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Natural gas production in the United States has increased 46 percent since 2006, but there has been no significant increase of total US methane emissions and only a modest increase from oil and gas activity, according to a new NOAA study.
The finding is important because it's based on highly accurate measurements of methane collected over 10 years at 20 long-term sampling sites around the country in NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, said lead author Xin Lan, a CIRES scientist working at NOAA.
"We analyzed a decade's worth of data and while we do find some increase in methane downwind of oil and gas activity, we do not find a statistically significant trend in the US for total methane emissions," said Lan. The study was published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters.
[...] Methane is a component of natural gas, but it can also be generated by biological sources, such as decaying wetland vegetation, as a byproduct of ruminant digestion, or even by termites. Ethane is a hydrocarbon emitted during oil and natural gas production and is sometimes used as a tracer for oil and gas activity. By measuring ethane, which is not generated by biologic processes, scientists had hoped to produce an accurate estimate of petroleum-derived methane emissions.
A bit of good news.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 17 2019, @01:34PM (3 children)
> ... oil fields are getting better at burning off the natural gas plumes,...
A friend who started out as a motor racing engineer has moved into an academic research position at one of the Ivy league schools. One of his projects is an IC engine designed to run on the natural gas that is normally flared (burned) in the gas & oil well fields. Turns out that gas straight from the well is pretty nasty, would normally get some treatment before it could be turned into normal natural gas fuel. The other reason it is normally flared off is there usually are no pipelines near new wells.
The hope is that by burning this gas (otherwise wasted) in a genset, they can generate enough electricity to be useful--and it's a lot easier to add electricity to the grid with some temporary wires, than to add pipelines into the natural gas system.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday May 17 2019, @06:34PM (2 children)
That's a good idea!
Personally I'd love to see a huge carbon tax on flaring (and a much larger tax on venting without flaring) to shut the process down completely, rather than just throwing away valuable resources at a huge environmental impact, but I imagine that would be hard to bill effectively. If they can make converting it to electricity on-site cost effective that would at least help considerably.
I wonder though just how cheap it would have to be to be cost effective - my impression is that most of the worst offenders are far from any electrical demand remotely on the same scale as the energy being wasted, so it wouldn't just be "some temporary power lines", but massive, long-range power lines, with the substantial costs and energy losses that incurs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 17 2019, @10:50PM (1 child)
From memory, they were thinking about something based on a small block Chevy V-8. Say a conservative 200 shaft horsepower or something in the range of 150 KW out of the generator. P = VA, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_distribution#Rural_services [wikipedia.org] says that a common rural distribution voltage is 34.5 kV in USA. That's something just over 4 amps, not a lot of current, but you do need high wires on decent insulators.
I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard to get a local power company to string wires for this, more difficult might be getting the electric company to pay you for your contribution to their grid--and taking away some of their revenue from their generating station(s).
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday May 18 2019, @12:41AM
>I'm guessing it wouldn't be too hard to get a local power company to string wires for this,
Oh, I'm sure. Provided you're willing to pay for them. High-tension lines, which is what you'd want for moving large amounts of power, apparently cost about $400,000 per mile. Low-voltage residential lines apparently run about $125,000-$250,000 per mile (e.g. if you want your new ranch house connected to the grid). Probably not going to pay for itself very quickly...
On the other hand, it sounds sounds like 100-150kW is roughly what it takes to operate a typical well pad, so that might actually be very handy, no power lines required - just use the gas to power the well to pump the oil. The real question is how much natural gas is flared off from a typical well? I couldn't find that directly, but some estimates:
North Dakota:
527 million cubic feet flared per day -- https://www.grandforksherald.com/business/energy-and-mining/4548181-north-dakota-natural-gas-flaring-hits-record-high-improvement [grandforksherald.com]
North Dakota has 15,000 oil wells -- https://www.americanexperiment.org/2018/09/gusher-north-dakota-four-times-oil-estimated/ [americanexperiment.org]
So, 527e6/15e3 = 35,000 cubic feet per day, per well. And 1 cubic foot of natural gas contains about 0.3kWh of energy.
So, an average ND well is flaring gas at a rate of 440 kW of chemical energy. Figure 33% efficiency, and that would be just about 150kW. That could actually work out quite nicely, have each well mostly power itself with only a trickle of power needed between them to balance out the imperfections.