produces Methane With 10x Efficiency
A study from six chemists at the University of Chicago shows an innovative new system for artificial photosynthesis that is more productive than previous artificial systems by an order of magnitude. Above, an artistic illustration of the process. Credit: Illustration by Peter Allen
University of Chicago breakthrough creates methane fuel from sun, carbon dioxide, and water.
Humans have relied on fossil fuels for concentrated energy for the past two centuries. Our society has been taking advantage of the convenient, energy-dense substances packed with the proceeds from hundreds of millions of years of
“Artificial photosynthesis” is one possible option scientists are exploring. This entails reworking a plant’s system to make our own kinds of fuels. However, the chemical equipment in a single leaf is incredibly complex, and not so easy to turn to our own purposes.
Now, an innovative new system for artificial photosynthesis that is more productive than previous artificial systems by an order of magnitude is presented in a study published in the journal Nature Catalysis on November 10 by six chemists at the University of Chicago. Unlike regular photosynthesis, which produces carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water, artificial photosynthesis could produce ethanol, methane, or other fuels.
Although it still has a long way to go before it can become a way for you to fuel your car every day, the method gives scientists a new direction to explore. Plus, in the shorter term, it may be useful for the production of other chemicals.
“This is a huge improvement on existing systems, but just as importantly, we were able to lay out a very clear understanding of how this artificial system works at the molecular level, which has not been accomplished before,” said Lin, who is the James Franck Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago and senior author of the study.
‘We will need something else’
“Without natural photosynthesis, we would not be here. It made the oxygen we breathe on Earth and it makes the food we eat,” said Lin. “But it will never be efficient enough to supply fuel for us to drive cars; so we will need something else.”
The trouble is that photosynthesis is built to create carbohydrates, which are great for fueling us, but not our cars, which need much more concentrated energy. So researchers looking to create alternates to fossil fuels have to re-engineer the process to create more energy-dense fuels, such as ethanol or methane.
In nature, photosynthesis is performed by several very complex assemblies of proteins and pigments. They take in water and carbon dioxide, break the molecules apart, and rearrange the atoms to make carbohydrates—a long string of hydrogen-oxygen-carbon compounds. Scientists, however, need to rework the reactions to instead produce a different arrangement with just hydrogen surrounding a juicy carbon core—CH4, also known as methane.
This re-engineering is much trickier than it sounds; people have been tinkering with it for decades, trying to get closer to the efficiency of nature.
Lin and his lab team thought that they might try adding something that artificial photosynthesis systems to date haven’t included:
Even with the significantly improved performance, however, artificial photosynthesis has a long way to go before it can produce enough fuel to be relevant for widespread use. “Where we are now, it would need to scale up by many orders of magnitude to make an sufficient amount of methane for our consumption,” Lin said.
The breakthrough could also be applied widely to other chemical reactions; you need to make a lot of fuel for it to have an impact, but much smaller quantities of some molecules, such as the starting materials to make pharmaceutical drugs and nylons, among others, could be very useful.
“So many of these fundamental processes are the same,” said Lin. “If you develop good chemistries, they can be plugged into many systems.”
The scientists used resources at the Advanced Photon Source, a synchrotron located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, to characterize the materials.
The co-first authors of the paper were Guangxu Lan (PhD’20, now with Peking University), graduate student Yingjie Fan, and Wenjie Shi (Visiting student, now with Tianjin University of Technology. The other authors of the paper were Eric You (BS’20, now a graduate student at
Biden to Announce Restrictions on Methane Emissions at COP27
SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt—President Biden is moving to tighten restrictions on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and boost funding for developing countries to adapt to the effects of climate change and transition to cleaner technologies, according to the White House.
Mr. Biden is expected to announce the measures in a speech before a United Nations climate conference, known as COP27, according to a fact sheet released by the White House ahead of the address. The measures include plans for the Environmental Protection Agency to require oil-and-gas companies to monitor existing production facilities for methane leaks and repair them, according to administration officials.
Methane is 80 times as potent at trapping heat from solar radiation as carbon dioxide over its first 20 years in the atmosphere. It is responsible for about half a degree Celsius of global warming since the preindustrial era, and its levels are rising fast, according to measurements made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The planned rules affect hundreds of thousands of U.S. wells, storage tanks and natural-gas processing plants, and require companies to replace leaky, older equipment and buy new monitoring tools.
