Relativity Space, a private company with ambitions for sending people to Mars, made it off the launchpad, but the vehicle experienced problems during the second stage of its flight.
Tag Archives: Methane
At COP27, Biden Casts America as Climate Leader, While Activists Push Him to Do More
At climate talks in Egypt, President Biden apologized for his predecessor’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
Who’s Driving Climate Change? New Data Catalogs 72,000 Polluters and Counting
A nonprofit backed by Al Gore and other big environmental donors says it can track emissions down to individual power plants, oil fields and cargo ships.
Countries Made Bold Climate Promises Last Year. How Are They Doing?
At last year’s U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, world leaders pledged to halt deforestation, phase out fossil fuel subsidies and offer up more climate aid. Following through has been tough.
He’s an Outspoken Defender of Meat. Industry Funds His Research, Files Show.
A UC Davis professor runs an academic center that was conceived by a trade group, according to records, and gets most of its funding from farming interests.
Can This Man Solve Europe’s Energy Conundrum?
Marco Alverà has big plans to produce a “green gas” from hydrogen that uses existing infrastructure.
Biden Prepares Actions to Cut Emissions After Signing Climate Bill
Regulations from the E.P.A. and elsewhere will help the president meet his aggressive climate goals, administration officials say.
Climate Bill ‘Transformative’ for Auto and Energy Industries
The Senate’s proposal aims to accelerate electric car sales and promote domestic battery manufacturing at China’s expense.
Seven Key Provisions in the Climate Deal
The $369 billion climate and tax bill would affect every aspect of U.S. energy production, with incentives for producers and consumers to move away from fossil fuels.
Gas Piped Into Homes Contains Benzene, Other Risky Chemicals, Study Finds
While the concentrations are low, the chemicals are potentially dangerous and some are linked to cancer risk, the researchers found.
Can Natural Gas Be Used to Create Power With Fewer Emissions?
One company says it has the technology. And though investors looking for cleaner power generation are lining up, some environmentalists are skeptical.
Russian Coal Mine Responsible for Huge Methane Leaks
In January, a satellite detected 13 plumes of methane, a potent planet-warming gas, coming from the largest coal mine in Russia.
Oil And Gas Companies Need a Shorter Leash
Government support could be the deciding factor in whether a new generation of climate-damaging infrastructure gets built.
Donors Pledge $41 Million to Monitor Thawing Arctic Permafrost
The six-year effort by climate scientists and policy experts aims to fill gaps in knowledge about planet-warming emissions and help affected communities in Alaska.
Methane Emissions Soared to a Record in 2021, Scientists Say
For the second year in a row, concentrations of the potent planet-warming gas jumped by the largest amount since measurements began four decades ago.
Methane Leaks Plague New Mexico Oil and Gas Wells
An analysis found leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas drilling in the Permian Basin were many times higher than government estimates.
Seen From Space: Huge Methane Leaks
A European satellite reveals sites in the United States, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere that are “ultra emitters” of methane. That could help fight climate change.
Gas Stoves Leak Methane Even When Turned Off, Study Finds
New research finds that gas stoves emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, even when turned off and adds to the debate over electrifying homes.
New York City bans new natural gas hookups in step toward all-electric future
Enlarge (credit: Tim Graham/Getty Images)
The New York City Council voted today to ban natural gas in new buildings, putting the nation’s largest city at the vanguard of national efforts to eliminate the fossil fuel and potent greenhouse gas.
The bill prohibits natural gas hookups and oil-burning equipment in new buildings under seven stories starting in 2023 and all new buildings starting in 2027. Existing buildings are not affected by the measure, though significant renovations could require buildings to become all-electric. Hospitals, factories, laundromats, and commercial kitchens are also exempt. Mayor Bill de Blasio has said that he will sign the bill.
The city isn’t the first to attempt something like this. Other, smaller cities like Brookline, Massachusetts, and San Jose and Berkeley, California, have enacted similar bans on new hookups, but New York City is by far the largest to date. Some 40 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions come from boilers, furnaces, and hot water heaters.
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China and U.S., at Odds on Many Issues, Agree on a Surprise Climate Deal
Some observers hoped the announcement might inject needed energy into lackluster negotiations at this week’s Glasgow climate summit, although the terms weren’t particularly aggressive.
