The Energy Transfer site, located near the city of Shreveport, is named as the biggest single “super emitter” in new rankings of US oil and gas operations for the largest releases of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is rapidly overheating our planet, according to a new UCLA study, which is based on satellite data.
From January 2025 to June this year, the Shreveport facility spewed out methane at an average emission rate of 1.56 tonnes an hour, which is 15 times larger than the threshold defined in a Biden era program by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a super emitter event, according to the study. The Trump administration has put implementation of that program on hold but climate experts and advocates say reducing methane emissions is vital to limit the climate crisis.
OK. Probably non-optimal. But, erm, 13,000 tonnes a year. US emissions are 25 million tonnes. 0.05%.
Horrors.
And global emissions are 610 million tonnes a year.
Does this include the methane emitted by rotting vegetation? That must be in gigatons.per annum.
To add context dairy cows in the UK together fart out more than 10 times this mass of methane.
True, but cows are just an added station on the methane cycle, they do not add to the methane total.
Methane doesn’t last long in the wild, it turns into CO2 and H2O. A big SO WHAT?
How about combining CH4 and NO2 and winding up with H2O and HCN? 😉
Happens in the stratosphere and higher up…
Or in smog…..
The HCN has a *really* short half-life, so it’s never more than a trace gas, really..
It’s one of the ways “abiotic” basic sugars ( needed for R/DNA.. ) and amino acids are created..
And how much is that leakage compared to the actual transfered quantity? It’s like usual bleating about millions of gallons of water leakage without mentioning the trillions of gallons of water supplied.
The Americans don’t emit a tonne [sic] of anything.
That’s not actually true. The US does most of its meaningful calculations in metric. It just converts into Imperial for public consumption
Problem you Yanks have is you don’t understand the system you’re using. Take weights. There’s three weight bands. Up to a pound. Up to a hundredweight & tons. All based on w/2 or wx2 for easy calculation. Each band having its own accuracy requirement. Yet you lot will quote an airliner’s weight in pounds. It’s impossible & unnecessary to weigh an airliner in pounds. That would depend on the colour of the paint it was sprayed with.
I’ve actually weighed aircraft. It is a fiddly job (or was, they use three smart jacks nowadays). Our helicopters were weighed with a spring scale on a hook. Then to determine the CG which is what really mattered. You level it on two axes with weights and a spirit level. The answer was in pounds and inches from datum. You use pounds even in a big airliner because all the items in a weight and balance calculation are in pounds (passengers, fuel, cargo) and distance from CG in inches. It’s quite important to get it right so consistent units are used to avoid any conversion which might introduce error. And that last is the clue. It doesn’t matter a toss which system you use as long as you are consistent. Metric has many traps.. Imperial, being quirky but empirical, has fewer. The essential factor is knowing what you are doing.
(That went on longer than I planned).
That’s rather different. You’re not quoting an airliner weight for the catalogue.
You used pounds & inches for doing that? Some sort of military perversion? I’m used to working in both systems & can cross convert in my head. But for all important measurements I use metric. It’s less problems when you’re doing weight/volume/dimensions.
Imperial’s better for practical things. Base 12 for measurements on the fly. w/2 for measuring quantities to use.
Aircraft weights are always in pounds or KG. You might see 100-ton airliner in a news item, but that’s kinda like olympic swimming pools or wing areas the size of Wales, not for serious use. I suppose the metric people can easily translate KG to tonnes, but the way to work is stick to the same unit throughout the calculation and only convert at the end.
According to AI Airbus quotes weights in tonnes in the brochure but KG and pounds in technical manuals. Smaller aircraft always quote in the smaller units.
Inexplicably Airbus and Boeing do not seem to have me on their mailing lists for brochures.X.
Metric is an open system. You can write a weight as 2400kg or 2.4 tn. Pounds implies accuracy to the nearest pound. It’s a ridiculous measure for the weight. Like measuring the length of a football pitch in inches.
The whole point of Imperial is the measures are appropriate for what’s being measured.
Interesting.
I’ve been on a few commercial flights that weren’t anywhere near full and they spaced us around and told us on pain of death to to move seats until we’d taken off and the seat belt lights turned off.
