Recently my notice has been captured by a couple of interesting reports about methane. First, it seems that there is twice as much carbon in the form of methane in permafrost than we previously thought. In fact about 1.5 trillion tonnes. To be sure I’d already read that in Ch 3 of the UNEP Year Book 2009 (large pdf). (It does in fact appear to be the same study, published in 2008 in Bioscience.) Big numbers can be confusing and downright misleading, so I’ve made an attempt to get some perspective.
My chemistry didn’t go very far at school so forgive and correct if I get this wrong. The problem is that no-one seems to bother to work out the relativities when this information is handed out.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 3,000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide which converts to 817 gigatonnes of carbon. That’s equivalent to 54% of the 1,500gt of carbon in the permafrost methane. So in permafrost we are looking at is roughly double the carbon presently in the atmosphere in the form of CO2.
The mass of the methane in permafrost if we add the mass of the four hydrogen atoms in CH4 is 2,000gt. The greenhouse potency of this methane over 100 years (multiply by 23) is equivalent to about 46,000gt of CO2. That’s over 15 times the CO2 currently in the atmosphere.
I do hope I got that wrong!
To the 1,500gt of carbon in permafrost we can add 200 to 450gt of carbon in the methane in bogs that aren’t frozen and another 10,000gt of carbon in marine clathrates.
At any given time there is not much methane in the atmosphere. It is usually quoted in parts per billion as against parts per million for CO2. So the 1745 parts per billion, up from 700 ppb in 1750 translates to 1.75ppm compared with 389 for CO2.
So the big questions are how much of it is coming out of the permafrost now and how much is likely to come out in the near future.
The short answers are not very much (probably) to the first and I have no idea as to the second, but possibly a helluva lot.
Some 60% of methane emissions are said to be from human causes and the rest natural. Stern and Kaufmann found in 1994 that “anthropogenic methane emissions have increased from about 80 million tonnes per annum in 1860 to close to 380 million tonnes today. (There’s more on their sectoral finding here.) Wiki says (link soon) that it’s about 500 million tonnes now.
The USA EPA gives an account of natural sources. They make the total 190 million tonnes divided as follows:
Mercifully the “hydrates” or “clathrates” only account for 10 million tonnes. I’m assuming that the 145mt from wetlands are actually from wet lands and not from permafrost.
But this is what Wiki says:
Current methane release has previously been estimated at 0.5 Mt per year.[7] Shakhova et al. (2008) estimate that not less than 1,400 Gt of Carbon is presently locked up as methane and methane hydrates under the Arctic submarine permafrost, and 5-10% of that area is subject to puncturing by open taliks. They conclude that “release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time”. That would increase the methane content of the planet’s atmosphere by a factor of twelve.[8]. (Emphasis added)
That equates over a 20 year time frame (which is how a significant methane burp should be calculated) to 3600gt of CO2 or about 70 years worth anthropogenic GHGs at the current rate of emissions.
Hope I’ve got that wrong too!
Now the second bit of news is that capitalists and some governments are lusting after methane as an energy source. The stuff is everywhere:
The countries actively pursuing the stuff include the US, Canada, Germany, India, Japan, China and South Korea. First cab off the rank may well be South Korea who plan production by 2015. The Japanese hope to be in business by 2016.
The favoured method is:
to drill a hole into the clathrate deposit to release the pressure, allowing the methane to separate out from the clathrate and flow up the wellhead.
But here’s the rub:
Clathrates exist in a delicate balance, and the worry is that as gas is extracted its pressure will break up neighbouring clathrate crystals. The result could be an uncontrollable chain reaction – a “methane burp” that could cascade through undersea reserves, triggering landslips and even tsunamis.
According to the New Scientist such a slide and tsunami occurred about 8000 years ago, the Storregga slide off Norway. Not a nice prospect!
The favoured way of stabilising the clathrates is to replace the methane with another gas and it seems that CO2 would be ideal, making the clathrates even more stable than before. Indeed I’m told that when you burn methane for every methane molecule you get a CO2 molecule plus two of water. So burn it on the spot, or nearby and bung the CO2 straight back down the hole.
I don’t know about you, but I’m still nervous. And I’m not at all keen on embarking on a new fossil fuel with reserves equivalent to 100 years worth of all current fossil fuels. Some of the countries keen on this new resource don’t have much in the way of conventional fossil fuels and/or want to diversify sources. The Chinese and the Indians are particularly insistent that no-one should prevent them from doing it.
