
Fertilizer plants emit 100 times more methane than reported - rguiscard
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/06/190606183254.htm
======
estsauver
Actual paper here:
[https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358...](https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358/)

My conclusions:

* A carbon tax would be nice to incentivize accountability around net- greenhouse gas contributions.

* This paper does quite a bit of probabilistic inference here. They conclude, for example, that the ~two orders of magnitude difference in emissions implies the model is working. ( [https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358...](https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.358/elementa-7-358-g4.png?action=download) ) This isn't super surprising since they're trying to measure methane emissions ~a km away from the source, but should measure our expectations.

Also, the whole dataset is available here
([https://oneshare.cdlib.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.15146/R3WT2N](https://oneshare.cdlib.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.15146/R3WT2N))
if anyone is interested. Props to the authors for including it.

(Disclosure: My company buys quite a bit of inorganic fertilizer every year.
None of it is US sourced though as we're operating in subsaharan Africa.)

~~~
pjc50
If we can't have a carbon tax because of the politics, we should at least try
for a ban on fracking. Every molecule of gas extracted has to go somewhere,
either into the atmosphere directly or as CO2.

~~~
mikemotherwell
We shouldn't do anything in any direction without detailed comparisons.

[https://www.drawdown.org/](https://www.drawdown.org/) has a big list of
things that can be done, with the benefits of each in terms of cost and carbon
reduction. It would make most sense to work through the list. If you guessed
what number 1 is, you're a smarter human than I am!

[https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-
man...](https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-management)

~~~
perfunctory
> We shouldn't do anything in any direction without detailed comparisons.

I feel differently. We should do everything. All at the same time. We don't
have the luxury of time to pick and choose anymore.

Good that you brought up the drawdown project. Even the number 1 on their list
is "only" like about 5% of total ghg.

No single solution will be enough. So we need to try to do as much in as many
sectors as possible. Including fracking.

~~~
ryanmercer
>I feel differently. We should do everything. All at the same time. We don't
have the luxury of time to pick and choose anymore.

As much as it would incredibly suck (for convenience and variety in life) I
think we, as a species, need to completely abandon fossil fuels in the next 10
years. Sadly it'll never happen, we will be burning fossil fuels well past
seeing massive deaths from starvation/drought/unpredictable weather/food wars.

Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight.

~~~
perfunctory
> As much as it would incredibly suck (for convenience and variety in life)

The good news is that it wouldn't even suck. I don't think so. We are being
brainwashed (sorry, being informed about products and services via
advertisement) that car ownership is the best thing since the pill, and that
flying to a tech conference is a great experience. There are better (and much
less polluting) ways to have fun. I believe without the fossil industry we
will flourish and our quality of life will skyrocket.

~~~
ryanmercer
>The good news is that it wouldn't even suck.

It would for me. I work in international freight, I'd be unemployed. It looks
like my employer may have used 1.2 billion gallons of jet fuel alone last
year, if these figures are accurate
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/878539/fedex-express-
tot...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/878539/fedex-express-total-jet-
fuel-consumption/) \-- at 9.57kg of carbon per gallon that is 11,640,000
metric tons of carbon (again if the numbers are accurate) just from our planes
last year :(

We'd also be forced back to a (largely) pre 1950s-1960sish era level of tech
as devices started to die off simply because we currently don't have the means
of mining and moving goods globally on renewable energy at anywhere near
current levels. I'm mostly fine with this though, if I woke up tomorrow and
magic had made the computers/the internet/smartphones/e-readers disappear I'd
have a really rough few days then I'd be like "oh well, let's go outside or
down to the library, let me show these kids how a card catalog works".

~~~
hef19898
I am not sure that CO2 emissions and climate change will have any real impact
on the forwarding and freight industries. Global supply chains are so
specialized by now that going back to 100% local production simply isn't
feasible anymore, if it ever was. I guess supply chains, now being optimized
for cost, will optimize for emissions instead.

Which is also _the_ lever to go to net zero, make emissions of CO2 and such
expensive enough and the world will change.

That being said, done well a global supply chain can very well be more
efficient from a emissions perspective than a non-global one. The optimization
knowledge needed to achieve that is already there. So, all in all I guess
transportation of goods will even be more important going forward.

------
ptah
I can only imagine how badly this increases the environmental impact of meat
industry if this fertiliser is used to fertilise soy fed to beef cattle which
is hugely inefficient in providing protein to humans

~~~
Nasrudith
I suspect it could ironically help still - at least if compared to non-
fertilized resource useage.

------
gdubs
Worth noting that when you see EPA charts that show agriculture’s impact on
greenhouse gases, the _manufacturing_ of fertilizer is _not_ included. The
_application_ of fertilizer and any evaporation into the atmosphere is what’s
counted as “agriculture”. I get why the EPA separates things into categories,
but one effect of that is that agriculture’s true impact on climate change is
greatly misunderstood. In fact, so much of our society is shaped by how we
farm, and how food gets delivered to your plate — it’s why I believe changing
our agriculture is fundamental to solving climate change (practically speaking
through a price on carbon).

~~~
ectospheno
Fewer people on earth also fixes the problem. No, I am not advocating this.
However, we should be prepared for the countries with big armies and few
morals who stumble upon this particular solution once the situation becomes
more dire.

~~~
gdubs
Thing is, we kicked off climate change a long time ago. Even if we cut our
population in half, we’d still cook the planet at our 1970s levels of
emissions.

