"The leak accounts for 25 percent of daily greenhouse gas emissions"
January 2, 2016 4:43 AM   Subscribe

Two months in, Porter Ranch [California] gas leak compared to BP Gulf oil spill: More than 1,800 families have been relocated by the gas company and more than 1,000 remain on a waiting list. Some say they can’t remember a displacement of residents this large since the Northridge earthquake in 1994, when 20,000 people were left homeless. Two local elementary schools have been impacted, with nearly 2,000 schoolchildren and staff slated to be moved to other schools in January. Enough methane gas is being released to fill the Empire State building each day, state officials have said, and the concern has even reached the Federal Aviation Administration, which issued temporary flight restrictions over the area for small aircraft and helicopters. posted by Room 641-A (51 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's bad, but not BP bad. The output is the same as 7 coal fired power plants. For perspective China bullt more than 30 coal fired power plants last year. Those plants will be online for at least a decade, while this leak will be capped in under a year.
The direct economic damage to businesses in the Gulf of Mexico from the billions of dollars. The damage to the marine ecosystem has been horrible. In terms of immediate ecosystem damage this is not at the same scale.
posted by humanfont at 5:01 AM on January 2, 2016 [5 favorites]


What does the reservoir consist of? Porous rock? I presume it's not an actual void in the rock.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:13 AM on January 2, 2016


What does the reservoir consist of? Porous rock? I presume it's not an actual void in the rock.

It's a depleted oil field so some variety of high permeability rock like sandstone. Salt caverns which can also be used to store natural gas are voids but the salt that makes up the walls is typically impervious to natural gas and does an extremely good job of containment.
posted by Talez at 5:22 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


read the first piece, can't figure out, where are the Feds in this? FEMA?
posted by angrycat at 5:53 AM on January 2, 2016


Depending upon your chosen value for the social cost of carbon, you can get quite similar costs for this event to the Deepwater Horizon spill. If we take the recent estimate of $220/tC, and assume the well will be capped on schedule, you get a total cost of $382m for the event. This is in line with a set of estimates of SCC from 2007 which (inflation adjusted), which would give you costs of $180m(+/- 1SD: $0-$360m) and an upper extremum of $1500/tC would give $3.16bn in total damages for the event.

For completeness, the extreme lower cost would be zero, because there's always some right wing fundamentalist polluting the literature.
posted by cromagnon at 6:10 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


Why not 'seal the well' with explosives a-la Red Barber? Come on, at least give it a try...

{/}
posted by From Bklyn at 6:17 AM on January 2, 2016


Methane will light on fire and a big flame shooting into the sky is bad PR.
posted by AlexiaSky at 6:33 AM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


There is also the chance of a continous flame if it isn't capped.
posted by AlexiaSky at 6:34 AM on January 2, 2016


Methane will light on fire and a big flame shooting into the sky is bad PR.

Great for tourism, though. Also less bad from a greenhouse gas point of view.
posted by flabdablet at 6:56 AM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


Blame the cows.
posted by fairmettle at 7:02 AM on January 2, 2016


Who needs the methane clathrates to destabilize? We're doing just fine with incompetent, corner cutting shithead energy companies. Maybe we can plug the hole with copies of the Paris agreement.
posted by Existential Dread at 7:46 AM on January 2, 2016 [16 favorites]


The Devil's Cigarette Lighter:
The Devil's Cigarette Lighter was a natural gas well fire at Gassi Touil in the Sahara Desert of Algeria. Ignited when a pipe ruptured on November 6, 1961, the Phillips Petroleum Company-owned well produced more than 6,000 cubic feet (170 m³) of natural gas per second, whose flame rose between 450 feet (140 m) and 800 feet (240 m). The flame was seen from orbit by John Glenn during the flight of Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962. The blowout and fire were estimated to have consumed enough gas to supply Paris for three months, burning 550,000,000 cubic feet (16,000,000 m³) per day.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:29 AM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


"The leak accounts for 25 percent of daily greenhouse gas emissions"

One way to judge these articles is to observe, if they do mention that 25% number, whether they even hint at what exactly it's 25% of, how badly they confuse daily or annual emissions for the current rate of emissions, and/or whether they realize or make clear that it's 25% of California's methane emissions, not 25% of all greenhouse gas.
posted by sfenders at 8:41 AM on January 2, 2016 [4 favorites]


I'm having difficulty googling both the leak and El Niño, so does anyone know what impact, if any, a lot of rain would have on the site if the leak is not capped quickly?
posted by Room 641-A at 8:42 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


I don't believe ran would have much if any effect, but a lightning strike that lit it would be a concern.
posted by boilermonster at 9:29 AM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


I hope someone captures the lightning bolt explosion on film.
posted by cman at 9:39 AM on January 2, 2016


There is also the chance of a continous flame if it isn't capped.
posted by AlexiaSky at 6:34 AM on January 2 [+] [!]