Kirk Smith appeals for the world to control methane before embarking on risky geoengineering. Certainly we need to pay more attention to methane but mitigating against the release of methane from permafrost really requires world cooling in a hurry, not ridiculous talk about 2C guardrails. Smith says:
Global methane emissions are divided roughly equally between the energy sector (coal mine emissions and leaks from oil and gas wells), waste management (landfill, waste water and animal manure) and agriculture (mainly rice paddies and emissions from livestock).
This is illustrated as follows (from Wiki):
In Australia the agricultural sector predominates.
Enteric fermentation means ruminants btw.
Conceptually the task is easy. Just stop mining coal, plus capture methane from waste dumps and use as fuel. Research on ruminants is well underway.
In practice not so easy. Better dust off the geoengineering plans and try to nut out what works.
Earlier posts:
The worst news you’ve heard all week
How good is the good news on methane?
Update: In the discussion thread there has been discussion on methane emissions from enteric fermentation (ruminants). I’ve uploaded some images to show trends. Since the post extends below the sidebar I can use the large versions so that you can read the writing.
First the trends from 1860-1994 from Stern and Kaufmann:
Remember that human caused emissions are now 60% of the total. I don’t have a trend for natural emissions.
The next image is the trend in agricultural emissions from 1970-2005. As you can see they are almost flat, with ruminants increasing a bit and rice decreasing.
The next graph incorporates the agricultural into the total anthropogenic for 1970-2005. There is a significant increase in fugitive emissions from mining in the last few years.
Finally here is the total methane concentration in ppb for 1997-2008, showing the up-tick from 2007. This is assumed to be mainly from permafrost and/or clathrates. The image comes from an article in Nature I’ve lost the link, but you can find it in Will Steffen’s report, Figure 34.
Is the last pie chart referring to Australia’s sources of methane or all
greenhouse gas emissions?
Brian,
if people do start mining methane, I don’t see why it is going to add to the amount of CO2 produced significantly. Surely, it is mainly going to substitute for other things, like buying oil from the Middle East, which is hardly any better, especially if you happen to be Chinese or Indian and don’t happen to have much of your own. Indeed, next time I’m in China, I’ll try and imagine what it would be like if they burnt methane and not coal, and hence what wouldn’t be polluting my lungs. Again, it’s all very easy for Australians to say how bad finding new energy sources is when (a) we have an essentially infinite supply of hydrocarbons; (b) we have 20 million people; and ( c) we’re already rich. These options simply don’t exists for big countries, and scooping off a small amount of methane from your average rubbish dump reminds me of ideas like encouraging people to put solar cells on their roofs and giving up plastic bottles. It simply isn’t a solution for 1 billion people.
In place of mining coal we should be mining methane. Burn it in a combined cycle plant and you get roughly twice the amount of electrical energy out per Joule in when compared to coal.
The Methane is converterd to water vapour and CO2 in the process.
There is ahuge resource of land based methane, much of it coal seams,also in accesssible Clathrates (Hydrates.
The coal seam stiuff has ben leaking into the atmosphere for millenia.
Huggy
This is the sort of project we should be funding. Not sure how it has turned out but.
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/factsheets/project/Proj249.pdf
Huggy
Murph @ 1, it’s just the methane. I’ll try to find the source tonight. I found it by googling images.
Conrad @ 2, I was trying not to make value judgements. What you say about China is perfectly true. I’m advised that methane at 2.17 times as much heat/tonne CO2 compared with pure carbon, gives the highest energy/tonne CO2 of all the fossil gases. So short to medium term using methane instead of coal would more than halve the GHG output. And it’s heaps better than tar sands.
But extending fossil fuel usage on a large scale beyond 2030 is IMO courting disaster, in terms of ocean acidity as well as warming.
“Conceptually the task is easy. Just stop mining coal, plus capture methane from waste dumps and use as fuel. Research on ruminants is well underway.”
I’m sure I’ve said it before, but reducing consumption of meat and other products from livestock/ruminants should be able to be done far more quickly and cheaply than stopping/reducing coal mining. That doesn’t mean we should only focus on one or the other, but just saying “that’s just not going to happen” to reducing red meat consumption is’t really good enough – especially for this issue.
This is still an action that’s mostly avoided – I noticed in the latest greenhouse brochure the Greens have produced in an effort to step up the campaign for a stronger ETS and Copenhagen position, meat/diet isn’t even mentioned.