EPA Administrator
Michael Regan
said flaring—a technique used by gas producers to burn off excess methane from oil and natural-gas wells—would be reduced at all well sites under the planned rules. Owners would be required to monitor abandoned wells for methane emissions and plug any leaks, he said.
“We’ve tightened down to limit flaring as much as possible without banning it,” Mr. Regan said.
President Biden met on Friday with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in Sharm El Sheikh.
Photo:
KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS
The American Petroleum Institute, which represents U.S. oil and gas producers, said it was reviewing the proposed rule.
“Federal regulation of methane crafted to build on industry’s progress can help accelerate emissions reductions while developing reliable American energy,”
Frank Macchiarola,
API’s senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, said in a statement.
Lee Fuller of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a Washington, D.C., trade group that represents many smaller producers, said his group would be reviewing the regulations closely.
“While everyone wants to produce oil and natural gas using sound environmental procedures, there will always be a need to assure that the regulatory structure is cost effective and technologically feasible,” he said in a statement.
Rachel Cleetus, lead economist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group, said in a statement that the EPA had “taken an important step forward by issuing a robust standard for methane emissions from oil-and-gas operations.”
Mr. Biden is walking a political tightrope during his brief stopover in Egypt on his way to summits in Cambodia and Indonesia. The war in Ukraine has unleashed turmoil in energy markets, underscoring the world’s continued reliance on fossil fuels.
Control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives still hinged on races that were too close to call as of early Friday morning, with both parties girding for a final outcome that might not be known for days. If Republicans win control of either chamber it would mean more power to a party that is deeply skeptical of Mr. Biden’s climate agenda and reluctant to spend billions of dollars to help other countries transition to cleaner sources of energy.
The White House said Mr. Biden is expected to announce an additional $100 million for the United Nations Adaptation Fund, which helps countries adapt to floods, droughts and storms that climate scientists say are increasing in frequency and severity as the earth’s atmosphere and oceans warm. The U.S. has yet to pay the $50 million it pledged to the fund at last year’s climate talks in Glasgow.
The U.S. also owes $2 billion to the U.N. Green Climate Fund, which finances renewable energy and climate adaptation projects in the developing world. The administration has asked for $1.6 billion for the fund in the fiscal 2023 budget.
The White House said Mr. Biden would also pledge $150 million to a U.S. fund for climate adaptation and resilience across Africa; $13.6 million to the World Meteorological Organization to collect additional weather, water and climate observation across Africa; and $15 million to support the deployment of early-warning systems in Africa by NOAA in conjunction with local weather-forecasting agencies.
The U.S. pledges don’t address demands from poorer nations to provide money for damage they say is the result of climate-related weather events—a new category of funding known as “loss and damage.” This week at the summit, Belgium and Germany pledged a combined 172 million euros, equivalent to $176 million, to support loss-and-damage payments to developing countries. Scotland pledged $5.8 million and Ireland pledged $10 million.
Developing countries have made a renewed push to set up a mechanism for loss-and-damage payments after severe floods in Pakistan this summer that caused $30 billion in losses, according to World Bank estimates, killed more than 1,700 people and displaced 33 million residents. Sen.
Sherry Rehman,
Pakistan’s federal minister for climate change, said she is hoping for more resources from the U.S. and other nations to help her country.
U.S. negotiators are concerned the concept of loss and damage exposes wealthier nations to spiraling liability. There is also the scientific uncertainty of determining which effects can be tied to human-induced climate change and which are part of normal seasonal variation. However, U.S. climate envoy
John Kerry
said this week at the conference that he is open to discussing loss and damage.
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“We need more,” Ms. Rehman said in an interview. “What you hear everywhere at COP is ‘action now.’ Everything else is fluff.”
Mr. Biden arrived at the climate summit Friday after most world leaders have departed. He met privately with Egyptian President
Abdel Fattah Al Sisi
at the conference, located at a resort town along the Red Sea. The U.S. and Germany were expected to announce Friday a $250 million financing program to build 10 gigawatts of new wind-and-solar energy facilities in Egypt while decommissioning 5 gigawatts of inefficient natural-gas power plants.