Ach! You've seen through my clever plan… drat!
posted by From Bklyn at 9:44 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]



Why not 'seal the well' with explosives a-la Red Barber? Come on, at least give it a try...


Because instead of one big leak, the gas will find other paths and you'll have a bunch of other smaller leaks. Drilling a relief well is the only way this is going to work.
posted by HighLife at 9:46 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


The costs arnt similiar. Deepwater Horizon's estimated costs to BP is currently at about $70 billion. Take the emissions costs at $3.6 billion, add in another $6.4 billion for damages to bring our estimated costs to $10 billion. We're at 1/7th the cost of Deep Water Horizon.
posted by humanfont at 10:54 AM on January 2, 2016


Great for tourism, though.

thank you for reminding me that i wanted to book a holiday to turkmenistan.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:02 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


From Bklyn: “Red Barber”
Red Barber was a famous baseball announcer. You're thinking of Red Adair, who put out the "Devil's Cigarette Lighter" referenced above.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:15 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


Although, on further review, I think they're calling a different well fire the "Devil's Cigarette Lighter" in that video.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:16 AM on January 2, 2016


By the way, it's true that atmospheric methane is better at retaining heat than CO2. But atmospheric methane isn't stable. It spontaneously combines with atmospheric oxygen to form CO2 and H2O. This happens even if the concentration is too low to permit flame or explosion.

Atmospheric methane has a half-life of 7 years. The biggest natural sources of atmospheric methane are wetlands and termites and domestic livestock, which between them totally dwarf the amount this well is releasing.

According to one of those articles above (which refers to this as a "Global Disaster") it's releasing 1,300 metric tons per day. A metric tonne is a million grams, so if it ran a full year it would release about half a teragram. (Unless I botched my calculation, it's about 475 gigagrams.) Wetlands release 225 teragrams per year, 450 times as much.

The reporting on this gas leak is rather hyperbolic. It isn't a world-ending catastrophe. (But it is a great opportunity for environmental NGO's to try to panic everyone and then beg for contributions!)
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 1:55 PM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]


From what I'm reading, there may be a "perfect storm" on the horizon: lots of poorly-documented wells ending their lifespan at a time of extremely low fossil fuel prices. This company has an interest in fixing the problem and it has the resources to do it; that won't always be the case in the USA, let alone in poorer countries.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:29 PM on January 2, 2016


Fine them the cost of solving it every 6 months.
posted by Burn_IT at 2:39 PM on January 2, 2016


Why not 'seal the well' with explosives a-la Red Barber? Come on, at least give it a try...

For 2 big reasons: Because that method is primarily for controlling wellhead fires, and because this is not a wellhead blowout but a subsurface blowout that has broached the surface.

For a very simplified explanation, an explosion is used to close off the pipe itself at the surface when that's where the blowout is occurring - not the case here. In other words, the pressures involved are significant enough to reach the pressure required to break through the sediments/rock around the wellbore - formation fracture pressure - and since other kill methods haven't worked that also means there is significant pressure differentials between the flowing zone, the loss zone (where the gas is flowing to in the subsurface), and the BHP (bottom hole pressure of the wellbore)/formation pressure. Closing off the pipe will do no good since with the apparatus on top it's already effectively closed off. It might even be making the situation worse - think of holding your finger over a straw that's in water and the water will rise in the straw, because fluids want to flow from higher pressure zones to lower pressure ones.

Since kill weight fluids and similar solutions haven't worked they need to separate the wellbore from the formation by drilling a relief well to the bottom of the well, dump in heavily weighted fluids at the bottom of the wellbore to control the pressure by equalizing the wellbore pressure to the formation pressure, and then cement it. I don't know what the pressures are - one pub I read mentioned ~3600 PSIG in the original oil reservoirs (which seems low to me for the depth, which shows the geology is complicating the situation) - but it's going to be high.

In a situation like this there could be other technical complications. Gas leaks after cementing are the very common; tubular corrosion and what's known as annular bridging often result in subsurface blowouts that are only recognized if they reach the surface. It's possible this wellbore has been leaking for some time and as it leaked into the strata around it - the "loss zone" - it gradually increased the formation pressure. (Or a leak from a well nearby did, or both.) The area is super faulted, which takes reckoning with.There's dealing with the formation fluids above the reservoir, which could be water, gas, even possibly oil. One article I read said they've been doing pressure tests only every 5 years, so the situation could easily have changed without them knowing it.

Part of the pressure problems they have to deal with might be gas going into dissolution in drilling fluids, or other fluids like water, and/or coming out of solution. I don't know if that's a problem here.