Barry Brook and Geoff Russell have regularly written, such as this recent one in Crikey the large greenhouse impact of methane has largely been underestimated. We can’t really ignore this aspect because its inconvenient (although I note that even Al Gore ignored that particular inconvenient truth)
Ah Brian, another in your series of fanciful, far-off, world-ending scenarios?
Seriously, though, these are the kinds of feeback cycles which are going to see billions of people displaced in the next 100 years. Say goodbye to London, New York, Sydney, Tokyo etc… I’m going to buy some speculative beachfront property in Mansfield.
I don’t agree with the geoengineering conclusion at all. How long did it take to discover that bcf gasses reacted with the upper atmosphere. I have zero faith in sciences ability to absolutely guarantee that there will be no unintended consequences from geo engineering initiatives. And that is not a lack of confidence in science, it is a lack of faith in solutions as applied. When government and business get together the outcome can be the exact opposite of the intention. “Clean” Coal and CCS as a glaring example. Add to that the fact that there are 195 countries, with 195 governments and 195 keen science institutes with a broad range of capabilities. Imagine North Korea, for instance taking advantage of a lisense to polute getting into the aerosol business with a substance that reflects sunlight strongly, but, ooops, drops caustic rain on South Korea and melts buidings, destroys electricity facilities and disrupts communications.
It is nice to think about these things from ones cozy, safe, well intentioned western developed nation office, but it is a messey world out there. And if our wealthy western economies cannot take full advantage of safe proven technologies such as wind, geothermal and solar thermal energy systems, then even suggesting that they will do a good job of geo engineering is somewhere between bizare and suicidal.
Operation Dark Storm.
OK BilB @ 8, what’s your strategy to avoid methane burps from permafrost?
Murph @ 1, this is the link for the Australia’s estimated anthropogenic methane emissions by source (2005). I’ve put a link in the post.
Andrew B we’ve had a go at the issue of ruminants and meat eating on several posts. There was also a comment at Quiggin’s (see Brook @ 2 and Quiggin @ 18). The issue is not that more carbon is put into the atmosphere, but the boost to the greenhouse effect from the methane while it is there.
From the post at Crikey, the ruminants are the biggest single factor in anthropogenic methane, but rice is about equal to fugitive coal and wastewater, and bigger than landfill. What do you think about rice?
Good summary Brian. The fourth assessment report of the IPCC has revised the 100 year global warming potential of methane upwards to 25 times that of CO2.
I disagree with Barry Brook and Geoff Russell that we should instead use 20 year global warming potentials. When we consider the damage that is inflicted when we pollute the atmosphere, we should not just worry about the next 20 years, we should think about the earth many generations into the future. I think there is a case for using global warming potentials over more than 100 years for this reason.
But in any case, the methane issue is still a reason for reducing the consumption of certain types of meat. Not all meat is associated with methane production, so meat such as kangaroo is also a substitute for lamb and beef, as well as plant based foods.
For about the 500th time….proceed post haste with the conversion to solar origin energy. THIS DOES NOT MEAN AN IMMEDIATE END TO THE USE OF COAL….THAT IS IMPOSSIBLE. What it does mean is a PROGRESSIVE TRANSFER FROM COAL TO SOLAR ENERGY CONVERSION AS FACILITIES BECOME AVAILABLE. Establish a retail electricity levy to fund the building of new infrastructure. New infrastructure will be managed under contract by the private sector.
Apply a carbon tax to all other fossil fuels, EXCLUDING COAL covered by the electricity levy, to fund what ever infrastructure that is necessary to minimise Carbon release from all other endeavours. Accelerate the production of all electric vehicles with legislation to force the hand of petrolhead executives.
There….I’ve said it as LOUDLY as I can. Do these things and the world will follow.
Everything else is a waste of precious time.
There are many smaller initiatives that can be undertaken
population reduction encouragement
minimum travel distance for work incentives
a national solar water heating conversion target date
a product packaging review
improved policing during times when people would prefer to move around as cyclists and pedestrians so that children can be safe.
A land clearing swap…land can only be cleared if an equal quantity of land plus 10 percent is planted out.
no till farming (seed drilling)
rural land restoration
rethink our buildings and town planning in view of the world to come
vehicle size reduction incentives (the converse is every family should have a bus for maximum travel comfort….which makes more sense)
There are a million practical programmes that can be undertaken at minimal cost. These things will reshape our communities into more efficient environmentally sound living spaces to be better prepared for the holocaust ahead.
Short answer, nothing can stop the burp……now.
Peter Wood: that’s what I said!