The Biden administration’s efforts to curb methane emissions follow an agreement reached on the sidelines of the Glasgow summit a year ago, in which China and the U.S. pledged to work on reducing emissions of the gas. Beijing this week announced a plan to cut methane emissions but hasn’t yet included the new measures in its climate plans submitted to the U.N.
Nigeria announced its first-ever regulations, including limits on flaring, to cut overall methane emissions by more than 60% over 2020 levels. Canada said Thursday it plans to cut emissions of methane from its oil-and-gas industry by more than 75% over 2012 levels by 2030.
Emissions from flaring are far higher than previous government and industry estimates, according to an analysis of 300 wells in four states published in September in the journal Science.
The White House says 260 billion cubic meters of gas are wasted every year from flaring and methane emissions within the oil-and-gas sector.
Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, countries aim to limit global warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and preferably to 1.5 degrees. The gap between the emissions cuts pledged by 166 nations, including the U.S., and their current emissions puts the world on track to warm 2.5 degrees Celsius, or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century, according to a recent U.N. report.
White House officials point to Mr. Biden’s support of the Democrats’ climate, health and tax legislation that allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to climate and energy programs, including tax credits for buying electric vehicles and investments in clean technologies.
Administration officials said the legislation has helped put the U.S. on track to meeting Mr. Biden’s goal of cutting domestic emissions 50% below 2005 levels by 2030.
—Matthew Dalton and Scott Patterson contributed to this article.
Write to Eric Niiler at eric.niiler@wsj.com
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NASA Detects More Than 50 Methane ‘Super-Emitter’ Zones Around The World : ScienceAlert
NASA scientists, using a tool designed to study how dust affects climate, have identified more than 50 spots around the world emitting major levels of methane, a development that could help combat the potent greenhouse gas.
”Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a press release on Tuesday.
”This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed – quickly.”
NASA said its Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) is designed to foster understanding of the effects of airborne dust on climate.
But EMIT, which was installed on the International Space Station in July and can focus on areas as small as a soccer field, has also shown the ability to detect the presence of methane.
NASA said more than 50 “super-emitters” of methane gas in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the southwestern United States have been identified so far. Most of them are connected to the fossil-fuel, waste or agriculture sectors.
Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor, said EMIT’s “additional methane-detecting capability offers a remarkable opportunity to measure and monitor greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.”
”Exceeds our expectations”
Methane is responsible for roughly 30 percent of the global rise in temperatures to date.
While far less abundant in the atmosphere than CO2, it is about 28 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas on a century-long timescale. Over a 20-year time frame, it is 80 times more potent.
Methane lingers in the atmosphere for only a decade, compared to hundreds or thousands of years for CO2.
This means a sharp reduction in emissions could shave several tenths of a degree Celsius off of projected global warming by mid-century, helping keep alive the Paris Agreement goal of capping Earth’s average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
”EMIT will potentially find hundreds of super-emitters – some of them previously spotted through air-, space-, or ground-based measurement, and others that were unknown,” NASA said.
Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory leading the EMIT methane effort, said some of the methane plumes detected by EMIT are among the largest ever seen.
”What we’ve found in a just a short time already exceeds our expectations,” Thorpe said.
NASA said a methane plume about 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) long was detected southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Permian Basin, one of the largest oilfields in the world.
It said 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure were identified in Turkmenistan, east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar.
A methane plume at least 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) long was detected south of Tehran from a major waste-processing complex, NASA said.
© Agence France-Presse
New NASA instrument detects methane ‘super-emitters’ from space | Climate News
The Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) identified more than 50 methane hotspots around the world.
NASA scientists, using a tool designed to study how dust affects climate, have identified more than 50 methane-emitting hotspots around the world, a development that could help combat the potent greenhouse gas.
NASA said on Tuesday that its Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) had identified more than 50 methane “super-emitters” in Central Asia, the Middle East and the southwestern United States since it was installed in July onboard the International Space Station.
The newly measured methane hotspots — some previously known and others just discovered — include sprawling oil and gas facilities and large landfill sites. Methane is responsible for roughly 30 percent of the global rise in temperatures to date.
“Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement, adding that the instrument will help “pinpoint” methane super-emitters so that such emissions can be stopped “at the source”.