Additionally that well isn't just blowing CH4. It's blowing sand. And sand at high pressures can be pretty erosive - it could be affecting the pipe integrity, so it's better to close off at the bottom. Also, according to the diagrams I'm seeing the pipe was cemented at the bottom - they need to find out what's happening there (perhaps the gas flow is not coming up inside the casing but in the annulus, for example).

Anyway, that's a very simplified explanation, with the caveat that I'm not a well control engineer. Well control is an extremely complicated, technical subject that requires deep training in several disciplines. This is also a situation that requires knowledge of the gas injection and reservoir behavior of the area, adding to the complexity. Not to mention it's ass clenching dangerous with the methane concentrations. In some of the articles there's some engineers weighing in about how shocked they are at the company's approach and speed; often my first thought when I read comments like that is those engineers are trying to sell something (like their services). Drilling is California is also not like drilling anywhere else. (Also possible: the writer chose the 2 engineers with the most negative comments to say after talking to 10, ha!)

It's extraordinarily frustrating that in an environmental disaster of these proportions the company seems to be moving slow, but relief wells take time, are very complex, and involve a lot of work and special knowledge. They're drilling thousands of feet to find a 7.5 inch pipe, and then they have to follow that pipe using directional drilling techniques for more thousands of feet - that alone takes some time/work to plan and execute as well as do it SAFELY. And oh yeah - they also have to avoid other pipes in the area. I don't blame them for being extremely conservative in their time estimates for the safety reason alone, but they do appear to be moving along at a reasonable pace well ahead of schedule. (No pun intended.) If nothing goes wrong, they might be done weeks before they say they will be.
posted by barchan at 3:47 PM on January 2, 2016 [19 favorites]


Although if you want to get into radical well control methods the Soviets once used a nuclear bomb.
posted by barchan at 3:50 PM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


Wetlands release 225 teragrams per year, 450 times as much.

This is the same silly excuse that climate deniers make with regards to CO2, that anthropogenic sources are tiny compared to the natural annual flux.

But this is irrelevant. Under natural conditions the same amount of methane is destroyed each year as is produced. There is a steady state balance. But when you add even a tiny amount of human generated methane, the surplus builds up, year after year so that today there is 150% more methane in the atmosphere than a century ago.

It is like a bathtub which has the faucet pouring water in at the same rate as it is going out the drain. Every thing is fine and in balance. But if you increase the faucet flow by even one drop per second, the bathtub is now eventually going to overflow onto the floor. The rate of flow isn't important. What is important is changing the balance by even a small amount.

Half of all the methane released in the U.S. annually is due to human activities, not natural sources. And most of that is from natural gas drilling and distribution.
posted by JackFlash at 4:33 PM on January 2, 2016 [14 favorites]


It is like a bathtub which has the faucet pouring water in at the same rate as it is going out the drain. Every thing is fine and in balance. But if you increase the faucet flow by even one drop per second, the bathtub is now eventually going to overflow onto the floor. The rate of flow isn't important. What is important is changing the balance by even a small amount.

Thanks for this analogy. It'll come in handy when I talk to folks about this... who don't look at things logically... oh wait...
posted by RolandOfEld at 5:13 PM on January 2, 2016


It is like a bathtub which has the faucet pouring water in at the same rate as it is going out the drain. Every thing is fine and in balance. But if you increase the faucet flow by even one drop per second, the bathtub is now eventually going to overflow onto the floor.

Not likely. Unless it's already near the rim, the water will merely rise until the drainage rate, accelerated by the increased pressure at drain depth, matches the new inflow rate. It's all so complicated...
posted by jon1270 at 5:17 PM on January 2, 2016


People have magical ideas about the capabilities of high explosives and nukes to solve problems.
posted by humanfont at 6:16 PM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


Well control is an extremely complicated, technical subject that requires deep training in several disciplines.

As a duly self-appointed Internet blowhard, I resent your attempts to silence my brilliantly obvious solutions with your "facts" and "reasoning".
posted by flabdablet at 9:44 PM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm with flabdablet!
Let me at with the right amount of nitro and a remote control back hoe!

Um, I am not in the least bit serious. Barchan I appreciate your answer and agree it's most likely the best solution. I tried to signal the intended sarcasm with not universal {/} symbol. My apologies for the confusion.
posted by From Bklyn at 10:59 PM on January 2, 2016


Also,
Not to mention it's ass clenching dangerous with the methane concentrations.
*Ahem* I see what you did there. Well played sir, well played.
posted by From Bklyn at 11:03 PM on January 2, 2016


Enough methane gas is being released to fill the Empire State building each day, state officials have said

gas
/ɡas/
noun
1. an airlike fluid substance which expands freely to fill any space available, irrespective of its quantity.


What am I missing here?
posted by knuckle tattoos at 12:19 AM on January 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


Thanks for this thread. I have been following the leak since... November?
At the time I was astounded.

The more I have read about is... boy, did they fuck this one up.