Glasgow Delegates Should Focus on More Than Methane
Without more action, we risk runaway warming.
Democrats Work to Salvage Methane Fee Amid Opposition From Manchin
Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democratic holdout, is still working to weaken or jettison a proposed fee on emissions of methane, a powerful pollutant.
EPA announces rules to slash methane leaks throughout oil and gas supply chain
Right now, a lot of the methane created or extracted during other activities goes to waste. (credit: Lawrence Berkeley Lab)
The EPA announced new rules today that would slash methane leaks from the oil and gas sector, a significant source of carbon emissions that represents 30 percent of methane pollution in the US.
Nearly every step in the oil and gas supply chain would be affected, from production to processing, storage, and transmission. In a first, the rules would apply to old wells in addition to new ones, and the rules would introduce “a comprehensive monitoring program to require companies to find and fix leaks,” the EPA said. Altogether, the rules would trim the oil and gas sector’s methane leaks by 75 percent, the administration estimated.
Leaks are rife throughout the industry, amounting to 2.3 percent of all natural gas production in the US. Globally, leaks are responsible for just over 5 percent of all energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.
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Biden Administration Moves to Limit Methane, a Potent Greenhouse Gas
A new rule will be announced at a U.N. summit where the United States is facing skepticism about its commitment to climate change, aides said.
Latest National Climate Plans Still Fall Far Short, U.N. Report Warns
Ahead of a major climate summit in Glasgow, many countries have vowed to do more to curb their emissions. But those plans still put the world on path for dangerous warming.
Private Equity Funds, Sensing Profit in Tumult, Are Propping Up Oil
These secretive investment companies have pumped billions of dollars into fossil fuel projects, buying up offshore platforms, building new pipelines and extending lifelines to coal power plants.
More Than 30 Countries Join U.S. Pledge to Slash Methane Emissions
Methane is the second largest driver of global warming after carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists say the promised cuts could help avert the worst consequences of climate change.
The controversial quest to make cow burps less noxious
Enlarge (credit: Hans Meleman | Getty Images)
It’s an oppressively hot morning in the barnyard, even in the shade of the long open-air structure where the cows come to feed. On a typical farm, they would gather around a trough, but here at UC Davis they chow from special blue bins, which detect when and how much each one eats. It’s like Weight Watchers, only researchers here aren’t so much interested in these cows’ figures, but how much they burp.
Animal scientist Frank Mitloehner leads me to another kind of feeder, one that could easily be mistaken for a miniature wood chipper. He grabs a handful of the alfalfa pellets that the machine dispenses when it detects that a cow has poked its head in. “This is like candy to them,” Mitloehner says. I stick my head into the machine as Mitloehner points out a small metal tube within: “This probe measures the methane they exhale, and that happens every three hours for all the animals in this study.”
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In a Pennsylvania Town, Tainted Water Was Only the Beginning
In a Pennsylvania town, fracking, contamination and a community unbound.
Biden Set to Host World Leaders for Climate Forum
The president will urge nations to take on more ambitious climate targets. But as of late Thursday night, it was unclear if China had agreed to attend the virtual meeting.
Here Are America’s Top Methane Emitters. Some Will Surprise You.
Oil and gas giants are selling off their most-polluting operations to small private companies. Most manage to escape public scrutiny.
Senate to Reinstate Obama-Era Controls on Climate-Warming Methane
Senate Democrats on Wednesday will use a once-obscure law to resurrect Obama-era regulations on methane that the Trump administration had wiped away.
Crusoe Energy is tackling energy use for cryptocurrencies and data centers and greenhouse gas emissions
The two founders of Crusoe Energy think they may have a solution to two of the largest problems facing the planet today — the increasing energy footprint of the tech industry and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the natural gas industry.
Crusoe, which uses excess natural gas from energy operations to power data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations, has just raised $128 million in new financing from some of the top names in the venture capital industry to build out its operations — and the timing couldn’t be better.
Methane emissions are emerging as a new area of focus for researchers and policymakers focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and keeping global warming within the 1.5 degree targets set under the Paris Agreement. And those emissions are just what Crusoe Energy is capturing to power its data centers and bitcoin mining operations.
The reason why addressing methane emissions is so critical in the short term is because these greenhouse gases trap more heat than their carbon dioxide counterparts and also dissipate more quickly. So dramatic reductions in methane emissions can do more in the short term to alleviate the global warming pressures that human industry is putting on the environment.
