Is the Biden administration’s priority on reducing methane emissions from oil and gas operations a wise move or a distraction from the more important goal of controlling carbon dioxide emissions? It’s not an easy question, despite a lot of buzz around methane reductions, claiming that action harvests (here’s the cliché) “low-hanging fruit.”
Touting the program, EPA claims that methane is “a climate ‘super pollutant’ that is more potent than carbon dioxide and responsible for approximately one third of the warming from greenhouse gases occurring today. The oil and natural gas sector is the largest industrial source of methane emissions in the United States. Quick reduction of these methane emissions is one of the most important and cost-effective actions the United States can take in the short term to slow the rate of rapidly rising global temperatures.”
The Environmental Protection Agency Jan. 12 announced a sliding scale of emission fees for methane emissions, under provisions of the administration’s flagship Inflation Reduction Act climate legislation. The purpose of the “waste emissions charge” is to give industry sources of the chemical, the main component of natural gas, incentives to reduce “fugitive” emissions from wells, pipelines, and storage facilities. When burned in natural gas fueled power plants, a result is CO2 emissions considerably lower than emissions from coal CO2 emissions for the same heat input.
When leaked into the atmosphere, the simple chemical CH4 is more powerful in trapping heat, calculated at 80 times more powerful, than CO2. But methane breaks down more quickly, within 20 years.
The fees fill in the details of an administration methane reduction program unveiled last December. In that announcement, EPA said it would impose a methane fee, based on a “social cost of carbon” determination of $190/tonne (metric ton), a figure the administration unveiled at COP 28 in Dubai.
The social cost of carbon is a wildly controversial estimate which is used to evaluate various control programs. The higher the cost, the easier it becomes to justify stringent controls. As the New York Times recounted, the Obama administration used $42/tonne as its benchmark carbon control cost. The Trump administration lowered the cost to $5/tonne (essentially ruling out any economic justification for controlling greenhouse gases). The Biden White House quickly increased the figure to $51/tonne when it came into office.
Under the EPA fee schedule, as described in an EPA news release, starts at $900 per tonne of “wasteful emissions” this year, increasing to $1,200 for 2025, and $1,500 for 2026 and beyond. EPA defines “wasteful” as “emissions that exceed the statutorily specified levels.”
The EPA move against methane has won widespread praise. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said, “We know methane is over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in our atmosphere in the short term. Thankfully, the Methane Emissions Reduction Program – which Congress adopted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act – will incentivize producers to cut wasteful and excessive methane emissions during oil and gas production.”
Fred Krupp, longtime head of the Environmental Defense Fund, said, “It’s common sense to hold oil and gas companies accountable for this pollution. Proven solutions to cut oil and gas methane and to avoid the fee are being used by leading companies in states across the country.”
Could the administration’s methane program be a diversion away from the more important policy of CO2 reductions? American geophysicist and climate expert Raymond Pierrehumbert at Oxford University, makes that case in a December interview in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (‘Mass delusion and wishful thinking’: Why everything you think you know about methane is probably wrong). He is a member of the magazine’s “Science and Security Board.”
Pierrehumbert notes that “the standard way that companies claim credit for their methane emissions reductions is to use a carbon dioxide equivalent number. And what’s come into favor is this figure based on 20 years, which is what gets you methane is 80 times [as potent as carbon dioxide].” He says that’s a flawed way to define methane emissions, “introduced as an example of how to do a comparison, and not as something people should actually use to make decisions. Nonetheless it stuck.”
That means “there is no true equivalence between carbon dioxide emissions and methane emissions, because the climate responds in different ways to a short-lived gas than to a long-lived gas. If you put a kilogram of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it has a warming effect that lasts millennia. You put a kilogram of methane in the atmosphere, the warming effect will disappear almost entirely after 20 years.”
For the climate, says Pierrehumbert, a kilogram of methane in the air doesn’t last beyond 20 years, while a kilo of CO2 “has a warming effect that lasts millennia…. So any equivalence that says that a certain mass of methane is equivalent to this other mass of carbon dioxide, one megaton of methane is worth a certain number of megatons of carbon dioxide, anything like that is going to distort the climate response.”
The 80X assertion, he says, is “a cognitive flaw. It’s what is called a stock versus flow problem. So methane is a flow pollutant; it doesn’t accumulate in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a stock pollutant—the harm is determined by the cumulative stock of it in the atmosphere. And people are seduced by this 80 times worse over 20 years, because they think, you know, 20 years, that’s the time scale we have to do something about.”
It’s a methodological trap, he says. The amount of warming avoided by huge reductions in methane is significant. “But it’s not significant compared to how much warming we’re going to get in 100 years, if we don’t decarbonize.”
–Kennedy Maize