BilB: exactly. Solar origin is the only energy source that doesn’t actually involve increased heating of the Earth. Solar, wind, waves, hydro.
Andos @ 13 include geothermal in that list
BilB, at the end of your comment @ 12 you simply gave up on the methane from permafrost threat. I’d suggest that your strategy will see warming well beyond the middle of this century, which means that the risk will get worse.
It seems to me that is we rely only on controlling emissions the world will warm until we can reach zero net emissions. And we can’t get to zero without some form of significant offsetting.
I don’t know how risky the permafrost threat is (it seems eminently possible) but I suspect the emissions from that source will pick up gradually in timescales that we are used to, that is over decades. This contrasts with a continental shelf slip and tsunami if we disturb underwater clathrates. The PETM event 55mya may well have been geologically a methane ‘burp’ but the time estimate I saw was that it happened over 10,000 years.
So at this point I’m saying we need to do some research in the geo-engineering area so that we can do it intelligently if we have to. The third and fourth graphs in this post show a disturbing uptrend. That wouldn’t have to go on for much longer before it would be panic stations all around. The need to work on a plan B seems only sensible to me.
We might also think about the need for international institutional arrangements that can exert some discipline over who does what.
If the permafrost melts we are all totally fucked – get over it.
Huggy
Brian: CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 +2H2O
you’re right!
Thanks chem. I was advised by someone who would know.
Huggy @ 16, that’s just stating the bleeding obvious. In fact it’s melting a bit now. Does that mean we just sit back and watch it happen?
Research on ruminants with natural locational Australian wild grasses has proceeded,there is good evidence native grasses help.They could be spouted,and donkeys years ago now,I wanted someone to see if local weed problems like Parramatta Grass could be sprouted or water shooted,but I found triumphant lack of interest.There are tree species abundant with seed and leaves , here on the Dorrigo Plateau I wanted someone to research as emergency fodder in a drought period…a triumphant lack of interest.There is a little yellow flower called Fireweed I have personally spent weeks pulling out,that is eaten by sheep at certain growth stages,I want research done on making it harmless an edible by some product similar to molasses as a sweetener,but not to increase farts or burps.The question of why cattle wont eat the flowers in abundance,needs answering.And then maybe we could have the beginnings of a dual solution.Termites cannot surely be contributing to the methane build up in the degrees mentioned if tree cover is diminishing at the rate some proscribe too.And Termites offer the solution in their gut,as more than one scientist has offered up.Synthesizing these things are just the matter of being able to.And Geoengineering is so vague a term, it now seems to offer itself as anon starter,but what if, the same term had engineering realities as paint made by the use of carbon dioxide made into solid brick or other forms of hardened material,or plastic covers,or combinations of very hard surface materials in various forms in moulded products,that fill ed up drilled areas and expanded in a different way to gas!? I mean there are options like growing algae from carbon dioxide which has many uses including biofuel and then put it down the bloody holes..why aren’t the Victorians putting algae down their experimental holes.Fuck them!
Actually fellers the output from converting methane to electricity should be about 4 times. that from burning coal. Firstly the sums from Brian@5 are about right you get twice the heat per unit CO2 because of the high hydrogen content. However you can burn the methane in a combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) and get a factor of two improvement in energy conversion over coal 2X2 = 4
With coal you are stuck with the steam cycle and a poor Carnot efficiency.
It’s a total no-brainer to just burn methane instead of coal.
Huggy
My comment simply is that plan A hasn’t even got beyond hot air, why do you think that a plan B will be anything other than a catchy phrase.
And now we have Australia’s principle coal company executive, Director Rudd, convincing the worlds largest pollutors, 6 of 8 G’s, that coal is clean, and the way to go. The guy needs to be sacked for his conflict of interest.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24368848-2702,00.html
“BilB, at the end of your comment @ 12 you simply gave up on the methane from permafrost threat”
The release of the balance tipping submerged methanes from submerged permafrost and methyl hydrates (clathrates) is driven by overall sea temperature on the one hand and ocean currents on the other. If the Atlantic conveyor does become disrupted by fresh water release from the melting cap, then warm currents reaching into the Arctic sea, where a huge store of relatively shallow clathrates reside, will be disrupted. This will buy time. For that to be helpful at all there has to have been a major reduction in carbon release. So the plan A is the only show in town to be supporting.
Huggy
Back in this thread you were also talking about converting methane to electricity. In the context of this older posting can you direct me to a website showing the parts & construction of a bio reactor.