Methane is far more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Our new @NASAClimate EMIT mission, designed to measure atmospheric dust, has mapped more than 50 methane “super-emitters” around the planet: https://t.co/d4OhBwIeOQ pic.twitter.com/9QLxDMN0nW
— NASA (@NASA) October 25, 2022
Circling Earth every 90 minutes from its perch onboard the space station some 400km (250 miles) high, EMIT is able to scan vast tracts of the planet dozens of kilometres across while also focusing in on areas as small as a football field.
The instrument, called an imaging spectrometer, was built primarily to identify the mineral composition of dust blown into Earth’s atmosphere from deserts and other arid regions, but it has proven adept at detecting large methane emissions.
“Some of the [methane] plumes EMIT detected are among the largest ever seen — unlike anything that has ever been observed from space,” said Andrew Thorpe, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) research technologist leading the methane studies.
Examples of the newly-imaged methane super-emitters showcased by JPL on Tuesday included a cluster of 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure in Turkmenistan, some plumes stretching more than 32 km (20 miles).
Scientists estimate the Turkmenistan plumes collectively spew methane at a rate of 50,400kg (111,000 pounds) per hour, rivalling the peak flow from the 2015 Aliso Canyon gas field blowout near Los Angeles that ranks as one of the largest accidental methane releases in US history.
Two other large emitters were an oilfield in New Mexico and a waste-processing complex in Iran, emitting nearly 29,000kg (60,000 pounds) of methane per hour combined. The methane plume south of the Iranian capital Tehran was at least 4.8km (3 miles) long.
JPL officials said neither site were previously known to scientists.
“As it continues to survey the planet, EMIT will observe places in which no one thought to look for greenhouse-gas emitters before, and it will find plumes that no one expects,” Robert Green, EMIT’s principal investigator at JPL, said in a statement.
A by-product of decomposing organic material and the chief component of natural gas used in power plants, methane accounts for a fraction of all human-caused greenhouse emissions but has about 80 times more heat-trapping capacity pound-for-pound than carbon dioxide.
Compared with CO2, which lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, methane persists for only about a decade, meaning that reductions in methane emissions have a more immediate effect on planetary warming.
Methane ‘super-emitters’ on Earth spotted by space station experiment
A powerful eye in the sky is helping scientists spy “super-emitters” of methane, a greenhouse gas about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
That observer is NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation instrument, or EMIT for short. EMIT has been mapping the chemical composition of dust throughout Earth’s desert regions since being installed on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS) in July, helping researchers understand how airborne dust affects climate.
That’s the main goal of EMIT’s mission. But it’s making another, less expected contribution to climate studies as well, NASA officials announced on Tuesday (Oct. 25). The instrument is identifying huge plumes of heat-trapping methane gas around the world — more than 50 of them already, in fact.
Related: Climate change: Causes and effects
“Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming. This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed — quickly,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement (opens in new tab).
“The International Space Station and NASA’s more than two dozen satellites and instruments in space have long been invaluable in determining changes to the Earth’s climate,” Nelson added. “EMIT is proving to be a critical tool in our toolbox to measure this potent greenhouse gas — and stop it at the source.”
EMIT is an imaging spectrometer designed to identify the chemical fingerprints of a variety of minerals on Earth’s surface. The ability to spot methane as well is a sort of happy accident.
“It turns out that methane also has a spectral signature in the same wavelength range, and that’s what has allowed us to be sensitive to methane,” EMIT principal investigator Robert Green, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.
Green and other EMIT team members gave some examples of the instrument’s sensitivity during the Tuesday media call. For example, the instrument detected a plume of methane — also known as natural gas — at least 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) long in the sky above an Iranian landfill. This newfound super-emitter is pumping about 18,700 pounds (8,500 kilograms) of methane into the air every hour, the researchers said.
That’s a lot, but it pales in comparison to a cluster of 12 super-emitters EMIT spotted in Turkmenistan, all of them associated with oil and gas infrastructure. Some of those plumes are up to 20 miles (32 km) long, and, together, they’re adding about 111,000 pounds (50,400 kg) of methane to Earth’s atmosphere per hour.
That’s comparable to the peak rates of the Aliso Canyon leak, one of the largest methane releases in U.S. history. (The Aliso Canyon event, which occurred at a Southern California methane storage facility, was first noticed in October 2015 and wasn’t fully plugged until February 2016.)
