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Damage Report: LA Methane Leak Is One of the Worst Disasters In US History (inhabitat.com)
MikeChino writes: A week after the ruptured natural gas well in Aliso Canyon was finally declared sealed, we have a full account of the damage — and it doesn't look good. In total, 97,100 metric tons of methane were released into the atmosphere over the course of 112 days — the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of over half a million cars.
From reading TFA, they say its the equivalent of a half million cars for a whole year.
There are 253 million cars in the US on the road. So 0.2% of the total. What a calamity.
But this did take action. They started draining the reservoir straight away. This reduced the loss rate and the pressure behind the leak which then gave them the ability to cap it. It really isn't that easy to do. As for the size of the leak the total loss is equivalent to around 5 Billion cubic feet (that is the normal measurement not tonnes), this compares to a US production rate of around 2,400 billion cubic feet per month.
It is still the worst methane leak in american history but it is far from as bad as some are making out.
Have a read of this - http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...
Right. And if you follow through the links, you'll find a statement that the leak was the equivalent of "burning 300 million gallons of gasoline." That's a nice round number, and I'd bet they rounded up.
/13476 = 445236 cars. So that was dishonestly rounded up.
Even so, that's 600 gallons for each of those 500,000 cars. New cars and light trucks get around 23 mpg, so let's say 20 mpg average when including older ones. That's 12,000 miles per car. US DOT says the average miles driven per year is 13476, so they're overstating the equivalence. 300,000,000 * 20 = 6,000,000,000 miles,
Looking at it another way, the EIA says the US consumed, "In 2014, about 136.78 billion gallons..." So, that leak was equivalent to less than 0.22% of US gasoline consumption. That seems to be a more honest indication of the scale.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
... link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements. Not even close.
The Guardian addresses several of your errors interpreting this graph in this article. Perhaps the biggest error is the implication that the models predict specific temperature rises over time. In reality, the projections all included error bounds which, if included, would have show a very different picture.
I will note that those error bounds were pretty broad back in 1990. And that newer models are narrowing those bounds.
Last, a quotation from the article: "The 1990–2012 data have been shown to be consistent with the [1990 IPCC report] projections, and not consistent with zero trend from 1990"
"One of the worst disasters in US history"? Cows and other livestock release 238 million metric tons of methane per year [source]. The estimated 97,100 metric tons from this leak amounts to a whopping 0.04% of that amount.
No they didn't sit around for 6 months twiddling their thumbs. This leak and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill weren't like a leaky pipe under your kitchen sink. Poke a straw into a kid's juice box, then sit on the box. The juice will squirt out the straw. Now imagine 1.5 miles of dirt sitting on top of the box (or in the Deepwater Horizons spill, 2.5 miles of dirt + a mile of water). That's the amount of pressure you're trying to counteract. Any cap you try to put on from the top (at the end of the straw) is pretty much guaranteed to be blown off, destroying the top of the straw in the process. (Which is what happened with this gas leak. They made 7 attempts to cap it from the top, and all they managed to do was create a 25 ft crater.) .
The only sure way to fix it is to drill a relief well which intercepts the leaking well (straw) deep underground (a challenging engineering feat in itself), and cap it from below by injecting concrete. The concrete gets carried up by the outflowing fluid, but the weight of the concrete column (plug) extending up to the surface is what counteracts the pressure. Eventually there's enough pressure from the concrete column that the escaping fluid is at atmospheric pressure at the top, and the outflow ceases. You've plugged the leak. The problem being drilling a relief well takes time, more than drilling a normal well since you need to stop every so often, pull everything out, send instruments down, and take measurements to make sure you're still on track to intercept the leaking well. And you want to drill several relief wells so if the first one misses you're not starting over from scratch.
Incidentally, SoCal Gas petitioned to light the methane on fire. Burning methane (CH4) produces CO2 and 2 H2O. But each molecule of methane is about 30x more potent as a greenhouse gas than each molecule of CO2, so you're actually reducing the environmental damage considerably by burning the methane. Oil wells and refineries regularly burn off the methane that percolates out because until a few years ago when oil (energy) prices skyrocketed to $100/bbl, it wasn't worth the cost to capture it. California state regulators denied their request, worried the fire could get out of control.
Please understand, I'm not trying to give SoCal Gas a free pass here. They removed the surface safety valve on the well because it was leaking, and didn't bother replacing it because it wasn't near anything important. Best guess right now is the casing or a valve further down failed due to age. So the cause is probably failure to maintain the well and equipment.
This is slashdot, it's ok to change your mind based on new evidence
Roy Spencer is indeed a "climate scientist" and a specialist in creating misleading graphs and statements about that particular set of sattelite data (UAH lower troposhpere temps). He is well known as a religiously motivated climate denier and is quite likely the author of the red-herring you just posted. I have used scare quotes on the phrase "climate scientist" because IMO someone who signs the Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming just doesn't have the skill set that Science requires.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This is slashdot, it's ok to change your mind based on new evidence
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.