To others upstream complaining about the methane from ruminants burping.These production systems exist within a a carbon cycle. To keep on peddaling that the the problems of livestock & their methane production are not solvable sound to me like what comes out the other end of a bull.
Can I just point out that we are kind of into geo-engineering now?
If we stop burning coal and stuff like that we should lose the aerosol mask, which is calculated to be worth 1.6C of further warming (p.34 of Will Steffen’s new report – large pdf) making 2.4C above pre-industrial. So winding back burning coal is going to be tricky. As I recall this problem is addressed in Climate Code Red.
That is a cute idea there, SatD.
A methane powered back pack for cows. The trick would be to think of some useful work that could be done out in the paddock.
My first thought is for a sheep shearing machine. You could have an appropriately equiped cow roaming the sheep paddock plucking up any sheep that came within range and spitting out the shawn sheep Wallace fashion, depositing collected fleeces at the dairy at milking time (this depositing process would be called “fleecing the fleece fleecers). And all powered by burps and farts.
Or you could fit out cows with fart powered LED light displays which would glow at night in various ways. This could become a rural tourist attraction.
Very good point, Brian. China is certainly doing its population share in that regard. Then there are the jet contrails.
Of course we are already geo-engineering; have been doing so since my forebears started felling trees. But the question concerns the magnitudes of our effects and the magnitdes of the detriments.
BilB I’ll join you in marketing LED-led rural tourism, but unfortunsately Uniqueness is the Watchword. As soon as (say) ten farms are doing it, the market’ll be disrupted and all will go broke.
We need to get the CFMEU on board. The Cow Fart Meliorating Enterprise Union. Put some real pressure on the Labor Govt.
It’s a massive win-win for the environment, jobs, clean energy, fresh milk and our old friends the cows. No bull. Think of the kiddies and their fresh milk.
By the way, it’s “shorn” I think. Shawn is that nice young chap in the CFMEU marketing, governance and vertical integration section. We’ve got him onto corporate relationships and he’s mocking up a position paper down the milking shed.
BilB #24 Piggery’s would the first place to start. Anywhere there is an intensive operation going on. Where manure piles give off methane. Convert it to methane & the waste spread as fertilizer. Forget about catching burbs, except for research, there are research programs on a 3 prong attack on this one; genetics, ruminant bugs to make better use of feed so less becomes methane, & lastly the impact of different feeds & feed supliements.
There is a land management approach to offset the release of methane by burbs, i.e. increase the carbon levels in the soil. This is achieved by rotational grazing & increasing ground cover (kg/ha of grass & natural litter). Had a nice link to put in here but the site isn’t responding.
BTW In my last comment I wasn’t refering to what Brian’s posting is about – methane being released from permafrost, my knowlege dosn’t extend to this field.
You’re right still, there’s impressive perliminary research being carried out on dairy production, (esp methane reduction). Seems to be a ‘whole of farm’ approach, whether methane reduction or lowering nutrient outflow (N, P) into streams, rivers.
SatD 27,
I agree, and I think that there is a lot of that quietly going on. We just don’t get to hear about it. But it should be promoted and supported everywhere. Have you been following what the Chinese are doing with domestic waste digesters. There is one company that projects to produce 1 million digesters in the coming year. Our councils need to come up to speed on these developments. One of Australia’s main disadvantages is bureaucratic drag. Christchurch City Council NZ built a dome methane collector for its sewerage plant. This was done for odour control. As time progresses that investment will be viewed in a very different light.
I think that the whole arguement for penalising the rural sector for methane releases is invalid as the natural prefarmed environment emits massive amounts of methane. The difference I expect to be marginal for most rural endeavours.
I’ve gotta go now, but possibly tonight, maybe tomorrow night I’ll put up some graphs that show that human caused methane has been increasing over the industrial period. From ruminants in recent times it’s been pretty steady, the main increase comes from mining.
Thanks, Brian. And thanks Ambigulous for your support of the rural LED tourism recovery idea. I think that the all year paddock Christmas display idea has real legs. When you think about it some more, you realise that the light intensity will be proportional to the methane availability, which will come in surges. And the surges will be relative to the cows (now here I have to say, here, that it is a shame that kangaroos do not fart much methane because wouldn’t that look dramatic) ablution cycle. So what you would see is a kind of slow twinkle of light spread around the rural landscape. With the occasional lightning bolt from the older cows. And, not that you would get Family First support for this idea ((((because, shhh, they don’t believe in any of this stuff)))), you still have to put a happy face to the promotion, so you could market the idea as a must see rural “tinkle twinkle” [circle C, registered tradenark]. All we have to do is get people to ride around on their push bikes to enjoy the display and we have a winner.
still@downfall@22
There is avast literature on bio-reactors methane generation available via google.
