Some small steps in the fight against GHG emissions. BP is making strides while US oil companies continue to argue against the reality of climate change.
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October 22, 2009, 11:10 am
Keeping Natural Gas in Pipelines, Not Air
By Andrew C. Revkin

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009...-air/

The Environmental Protection Agency issued its latest report on the Methane to Markets program intended to encourage industries to capture “fugitive” emissions of the one heat-trapping greenhouse gas that is a valuable fuel, methane. (Nearly all of natural gas is methane.) The illustration above shows the emissions captured so far in international partnerships and those identified but not yet pursued. The gains are substantial, and — as we reported recently — often profitable. But there is still huge untapped potential for capturing emissions from gas wells, oil tanks, coal mines, landfills, livestock operations and other sources. If you missed it the last time around, click on the video here to see these leaks, which are normally invisible but are clearly revealed thanks to infrared photography. Michael Schlesinger, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, noted when he saw the images how they powerfully illustrated just how potent methane was as a greenhouse gas. The opacity to infrared wavelengths that makes it visible to such cameras is the property that causes it to trap radiation that would otherwise head toward space. In essence, this technology is kind of akin to the thought experiment in which I mused on whether the climate challenge would be easier to grasp if CO2 were pink.

While the Obama administration has delayed issuing rules requiring oil and gas companies to tally the amount of methane escaping around the country, other forces are likely to start pressing industry to move more aggressively to cut such emissions. One is pressure from lawmakers who have increasingly realized that the federal government is losing royalty payments when gas extracted on federal land is lost to the atmosphere.

At the behest of two congressmen, the Government Accountability Office has begun an analysis of federal revenue lost when natural gas produced on federal lands either escapes to the atmosphere or is burned in flares. The new study builds on one published in 2004 that pointed to the lack of decent estimates of such losses. In this case, the emitted gas is not only a climate threat and a lost source of company income, but also a loss to taxpayers, Dan Haas, a G.A.O. spokesman, told me. “Since it’s your asset and mine, you want to make sure they do it right,” Mr. Haas said. Watch for more here when that study is completed.

There is one last point about the untapped potential to capture this gas worth touching on here. A question that came up repeatedly during my reporting for the recent methane article was this: If it is such a no-brainer to catch the gas, why isn’t aggressive action already the norm instead of the exception?

There is strong evidence that the difference lies in corporate culture and leadership as much as technology. Some E.P.A. officials and employees of BP told me the importance of pressure from a company’s leadership is illustrated by BP’s changed operations at 2,300 gas wells in the southern San Juan basin, a rich region of gas deposits centered in northwestern New Mexico.

Here is an expanded look at what happened there over the last 10 years.

In the late 1990s, while many other oil and gas companies were still questioning science pointing to a dangerous human influence on climate, BP pledged to cut its direct emissions of such gases 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2010. By 2001, it had already met that internal goal, but the company kept pressing for more reductions.

Around that time, in its New Mexico fields, BP began shifting to systems that constantly monitored operations done periodically to purge liquids that can accumulate in a gas well and impede the flow of gas.

As with some 150,000 wells around the United States, most of the company’s 2,300 wells in that region are fitted with “plunger lifts,” small devices that periodically drop to the bottom of a well and then rise, carried by the pressure of gas below, forcing out liquids that are shunted to tanks at the surface.

Most plungers around the country operate on a set cycle, which can release large amounts of gas to the atmosphere. But BP started trying to fine-tune the liquid removal by adjusting software, hardware and standards to minimize releases.

Emissions declined sharply but leveled off around 2004. That was when Gene Desaulniers, the company’s climate change specialist for its operations in the western hemisphere, focused on the basin’s wells.

Working with the regional crew devoted to emissions reductions, Mr. Desaulniers found fresh ways to tweak operations so that by 2007, emissions had dropped to less than .01 billion cubic feet per year from 4 billion cubic feet a year.

He and other BP staff members have given presentations through the E.P.A. Gas Star program and say other gas-field managers seem eager to adopt the practices, which BP estimates return three times as much money as they cost.

But without a strong push from above, and a new culture pushing for stanching avoidable losses, they and E.P.A. officials say it will be hard to turn awareness into change in the country’s fast-spreading gas fields.