And the biggest source of methane emissions is the oil and gas industry. In the U.S. alone roughly 1.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas is flared daily, said Chase Lochmiller, a co-founder of Crusoe Energy. About two thirds of that is flared in Texas with another 500 million cubic feet flared in North Dakota, where Crusoe has focused its operations to date.
For Lochmiller, a former quant trader at some of the top American financial services institutions, and Cully Cavmess, a third generation oil and gas scion, the ability to capture natural gas and harness it for computing operations is a natural combination of the two men’s interests in financial engineering and environmental preservation.
NEW TOWN, ND – AUGUST 13: View of three oil wells and flaring of natural gas on The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation near New Town, ND on August 13, 2014. About 100 million dollars worth of natural gas burns off per month because a pipeline system isn’t in place yet to capture and safely transport it . The Three Affiliated Tribes on Fort Berthold represent Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations. It’s also at the epicenter of the fracking and oil boom that has brought oil royalties to a large number of native americans living there. (Photo by Linda Davidson / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The two Denver natives met in prep-school and remained friends. When Lochmiller left for MIT and Cavness headed off to Middlebury they didn’t know that they’d eventually be launching a business together. But through Lochmiller’s exposure to large scale computing and the financial services industry, and Cavness assumption of the family business they came to the conclusion that there had to be a better way to address the massive waste associated with natural gas.
Conversation around Crusoe Energy began in 2018 when Lochmiller and Cavness went climbing in the Rockies to talk about Lochmiller’s trip to Mt. Everest.
When the two men started building their business, the initial focus was on finding an environmentally friendly way to deal with the energy footprint of bitcoin mining operations. It was this pitch that brought the company to the attention of investors at Polychain, the investment firm started by Olaf Carlson-Wee (and Lochmiller’s former employer), and investors like Bain Capital Ventures and new investor Valor Equity Partners.
(This was also the pitch that Lochmiller made to me to cover the company’s seed round. At the time I was skeptical of the company’s premise and was worried that the business would just be another way to prolong the use of hydrocarbons while propping up a cryptocurrency that had limited actual utility beyond a speculative hedge against governmental collapse. I was wrong on at least one of those assessments.)
“Regarding questions about sustainability, Crusoe has a clear standard of only pursuing projects that are net reducers of emissions. Generally the wells that Crusoe works with are already flaring and would continue to do so in the absence of Crusoe’s solution. The company has turned down numerous projects where they would be a buyer of low cost gas from a traditional pipeline because they explicitly do not want to be net adders of demand and emissions,” wrote a spokesman for Valor Equity in an email. “In addition, mining is increasingly moving to renewables and Crusoe’s approach to stranded energy can enable better economics for stranded or marginalized renewables, ultimately bringing more renewables into the mix. Mining can provide an interruptible base load demand that can be cut back when grid demand increases, so overall the effect to incentivize the addition of more renewable energy sources to the grid.”
Other investors have since piled on including: Lowercarbon Capital, DRW Ventures, Founders Fund, Coinbase Ventures, KCK Group, Upper90, Winklevoss Capital, Zigg Capital and Tesla co-founder JB Straubel.
The company now operate 40 modular data centers powered by otherwise wasted and flared natural gas throughout North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. Next year that number should expand to 100 units as Crusoe enters new markets such as Texas and New Mexico. Since launching in 2018, Crusoe has emerged as a scalable solution to reduce flaring through energy intensive computing such as bitcoin mining, graphical rendering, artificial intelligence model training and even protein folding simulations for COVID-19 therapeutic research.
Crusoe boasts 99.9% combustion efficiency for its methane, and is also bringing additional benefits in the form of new networking buildout at its data center and mining sites. Eventually, this networking capacity could lead to increased connectivity for rural communities surrounding the Crusoe sites.
Currently, 80% of the company’s operations are being used for bitcoin mining, but there’s increasing demand for use in data center operations and some universities, including Lochmiller’s alma mater of MIT are looking at the company’s offerings for their own computing needs.
“That’s very much in an incubated phase right now,” said Lochmiller. “A private alpha where we have a few test customers… we’ll make that available for public use later this year.”