I will try to dig up some good stuff and post a link. Have to go now.
Brian, the SO2 blanket thing is also scary have often wondered how we get rid of it without upsetting the apple cart,
Huggy
I don’t know if s0me-one is taking it or not “but Now, as Ariel Schwartz of Fast Company reports, Ohio University researcher Geraldine Botte has come up with a nickel-based electrode to oxidize (NH2)2CO, otherwise known as urea, the major component of animal urine.
Because urea’s four hydrogen atoms are less tightly bound to nitrogen than the hydrogen bound to oxygen in water molecules, it takes less energy to break them apart: Just 0.37 Volts need to be applied across the cell, against the 1.23 Volts needed to break down water.”
http://www.greencarreports.com/blog/1022028_can-urine-rescue-hydrogen-powered-cars
Given that there must be about 8 million l produced every day it seems we are missing a major resource not only a fertiliser but a fuel.
At apublic meeting called to hear a”green’ expert talk about energy conservation,I raised the utilisation of urine. The man almost ran from the meeting screaming “we don’t want to talk about that ewww ”
Huggy
I heard this yesterday, and if it goes ahead it makes worrying about methane moot.
From Crikey
Wednesday, 28 May 2008
What about Victoria’s vast gas reserves?
Stephen Mayne writes:
Queensland Gas generated plenty of excitement yesterday when it announced plans for a Hunter Valley power station to be supplied from Queensland’s vast coal-seam methane gas reserves.
There is so much coal-seam-methane gas in Australia’s eastern states that it remains an absolute travesty that NSW is selling good black coal to its power stations at about $12 a tonne, when it could be exported for ten times more.
Few people know it, but there is also an emerging view in Victoria that the Gippsland basin potentially has more gas reserves than either Queensland or the North West Shelf.
Yet the Victorians who will vote in the Gippsland by-election continue to burn dirty brown coal in the La Trobe Valley that does more than anything else to deliver Australia the world’s worst record for carbon emissions on a per capita basis.
While the green purists and climate change deniers can dream about “clean coal”, wind, solar and geo-sequestration, developing baseload capacity from these technologies is at least 15 years away.
Australia should be closing down coal-fired power stations and building a stack of new gas-fired power plants right now. Instead, we’re years behind because John Howard was so captured by the carbon club.
We’d actually make money out of the gas switch when you consider the increased coal exports – plus Australia would be feted the world over for achieving the biggest cuts in carbon emissions.
Your post is nonsense, because you have used Wikipedia for your ‘facts’.
There’s 3,000 gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere?
Oh, really. You are actually (in common measurements, which you imply, here) wrong by a mere three orders of magnitude. That’s an impressive error.
Why don’t you take a look at the following, for the actual estimates (in common measurements) from a proper source?
Trenberth, K.e., Christy, J.R., and Olson, J.G., 1988, Global Atmospheric Mass, surface pressure, and water vapour, variations, Journal of Geophysical Research 93D, 10925
If you are three orders of magnitude out at the start, how can your work be trusted at all?
MarkL
Canberra
MarkL,
Brian’s comment
“I do hope I got that wrong”
clearly indicates that this is a work in progress open to correction. If you know of more correct information then please put it up. The derisive remark is not at all appropriate.
Do you have any information on methane and its potential impact? or is the above the extent of your knowledge?
RE: the LEDs on livestock: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw
Well bugger me!!
That looks so cool.
I did wonder whether with the light available 24/7 the sheep would continue eating until they popped. But don’t the dogs look to be having so much fun!
Even if all this methane from permafrosts goes up in the atmosphere does anyone truly believe it will have a long term impact on the climate? The fact remains that methane breaks down in the atmosphere over a period of just 12 years, eventually becoming CO2 and Water (amongst other rather innocuous things). It has been shown through studies all over the world that plants grow bigger and faster when there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, puling out the Carbon and emitting Oxygen. This has to be a classic case of nature rectifying the situation on its own.
MarkL @ 36 I’m happy to be corrected, as always, but you’ll have to do better. In the post I converted the 3,000gt of CO2 quoted in Wiki to carbon by dividing by 3.67, which gave me 817gt. That put me in a comfort zone because 800 was what I had in memory.