I guessed it was based on something like that.
CG is important. You don’t want it out of whack.
I’ve actually weighed aircraft. It is a fiddly job
Of all the things I wish I could say, this would be in my top 20. ‘Fiddly’ is especially good.
As usual, I notice that they’re quoting “climate experts”, not “some climate experts” or “the climate experts we like”.
I once quizzed a “climate expert”. Had he used infra-red spectroscopy in a lab? No. Had he done much temperature measurement in the lab or “in the wild”. No. Had he any practical knowledge of radiative heat transfer e.g. furnace calculations? No. Had he done mathematical modelling of physico-chemical interactions beyond “the climate”. No. Had he done any fluid mechanical modelling? No. Had he developed any finite element methods for solving partial differential equations? No. Had he even taken ordinary weather readings e.g. using a rain gauge and a Stevenson screen containing a max-min thermometer. No. And, anent ocean temperatures, had he ever hauled aboard a bucket of sea water (which is how it used to be done)? No.
In that case, says I, in what sense are you a climate expert? “I’ve looked at the records”.
“Oh, have you done some original work applying statistics to analysing observational data?” You know his answer. Buncha frauds. Utter frauds.
Ships now have hull temperature sensors to measure sea temps. I once had to replace one that was accessed by lowering myself into a compartment that had recently contained molasses. (It was docked at Tate & Lyall’s plant at Silvertown.) Although it had been flushed out it was still very sticky and I came out looking like a toffee apple.
I have to wonder how accurate those are since they’re measuring water that’s recently been in contact with a large heat emitter, i.e. the ship itself.
It matters because apparently they’re quoting temperatures supposedly accurate to 0.01C.
I think you’ll find that’s the result of averaging multiple measurements. Anyone who’s operated in the real world knows that does not increase accuracy. The accuracy is still to same as doing a single measurement.
“Never mind the accuracy, feel the resolution!”
That would only matter if both ship and sea were static.
They’re not so you’ll get friction heating.
In practice 0.1deg is only found in cryogenic labs. Temperatures are never static to that degree & still be measurable.
In my day sea temperature was only reported to the nearest degree, same as air temperatures.
I don’t know about big ships but on yachts it’s at the bow about and part of the depths transponder so measuring the sea temperature and not hull temperature.
Did anyone try to lick you?
Sadly, nobody wants to lick the stick.
A lot of the experts seem to come from geography and meteorology rather than physics or mathematics.
Methane quickly breaks down in the atmosphere – average 8 years – into CO2 and water. The CO2 is then captured by plants.
More nonsense.
Even faster if you flare it off. Like they show in the fucking picture.
You can’t hate journalizards enough.
With some math it looks like that’s about 150,000 head of cattle’s worth. There’s over 2 million head in Montana.
It’s rather fewer if you counted it in terms of emissions from Gruniad columnists. Perhaps it’s fortunate there’s not that many of them.
ISTR reading that cattle are put in the shade by the methane output of the world’s termites…
And the termites by the word’s bacteria.
Essentially all the biotic emissions of methane come from bacteria digesting cellulose and other plant materials. The bacteria may reside in the guts of ruminants or termites, or be free range.
Yes, but the free bacteria in the soil outweigh the termites by orders of magnitude.
It’s something the environ-nutters never get. All vegetation will be digested with an associated methane release. So it doesn’t matter what’s doing the digesting. The only way to stop the process is sterilisation.
Sorta true. Ruminants, termites, anaerobic digestion of cellulose, yes, CH4 is always one of the outputs. Aerobic digestion, no. The process leaps to CO2 and H20 directly. So, in topsoil, leaf litter and so on – and, I think, funghi – no CH4. On the other hand CH4 is only a partway stage to the decade later degradation to CO2 and H2O anyway, but there’s still that decade etc difference between the two routes.
Methane is an energy source if burned or otherwise combined with oxygen. That would mean that the biota producing this methane need to step up and take advantage, or Darwin has some explainin’ to do.
It’s okay, M. We ‘Mericans killed off 3 million bison to pay forward for our raising of cattle.