Crusoe Energy Systems should have the lowest data center operating costs in the world, according to Lochmiller and while the company will spend money to support the infrastructure buildout necessary to get the data to customers, those costs are negligible when compared to energy consumption, Lochmiller said.
The same holds true for bitcoin mining, where the company can offer an alternative to coal powered mining operations in China and the construction of new renewable capacity that wouldn’t be used to service the grid. As cryptocurrencies look for a way to blunt criticism about the energy usage involved in their creation and distribution, Crusoe becomes an elegant solution.
Institutional and regulatory tailwinds are also propelling the company forward. Recently New Mexico passed new laws limiting flaring and venting to no more than 2 percent of an operator’s production by April of next year and North Dakota is pushing for incentives to support on-site flare capture systems while Wyoming signed a law creating incentives for flare gas reduction applied to bitcoin mining. The world’s largest financial services firms are also taking a stand against flare gas with BlackRock calling for an end to routine flaring by 2025.
“Where we view our power consumption, we draw a very clear line in our project evaluation stage where we’re reducing emissions for an oil and gas projects,” Lochmiller said.
Halting the Vast Release of Methane Is Critical for Climate, U.N. Says
A major United Nations report will declare that slashing emissions of methane, the main component of natural gas, is far more vital than previously thought.
Drillers Burned Off Gas at a Staggering Rate as Winter Storm Hit Texas
Frigid temperatures last month froze pipelines and forced companies to flare vast amounts of planet-warming gases that they suddenly had nowhere to send.
The Climate Desk Looks Ahead to 2021
After a year when climate-related disasters seemed to become the norm, the team will be monitoring a 2021 that is pivotal for the world.
Covid, Climate and the Power of Denial
If we can’t face up to a pandemic, how can we avoid apocalypse?
New Technology Claims to Pinpoint Even Small Methane Leaks From Space
Amid growing alarm about methane’s role in driving global warming, a Canadian firm has begun selling a service to detect even relatively small leaks. At least two rivals are on the way.
‘Zombie’ Oil Wells in Canada Are a Climate Threat
Canada’s oil patch has nearly 100,000 suspended wells, neither active nor capped, and they’re a worrying source of planet-warming methane.
Belching Cows and Endless Feedlots: Fixing Cattle’s Climate Issues
The United States is home to 95 million cattle, and changing what they eat could have a significant effect on emissions of greenhouse gases like methane that are warming the world.
A Secret Recording Reveals Oil Executives’ Private Views on Climate Change
At a meeting last year, industry leaders contradicted public claims that emissions of climate-warming methane are under control
Trump admin. finally kills off Obama-era rule limiting methane emissions
Enlarge / A natural gas flare from an offshore oil drilling rig in Cook Inlet, Alaska. (credit: Paul Souders | Getty Images)
The Environmental Protection Agency this week finalized a rule that kills off Obama-era limitations on how much methane, a potent greenhouse gas, oil and natural gas producers are allowed to emit into the atmosphere—even though industry leaders didn’t want the changes.
The changes to the rules, known as the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS), remove some segments of the industry from being covered under the existing standards at all, and these changes also lift the methane caps on other segments, the EPA announced on Thursday.
The oil and gas industry basically splits into three big buckets of activity: upstream, meaning the actual drilling for oil or gas; midstream, which is the world of storage and pipelines; and downstream, that last mile where products are refined and sold. The current changes apply to the downstream and midstream segments, as the EPA broke down in a graphic (PDF).
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E.P.A. to Lift Obama-Era Controls on Methane, a Potent Greenhouse Gas
The reversal is the latest move in the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to weaken environmental rules, but it could be quickly undone after the November election.
3 Great Mysteries About Life on Mars
How habitable was early Mars? Why did it become less hospitable? And could there be life there now?
New Emails Show How Energy Industry Moved Fast to Undo Curbs
The messages, made public in a lawsuit, suggest the E.P.A. rescinded a requirement on methane at the behest of an executive just weeks after President Trump took office.
Global Methane Emissions Reach a Record High
Scientists expect emissions, driven by fossil fuels and agriculture, to continue rising rapidly.
Fracking Firms Fail, Rewarding Executives and Raising Climate Fears
Oil and gas companies are hurtling toward bankruptcy, raising fears that wells will be left leaking planet-warming pollutants, with cleanup cost left to taxpayers.