It’s actually not easy to verify, but this image this image of the carbon cycle gives us 800. You’ll notice from the url that it’s got a German pedigree. It comes from the German Advisory Council on Climate Change. The most common image of the carbon cycle is this one from NASA. It’s common because it’s a bit older. From other evidence I turned up it’s based on a concentration of 360ppm. Anyway if you convert that proportionately with your calculator to 387 you’ll get 806.
That’ll do me until a real climate scientist tells me I’m wrong. I’ve wasted enough time on it.
“There’s 3,000 gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere?
Oh, really. You are actually (in common measurements, which you imply, here) wrong by a mere three orders of magnitude. That’s an impressive error.”
Can’t get to the article but let’s do a quick sanity check…
The abstract gives total dry air mass of the atmosphere as about 5 x 10^18 kg. or 5 x 10^6 Gigatonnes.
current CO2 concentration is about 380 x 10^-6 (Number of C02 molecules divided by total number of molecules in a volume of dry air) http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Molar mass of C02 is about 44g. Molar mass of air about 29g. So C02 concentration by mass in the atmosphere is about (44/29) x 385 = 585 x 10^-6.
therefore Mass of CO2 in atmosphere = 585 x 10^-6 x 5 x 10^6 Gt = 2925 Gt.
What’s the article say and how do they shift the calculation by three orders of magnitude? (Or did you forget to convert kg to tonnes?)
d
Brain @10
“From the post at Crikey, the ruminants are the biggest single factor in anthropogenic methane, but rice is about equal to fugitive coal and wastewater, and bigger than landfill. What do you think about rice?”
The food value/nutrition from rice is much greater per unit of methane than red meat – which doesn’t mean the rice impact should be ignored, but there’s much bigger and quicker gains to made by reducing consumption of livestock products. However, shifting from rice to other foods would also be a good idea rfom a greenhouse perspective, and/or changing rice production methods.
AB@43, When are people going to get over the whole eating meat is destroying the planet thing? Ruminants have been on the planet forever simply excreting methane that turns into C and H over a period of just 12 years which gets absorbed by plants (that cows go and eat again) as water and CO2. It’s been happening forever! If it was such a problem we’re lucky those Americans nearly wiped those millions of dastardly buffalo off the face of the Earth. Doggammit, we should give those Ivory hunters a medal for taking out methane belching elephants! Time to get real and accept that animals in no way add to the greenhouse gas load in the atmosphere, the only way anything can be added to the current atmosphere we live in is by digging it up from underground and putting it there.
Good on you TBW, I saw AB’s comment in the early hours of the morning & didn’t trust myself to reply. Brian would’ve had to play the delete comment role
TBW at least you’ve got the methane coming out of the right end. Please note everyone, it’s burping, not farting, for the most part. I got over fart jokes before I got into them.
More Methane
http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/search/label/Methane%20hydrates
in case it is not alrady linked.
So, TBW and SatD. What is the story on methane? You have been jumping up and down about the ‘ruminants don’t matter’ idea, and I kind-of get that. Isn’t the problem the ‘temporary’ additions of CO2e gases at a critical time when we are needing them to come down. As far as I can tell (I’m not a boffin), the carbon is better off being in grasslands and thus becoming soil carbon, than being chewed and burped by a ruminant.
What am I missing?
Re: link in DI(nr) (34): and HB’s reference to deluded voters in Gippsland being the agents for such a retrograde step: Let’s not forget the victorian ALP, those evil geniuses that gave us Senator Fielding: ( and don’t for a nanosec construe that as an endorsement for torydom)
Also, in context of latest Rio Tinto kerfuffle about “When is a chinese resources and energy investment and control vehicle not an tool of China’s statist ambitions?”, and after Cicero’s “Cui Bono?”, note who the mining company partner in the proposed Latrobe Wide Brown Land ( and Atmosphere) project is : Truenergy, which is really China Light and Power, which is part owned by CITIC pacific, which is a vehicle of China International Trust and Investment Corp, one of the most behemoth of China’s state owned corporate covers.
So Victorians getting electricity bills from Truenergy can know a little bit of their money is being used to pay PLA wages out there in Xinjiang.
