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Giant Methane Leak in California Won't Be Capped For Months
Motherboard takes a look at the ongoing leak from a deep well in Southern California, and the engineering challenges that mean it won't be stopped for a while. From Motherboard's report:
An enormous amount of harmful methane gas is currently erupting from an energy facility in Aliso Canyon, California, at a startling rate of 110,000 pounds per hour. The gas, which carries with it the stench of rotting eggs, has led to the evacuation 1,700 homes so far. Many residents have already filed lawsuits against the company that owns the facility, the Southern California Gas Company. ... Part of the problem in stopping the leak lies in the base of the well, which sits 8,000 feet underground. Pumping fluids down into the will, usually the normal recourse, just isn't working, said [copmany spokesperson Anne] Silva. Workers have been "unable to establish a stable enough column of fluid to keep the force of gas coming up from the reservoir." The company is now constructing a relief well that will connect to the leaking well, and hopefully provide a way to reduce pressure so the leak can be plugged.
As the article notes, methane is an especially noxious gas in a figurative as well as literal sense; while it spends less time in the atmosphere than does CO2, it is more effective at trapping heat.
Look at the prevailing atmospheric vorticity of the area, place a bunch of counter-vorticity-inducing stators around the biggest leak (just a few percent cant on them is sufficient) and light it up. The updraft will pull air in through the stators inducing continuous vorticity that will form a fire tornado miles into the atmosphere, totally oxidizing the methane and anything else that might burn in the gas.
Once the fuel supply is cut off, the vortex may be self-sustaining due to the temperature difference between the ground and the upper troposphere. This is known as an Atmospheric Vortex Engine.
To turn it off, you turn the stators straight in thereby removing the vorticity and the vortex structure dissipates into a normal updraft.
Seastead this.
It's a disasterous waste of a resource and many people have had to be evacuated, possibly for months. Why isn't there a serious response on the federal level instead of expecting the company to do whatever they can with their own resources? A spill in the gulf was dealt with on such a level.
Assuming it's pure methane, that would be ~23k BTU/lb, or about 2.5B BTU/hour.
At around $1.80 per Million BTU, that's about $4,500 worth of gas leaking out per hour. About $3.2M/month.
Not good, by any means, but I think dollars puts it into better scale.
I don't read AC A human right
They are probably waiting for the price to go up. There are wells all over the Midwest that have been prepped for drilling but not drilled, or drilled but not fracked, or fracked but are being held idle, because the economics of their existence was calculated on $80+/barrel oil. The companies are letting them sit hoping the price goes up so they can make more. It's easy to project how long this is worth doing given a certain amount of volatility in the price and the fact that demand will always be there, in fact, the current glut of NG in North America means applications are being converted to run NG, possibly boosting the coming price upswing.
So this is a storage well for natural gas, right.
Is that anything like the proposed storage wells for captured carbon dioxide? Sequestering billions of tons of carbon dioxide in undrerground in deep wells so it doesn't get into the atmosphere and cause trouble?
Methane is lighter than air and disperses quickly -- in fact it goes to the upper atmosphere where it causes the problems that it causes. So this light gas which isn't particularly toxic hangs around long enough for it's impurities to force the evacuation of 1700 homes. Now what would happen if a CO2 storage facility would have a similar blowout, of a gas that is very heavy and creeps along the ground and kills people in houses (and livestock) instead of just stinking them out?
And unlike nuclear waste that is dangerous for thousands of years, carbon dioxide is deadly forever.
Is it really such a great idea to consider storage and capture?
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
and distinctly (distinkly?) different from H2S (which could masquerade as flatulence).
Very different from H2S. H2S is highly toxic and tricks your brain into thinking that you don't need to breath. It has some even better bonus features. At high concentrations (50ppm) it paradises your sense of smell so if you step into a H2S cloud you can get an instant whiff and then think you're back in the clear even though you're at great risk of death.
Methyl Mercaptan doesn't paralyse your sense of smell, but it is also far more toxic. However stench (as it is called in the industry) is detectable in concentrations of 1ppb so you need only a tiny tiny fraction of the stuff to dose your consumer gas, and at that concentration it's quite safe for everyone except for the people working at sites which use it ... and their office workers ... and their families. Had a funny story from a mechanic who drew the short straw to overhaul a stench pump at our work. He walked into the office a day after still smelling and complaining that despite having 3 showers he was still sleeping on the couch and the dog is in his bed with the wife. We all would have laughed but we were holding our breath so we didn't need to smell him.