Natural gas is already stored in enormous quantities, and shipped around the world. Leakage appears to happen mostly in transit, or at poorly maintained installations. My guess is, it's a solvable problem.
The industry provided (self reported) estimates of linkage is a little over 1%. The realistic value is over 2% and is at the point that coal and natural gas are likely equally bad for the environment given our current infrastructure.
Carbon neutral is a useful feature but doesn’t solve that problem.
I will say I am a fan of carbon neutral methane in place of the efforts to move to hydrogen combustion (this is a thing) and hydrogen for fuel cells since there isn’t a commercially viable carbon neutral version of that yet.
Making existing methane infrastructure cleaner and less leaky is better, in my mind, in the path to solar/wind/nuclear electrification than trying to capture the emissions of coal or retool petroleum infrastructure into hydrogen.
I agree we can do it. It just has to be done. Aka give the EPA some teeth and require actual monitoring and enforcement rather than a self reported fantasy.
Exactly. Sure we can do it but the better question is are there any incentives to do any of it ?
The fact that there isn't and that we would have to create one through some sort of government policy should be worrying, especially now that we know that enforcement is in general the government asking a branch of industry to self-regulate... and that's exactly what's happening right now with the natural gas industry and its leaks.
> Carbon neutral is a useful feature but doesn’t solve that problem.
Uh... yes it does? A fossil-fuel free fuel production process that loses 2% to the atmosphere is still fifty times lower-impact (when considering output energy -- obviously production costs are different) than one that pulls 100% out of the ground.
See the video I linked or the other commenters with references that Methane is a higher contributor to global warming than CO2 by 30x. It’s not about the carbon removed, it’s about the methane leaked.
Even granting that number (and the 2% loss above), Terraform still wins. It's just math, sorry.
I mean, sure: this might be bad on balance. But it's starting from a position of overwhelming assumed advantage. You need to come to the table with analysis actually showing it's bad, and all you have is "it's only about twice as good and not 50x better".
Remember that “at least 2%” is what we know. We don’t know the real number because it’s self reported and reconnaissance show it’s over 2%. The EPA needs to actually audit and find the real values. It could be 3, 4, 5 percent, etc and work out just fine economically. LNG has a 5% overhead before you even ship it.
Working on the margins of climate improvement is not worthwhile when billions of dollars to change the means of production are on the line.
Also, this has nothing to do with this company. This is not their responsibility. They should definitely do what they’re doing, but it doesn’t solve the root problem here of leaking methane into the atmosphere.
The totality of leaked methane is not just the pipeline. There’s the last mile, LNG distribution, and accidents that are not part of that number.
Operating on “but it’s .5% better” is very shaky when past predictions of huge improvements in the climate, and then zero real oversight, is how we got here in the first place. See Obama term 1 embracing fracking vs Obama term 2 expressing concern vs Biden term 1 restricting further expansion due to the environmental impact.
As others said, it mostly makes sense as seasonal energy storage. You could have these Terraform installations at storage sites, and also gas power plants in the same place.
Solvable, yes, but at least in Europe it is currently dirtier than anthracite coal due to leakages in lifetime emissions. Solvable but not solved, and we really should be looking for solutions.