EMIT spotted all of these super-emitters very early, during the instrument’s checkout phase. So it should make even greater contributions as it gets fully up and running, and as scientists gain more familiarity with the instrument’s capabilities, team members said.
“We are really only scratching the surface of EMIT’s potential for mapping greenhouse gases,” Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at JPL, said during Tuesday’s press conference. “We’re really excited about EMIT’s potential for reducing emissions from human activity by pinpointing these emission sources.”
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
Nord Stream spill could be biggest methane leak ever but not catastrophic
“It’s not trivial, but it’s a modest-sized U.S. city, something like that,” Drew Shindell, a professor of earth science at Duke University, said. “There are so many sources all around the world. Any single event tends to be small. I think this tends to fall in that category.”
New data released Wednesday by the Danish Energy Agency allowed scientists to produce preliminary estimates of the amount of methane released. If all that gas reaches the atmosphere, it would be equivalent to about 0.1 percent of the estimated annual global methane emissions, according to scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Gas Hydrates Project.
From an emissions perspective, the breach is “an important one to watch,” said Carolyn Ruppel, chief of the project, who made the estimate with a colleague, Bill Waite. A worst-case calculation by Thomas Lauvaux, a researcher with the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in France, equated it to what comes from about 1 million cars in a year — compared to the about 250 million cars operating in the E.U. alone.
Other scientists cautioned against underestimating methane’s power. Paul Balcombe, a senior lecturer in chemical engineering and renewable energy at London’s Queen Mary University, called it a “really potent greenhouse gas” and that “even a little leak has quite a climate impact.”
Swedish monitoring stations that measure local atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases reported spikes since the pipeline burst, with methane concentration 20 to 25 percent higher than usual, “which is quite remarkable compared with our long-term data series,” Thomas Holst, a researcher at Lund University in Sweden, told The Post in an email, while maintaining it was not enough to pose a health risk.
Monitoring stations in Finland and Norway reported similar spikes. Ruppel noted that “methane is generally well-mixed in the atmosphere, so these local spikes would dissipate over the globe.”
Despite the size of the leak, it will not likely impact marine life in the way an oil leak might, Jasmin Cooper, a research associate at the Sustainable Gas Institute, said. “The environmental impact will be toward global warming.”
Images released Thursday by the Swedish Coast Guard still show a large mass of methane bubbles on the sea surface emanating from the four leaks across the pipelines — not three, as authorities initially said.
Scientists say that further imaging and access to the site are both necessary to get a clearer picture of the leaks and to calculate how much methane might be released into the atmosphere.
“We know it’s leaking badly because we see the pictures and video of the gas bubbling at the water surface, but we don’t know anything about the leaks,” Cooper said. “We don’t know how big they are or where they are in the pipeline, and so it’s difficult to figure out the flow rate.”
Danish officials said Wednesday that they anticipate both pipelines being empty by Sunday, as more than half of the gas had already been released. Once the gas is gone, they said, scientists and security officials will have better access to the site, which has been limited because of safety concerns.
The dissipation of the gas will also allow forensic experts to examine the site for clues at what caused the explosion, which has fixated security officials across Europe.
NATO issued its strongest statement yet on Thursday over the breaches in the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, describing the damage as the result of “deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage.”
An E.U. official reiterated Thursday that the damage to the pipelines was “not a coincidence.”
The Swedish National Seismic Network put the strength of the larger second blast at equivalent to 100 to 200 kilograms (220 to 440 pounds) of TNT. The first was smaller and consequently harder to measure.
Arms experts say it is difficult to guess what kind of munition might have caused the damage. It is possible that a torpedo was used, but more likely that divers or an autonomous underwater vehicle put one or more demolition charges on each site. To identify the weapon or weapons used, more evidence — including additional sensor data, as well as physical evidence such as munition remnants — would be required.
With the consensus among European leaders that sabotage was involved, suspicion is increasingly falling on Russia, which has used energy supplies as leverage against Europe since the invasion of Ukraine.
Intelligence officials have begun poring over communications intercepts, sonar signatures and other records that might reveal suspicious activity in the weeks or months leading up to the explosions. Two senior officials with two European security services said Russia remains a main suspect because it has the technical means to carry out subsurface attacks on key infrastructure and has demonstrated its determination to destabilize energy markets in Europe.