What am I missing here?

Gas expands as it warms and shrinks as it cools.
posted by Mezentian at 2:31 AM on January 3, 2016


Am I correct (I think I am) but if you boil it down, the basic principle behind this sort gas storage and carbon capture and storage are essentially the same, so this sort of think could happen in a working CCS facility (except CCS as far as I know use deeper reservoirs for greater pressure) and in some cases hope the brine will help contain the CO2.

Just putting it out there.
posted by Mezentian at 2:38 AM on January 3, 2016


Knuckles: pressure and a calculator.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:25 AM on January 3, 2016


Filling the Empire State Building with methane and then lighting a match would have been an exciting King Kong solution in a movie, but a bad idea otherwise.

It is like a bathtub which has the faucet pouring water in at the same rate as it is going out the drain. Every thing is fine and in balance. But if you increase the faucet flow by even one drop per second, the bathtub is now eventually going to overflow onto the floor. The rate of flow isn't important. What is important is changing the balance by even a small amount.

Isn't it fortunate that we have destroyed a significant percentage of wetlands, reducing their methane contributions? (In terms of the original analogy, destroying wetlands was ecologically about as smart as drilling a hole in the side of your bathtub so it can drain onto the floor, sadly.) But it is not accurate to say that a pre-human earth was in a constant steady-state balance, though obviously not with the sudden changes that we have caused.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:24 AM on January 3, 2016


Um, I am not in the least bit serious. Barchan I appreciate your answer and agree it's most likely the best solution. I tried to signal the intended sarcasm with not universal {/} symbol. My apologies for the confusion.

Oh I saw that, but it's actually a really good question!
posted by barchan at 6:58 AM on January 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


I also am no petroleum engineer, but I am pretty sure that the reason Red Adair and the folks companies like his used explosives (and I believe explosives are still used) for oil/gas well fire fighting was not to seal the leak. Instead, the explosion removes enough oxygen from the immediate location of the blowout to put out the fire. Then you have oil or gas spewing out that is no longer a ridiculously hot blow torch, and your crew can move in and seal the wellhead.
posted by HycoSpeed at 7:10 AM on January 3, 2016


So it's an Empire State Building of gas at standard temperature and pressure? OK, I guess that works. Follow-up: where's the "a million metric tons" monthly figure from, if the daily figure is 1,200 metric tons?
posted by knuckle tattoos at 9:07 AM on January 3, 2016


where's the "a million metric tons" monthly figure from, if the daily figure is 1,200 metric tons?

Methane is about 25 to 28 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, according to the EPA. The "million metric tons" is methane converted to CO2 equivalent, which is then converted to more easily understood number of automobile equivalents (since automobiles don't emit methane). This is a routine calculation, but isn't explained very well in the article excerpt.
posted by JackFlash at 10:06 AM on January 3, 2016 [3 favorites]


The LA Gas Leak Is Scarier Than We Thought

A much broader swath of LA is now drowning in methane.
posted by Mezentian at 5:11 PM on January 14, 2016


It does sound alarming that some researchers detected levels of methane in the air 67x normal eight miles from the leak. Remember that 67 times a small number is still a very small number.
posted by humanfont at 5:49 PM on January 14, 2016


I think they only found elevated levels eight miles from the leak; the 67x level was "in the region surrounding the Porter Ranch leak", not necessarily eight miles away.
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:25 PM on January 14, 2016


The LA Basin is loaded with wells. Everyone has been breathing petro for ages.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:22 PM on January 14, 2016


Los Angeles, November 2019
posted by mbrubeck at 10:01 PM on January 14, 2016


Everyone has been breathing petro for ages.

But mostly at low levels (well below this).

I can't find the stats for California, but typically just but a fraction of plugged or producing wells leak, and are responsible for methane pollution, and of that a tiny number account for most of it.

Although, it seems regulations in the US are lacking, and this piece indicates one in five wells is improperly plugged, which seems like an issue that should be sorted out globally.
posted by Mezentian at 10:12 PM on January 14, 2016


Gas Leak At Risk Of Blowout, Attempts To Fix Have Only Made It Worse
The risk of fire at the site is already so high that watches and cell phones are prohibited out of fear that an electrical spark could ignite the gas.
posted by Room 641-A at 11:11 PM on January 15, 2016


To be fair, at any rig or oil and gas facility anything that could cause a spark (phones, I've not heard of watches, personally) are prohibited, even safe operating sites. Fabrics are limited to, to things that won't generate a static charge.

At Porter Ranch they may being extra careful with their exclusion zone because the release is uncontrolled.

(I think it's something to do with intrinsic ignition sources, but I may be using the wrong term).
posted by Mezentian at 2:23 AM on January 16, 2016


« Older "...sometimes the writing goes well and sometimes...   |   Man is small, life is large. Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments