The whole idea that switching from coal to gas is bad for the environment because of methane emissions always smelt a bit dubious for exactly this reason: coal mining emits lots of methane.
"Methane (CH4) emissions from coal mining and abandoned coal mines accounted for about 8% of total U.S. methane emissions in 2019. It was the fifth-largest methane-emitting sector"
Great for CO2 emissions, not so great for climate change. Several recent studies have found that methane emissions from natural gas extraction and operations make natural gas as bad for the climate as coal, at least over the next few decades. Methane drops out of the atmosphere much faster than CO2, but is also a much stronger greenhouse gas.
> The fossil-fuel industry is understood to be one of the biggest sources of atmospheric methane, primarily due to leaks from the production of oil and gas.
> However, a new paper published in the Journal of Cleaner Production suggests that coal mining may actually be a bigger contributor to levels of the greenhouse gas, with emissions set to grow considerably in the coming years.
Isn't coal and coal mining part of the fossil fuel industry?
Natural gas is methane, to a good first approximation, but if your plant is emitting methane, it means your plant is not operating efficiently. Natural gas power plants burn methane, producing CO2 and water.
Edit: if you're talking about production leaks, coal mines emit methane, too, and there's not even a token amount of effort to stop it, nor any incentive to do so. With gas production, every cubic meter that leaks is a cubic meter you don't get to sell.
Note that coal mines are currently the 5th largest methane emitters. However, that would certainly go up a lot if natural gas were replaced with coal.
The number 1 methane emitter, by a fair amount, is still "enteric fermentation" (i.e., farts and burps).
Not too that this table does not include all the naturally-produced methane resulting from the normal rotting of vegetation and non-domestic animal manure. I would almost bet that exceeds even the enteric fermentation.
Yes, the numbers for methane pollution in both coal and oil extraction are entirely untrustworthy, and a headline comparing them is just clickbait.
That said, methane emission associated with coal extraction is very large, and is another good reason (piled on the rest) to put an earlier stop to it.
Methane that has been burned to convert it to CO2 is much less bad of a greenhouse gas than methane that has been allowed to just float off into the atmosphere.
Perhaps counterintuitive given how much we usually go around saying burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment, but the science is sound.
Coal leaks methane too. A while ago there were people here pointing that even more than natural gas; I'm not convinced, but both are on the same ballpark.
Anyway, methane is a short term problem. It's CO2 that is long term.
Actually even worse as it would get converted into much more potent GHG - mostly methane.
The oil and coal only happen when organic matter is subjected to pressure and non-porous geological layers. Otherwise you get peat fields and those emit methane.
Burning coal is overall much worse for the environment and people, but in terms of climate change, it might not be much better than coal. The CO2 emissions from a natural gas plant are lower than a coal plant, but it isn't clear that if you account for methane releases during production/transporting/storage that it is better for climate change than coal.
>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas. We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned. But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25. ...The IPCC reports that, over a 20-year time frame, methane has a global warming potential of 86 compared to CO2, up from its previous estimate of 72. Given that we are approaching real, irreversible tipping points in the climate system, climate studies should, at the very least, include analyses that use this 20-year time horizon. Finally, it bears repeating that natural gas from even the best fracked wells is still a climate-destroying fossil fuel. If we are to avoid catastrophic warming, our natural gas consumption has to peak sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, according to studies by both the Center for American Progress and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
As we use more and more natural gas, we can expect more and more methane disasters like the leak from Aliso Canyon in CA which was the largest methane leak in US history. This released over 100,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere and required 11,000 residents to be evacuated.
Yes. The comparisons of CO2 output aside, methane mining is increasingly being shown to be a major contributor to methane in the atmosphere. Being a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, we need to minimise the production of methane, rather than increase it. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/26/what-is-...
Across the US, a major, uncontrolled leak of a potent greenhouse gas is going unregulated and largely unnoticed.
Climate Home News analysis of government data has identified roughly 300 active and 200 abandoned coal mines, which are the source of almost one-tenth of US methane pollution.
Methane has 34 times the long-term warming effect of carbon dioxide and accounts for 10% of US greenhouse gas emissions. Its emissions from the oil and gas industry and the efforts of the Trump administration to roll back regulations on them have been widely publicised.
Meanwhile, US coal mines released 60.5 MMTCO2e of methane in 2016, with roughly the same warming impact as 13 million cars. Efforts to control the problem are being hampered despite those with the technical expertise claiming a whole industry could be built on capturing these emissions and turning them into electricity.
Quite so. Think of CH4 as sort of half way between burning coal and burning Hydrogen. Methane and ethane generate about 14 to 15 kg of Carbon emissions per gigajoule of energy released in combustion, compared to 18 for gas/kerosene and 37 for coal. So switching from coal to natural gas has a giant impact on carbon emissions (cutting them by more than half for the same energy use) while switching from gasoline to natural gas still reduces emissions by more than 20% (and that doesn't factor in the emissions due to refining, which are significant).
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