The officials, which spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, emphasized that these are preliminary, analytic conclusions with no evidence emerging so far to implicate Moscow.
The Kremlin has denied responsibility for the incident, suggesting Thursday that the incidents should be investigated as “an act of terrorism” and a coordinated international investigation is required, as Russia is the majority owner of both pipelines.
Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, has also hinted that the United States could be behind the blasts.
“The absolute beneficiary of this situation was Washington,” she said Thursday. “Mr. Blinken, made no secret of the fact that the main goal was to cut Europe off from Russian energy resources, and now you don’t know who might benefit from it. It benefits you!” she added addressing the U.S. secretary of state.
A U.S. official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said Wednesday the United States had nothing to do with the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, calling the idea “preposterous.”
Francis reported from London. Greg Miller in Washington, Emily Rauhala in Brussels, Martin Selsoe Sorensen in Copenhagen, Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.
Methane leak at Russian mine could be largest ever discovered | Russia
Possibly the world’s biggest leak of methane has been discovered coming from a coalmine in Russia, which has been pouring out the carbon dioxide equivalent of five coal-fired power stations.
About 90 tonnes an hour of methane were being released from the mine in January, when the gas was first traced to its source, according to data from GHGSat, a commercial satellite monitoring company based in Canada. Sustained over the course of a year, this would produce enough natural gas to power 2.4m homes.
More recently, the mine appears to be leaking at a lower rate, of about a third of the highest rate recorded in January, but the leak is thought to have been active for at least six months before January’s survey.
The leak, which comes from the Raspadskaya mine in Kemerovo Oblast, the largest coalmine in Russia, is about 50% bigger than any other leak seen by GHGSat since it started its global satellite monitoring in 2016. The company believes it is bigger than any leak yet traced to a single source.
Brody Wight, director of energy, landfill and mines at GHGSat, said that methane was an often overlooked side-effect of coalmining that added to the climate impact of burning coal. The Raspadskaya leak would add about 25% to the greenhouse gas emissions of burning any coal produced from the mine, he estimated.
“We are seeing an increase in methane from this site generally, which could be the result of increased coal production, linked to global trends in coal use,” he said.
Russia is one of the world’s biggest sources of methane from fossil fuel extraction. The country’s gas infrastructure, including production facilities and pipelines, is notoriously leaky despite calls for the government to take action.
Paul Bledsoe, a former White House adviser to Bill Clinton and now with the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC, said: “Deeply cutting methane is the only sure way to limit near-term temperatures and prevent runaway climate change, yet every month brings new evidence that Russia is hiding the world’s most massive and destructive methane leaks. Putin is desperately hiding these enormous emissions so he can continue to profit from sales of Russian coal, oil and gas and fund his war-making regime. But those nations like China who continue to buy Putin’s oil and gas are equally abetting his climate and war criminality.”
All underground coalmines produce methane, which can cause explosions if it builds up. A blast at the Raspadskaya mine in 2010 killed 66 people.
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Venting methane can be done for safety reasons. However, there are ways of capturing methane when it is produced at a high rate, or venting through oxidisation, so that it causes less harm to the climate.
Methane is about 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though it degrades in the atmosphere over about 20 years. In February, the International Energy Agency warned that most countries were under-reporting their methane emissions, and the true amounts pouring into the atmosphere were far greater than had been thought.
Recent studies have shown that cutting methane could be one of the fastest ways of holding down global temperature rises, and that sharp cuts now could prevent a rise of about 0.25C by 2050.
Durwood Zaelke, the president of the Washington-based Institute for Governance, said the Raspadskaya leak showed the urgent need for action. “It’s critical to set up a comprehensive satellite monitoring system for methane. We also need to deploy a system of incentives and sanctions that can remedy these emissions, focusing first on the super emitters,” he said.
The IEA also found that at current high gas prices, the cost of capturing methane was far less than the value of using it or selling it as a fuel source, which should give companies and governments an incentive to capture the gas rather than venting or flaring.
At the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow last November, more than 100 countries agreed to reduce their methane emissions by at least 30% by 2030. Russia was not among them, however.
GHGSat said it measured 13 distinct methane plumes, ranging in size from 658 to 17,994 kg an hour, from the mine. The discovery was made on 22 January, but the company took time to verify its findings and contact the operator of the mine, which has not responded.