------
Robotbeat
Fertilizer is a MUCH better market for clean hydrogen production than cars.

~~~
alex_duf
You mean we should use hydrogen to produce fertilizer? Or producing hydrogen
as a by product of fertilizer?

I'm not too versed in that domain but I'm curious!

~~~
Symmetry
The first step making fertilizer is making ammonia. Amonia is made with the
Haber-Bosch[1] process by combining nitrogen with hydrogen. The hydrogen from
that is made by combining steam and natural gas to make hydrogen and carbon
monoxide[2]. The carbon from the natural gas ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere.
If there were more green way to produce hydrogen for a reasonable price that
would knock out a significant source of global CO2 emissions.

If solar power gets cheap enough maybe it'll make sense to use the excess
power at noon for electrolysis, though I don't have a good sense of the
capital costs for that.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process)

[2]h[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming)

~~~
Robotbeat
Indeed. Unlike cars which really want mechanical energy or electricity (with
hydrogen just being one way to provide that electricity... at lower efficiency
than battery-electric), fertilizer production already needs hydrogen, with
methane being an indirect way to provide that hydrogen.

Instead of trying to compete one-to-one against natural gas for thermal
applications or battery-electric for electric ones, you can compete on turf
that requires hydrogen fundamentally, saving the investment in a steam
reformer. So if you have hydrogen already, instead of needing an extra capital
investment (like a fuel cell in a fuel cell car), you actually can reduce
capital investment (the steam reformer).

Also, it's large and centralized (large, centralized hydrogen plants have a
cheaper relative capital cost and tend to be more efficient) and there are
even ammonia pipelines carrying the ammonia to the Midwest from Texas (with
world-class wind AND solar potential and plenty of land), so you don't have to
deal with hydrogen storage and distribution issues.

It's a way better spot for wind and solar produced hydrogen to compete than in
mobile fuel cell applications where you have to solve a bunch of other
problems (fuel cells, distribution, hydrogen storage cost and safety to the
uninvolved public, small electrolysis facilities with requisite lower
efficiency and higher specific capital cost) while simultaneously having to
compete with the low price of electricity and natural gas.

------
bamboozled
Wow, it took me a while to realize that this article is about fertilizer
factories and not about fertilizer (actual) plants.

The brain is funny sometimes and so is this title.

~~~
oever
I had the same confusion. Apparently the english name for natural fertilizer
plants is 'green manure'.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_manure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_manure)

------
awakeasleep
This is the kind of thing i expect from China, not the USA. I guess in some
ways our cultures are not so different after all

~~~
maxxxxx
i am surprised that you are surprised :)

------
brianbreslin
Its interesting they used the google street view cars to carry the methane
sensors. Anyone know what other sensors they might be carrying on street view
vehicles?

Similarly to how our own phones transmit data back to Waze for traffic info,
are there any other things that could be useful for us to attach to our
vehicles to record?

~~~
rtkwe
There's probably all sorts of interesting things that could be done to weather
and air quality monitoring if we had the low level local data points from
every car on the road. It'd be way easier to catch smaller or intermittent
polluters for example.

~~~
cududa
They don’t share the raw data, but there are a number of projects/ third-
parties they partner with that share sanitized/ cleaned up data:
[https://www.google.com/earth/outreach/special-
projects/air-q...](https://www.google.com/earth/outreach/special-projects/air-
quality/)

This methane discovery was a result of this project

~~~
rtkwe
Yeah, I was imagining that on an even wider array of cars though, imagine the
resolution and constant pollution monitoring we could get if the same sensors
were on 1-10% of cars?

------
Joe-Z
So, how does this relate to our predictions about global warming? Anyone here
who has insights on that?

~~~
pjc50
I think this is both good news and bad news.

Most of the global warming work is based off the amount of methane estimated
to be in the atmosphere, which can be determined with sampling and
spectroscopy. This particular piece of research tells us where some of that is
coming from, and fortunately it's from a few concentrated sites that are under
human control. We could lean on them to fix it. Chemical processing sites
already try to control methane leakage because it's explosive in air.

The bad news is that we probably won't. We have enough trouble with flaring:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-
fife-4...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-
fife-48051005) (my pet complaint, not only because it's a nuisance but because
they've wasted in a year as much gas as I personally will use in 50,000 years,
which makes reducing my personal consumption seem a bit pointless)

(
[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=((38747+tonnes+*+50MJ%...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=\(\(38747+tonnes+*+50MJ%2Fkg\)+in+kwh\)+%2F+10000kwh))
)

~~~
Joe-Z
Thank you for taking the time to write up some conclusions!

>... makes reducing my personal consumption seem a bit pointless

Although I try to not to be wasteful also I get this feeling a lot that in
climate change matters the actions that individuals can set are far outweighed
by consistently applied systemic changes. Makes it kind of frustrating to try
to save the earth :)

~~~
perfunctory
Apart from absolute emission reductions, we shouldn't underestimate the
cultural and political impacts of individual actions. Individual actions are
also a form of political pressure. Don't get frustrated.

~~~
nashashmi
Right! And let's all consider this karma. The more you waste the more the
world heats up. The more effecient you become the more ideas you have on how
to make market decisions towards efficiency.

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DigitalVerse
All the incentives are in all the wrong places. No surprise, self-regulation
isn't working. (But still very disappointing.)