Yaz @48. The problem with soil organic carbon is that it cannot increase indefinately. Like all things in nature, the organic carbon in the soil comes into balance with the carbon consuming, organic matter decomposing microbes in the soil that emit, you guessed it, CO2. Since soils have been around forever, this balance was achieved long ago so grass going through its natural life cycle does not do anything for the soil organic carbon levels. Sure, fully grown grass above the ground stores a lot of carbon, until a fire or animal comes and eats it or it naturally dies off and turns it back into CO2. It does not increase SOIL organic carbon.
Soil organic carbon has been run down in cropping lands where produce (consisting of large amounts of Carbon) is removed from the land for people to eat AND where this land has been continually cultivated as this exacerbates the breakdown of organic carbon from crop residues. Farmers are finding nowadays that zero till farming has restored soil organic carbon levels to the same levels that are seen under virgin land. Low and behold, despite farmers best efforts to keep increasing soil organic carbon levels (as this is also good for farmers yields) above this level, the soil organic carbon level has plateaued. This in fact is the sign of a healthy, resilient soil – one which does not let anything go out of balance with anything else.
So yaz, getting back to your original point, you can forget about increasing soil organic carbon and make a choice about what you do with the carbon in grass above the ground – feed it to animals or let it die off – either way you end up with CO2 eventually.
Thanks for that, BilB @ 47. I don’t think Cannadel and the Global Carbon Projest do all that well in disseminating their work outside the academic journals.
The money quote on implications from the link is this one:
This is less drastic than implied in the post and I’m not sure why. The 80 ppm seems low.
As to the temperature implications, I suspect that one problem is that climate models used for forecasting still only incorporate short term feedbacks. It seems that they simply don’t know how to include the longer term feedbacks as per Hansen’s “Trace gases” work. The frustration is that Hansen’s work is acknowledged, as in Garnaut and then either ignored or included in a throwaway comment, like “the risks/uncertainties are mainly/all on the upside”.
Hence the temperature implications of increased carbon emissions are routinely underestimated and the policy implications are missed.
We can argue about Methane forever, the fact remains that if the entire electricity generation system was changed over Coal Seam Methane we would reduce carbon emissions due to our present coal fired generation by over 70%.
Queensland and NSW have vast proven reserves of CSM, Victoria will be found to contain just as much.
What are the problems?
1. The nuclear fantasy
2. The retardation of our Government and business leaders.
3. h incumbent coal generators.
Do you know what really incenses me? The technology to do this is off the fucking shelf and its low cost. Just call Siemens, ABB or any other major generation equipment supplier and they will deliver within 6 months.
It’s not rocket science.
Huggy
“The nuclear fantasy”
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Actually, I think Australians have the opposite — nuclear paranoia. I don’t think that’s a problem in Australia, since there is essentially infinite space and essentially infinite other resources, but it is a big deal in other countries. If you are smallish sized country (i.e., most countries), sticking windfarms and so on around the place is a lot more difficult than Australia, where it still seems near impossible. It appears NIMBYism exists everywhere.
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Also, I find it hard to believe that you can get coal seam methane cheaply. If you could, given the massive market for gas, I find it hard to imagine people wouldn’t be trying to get it, even if it was only exported. There would be oodles of money to be made.
HB: Isn’t there a small matter of huge, measured in the Sydney Harbor units, amts of very nastily contaminated water co-produced when liberating CSM?
In what must surely be a benchmark for coyness: “The Queensland Government has identified a significant imbalance between the volume of coal seam gas water likely to be produced over the next 30 years and the demand for this water by potential users”.
But on the bright side, I’ve just got my idea for an entry in the “new flavor of potato chips” competition ( didja know Australia has more flavors of potato chips per head of poultaion than anywhere on the planet?): What we’ve got there is agricultural land, perfect for spuds, and an unlimited supply of the saltiest of salt, all out in the blazing sun. Surely a business plan to bolt them together as Solar-baked ultra-salty chips, … smoky bacon has been a big seller, blend in whatever artificial aromatic flavor was behind that to disguise the coally taste, titrate it out gradually, and folks will get to like even the coal taste. Make’em so salty that people drink heaps of beer, get ultra-pissed, and the pavlov effect will take care of the rest.
The Good News
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/global-warming/climate-warriors-march-behind-little-green-book-20090710-dg2t.html
Conrad,
CSM is about the cheapest gas you can get, there is a basically unlimited resource in Australia. You say “Also, I find it hard to believe that you can get coal seam methane cheaply. If you could, given the massive market for gas,”
Queensland will have over 70% of its gas from CSM by 2011.
“QLD GAS SCHEME. In 2000, the Queensland Government introduced the Gas Scheme
requiring electricity retailers to source at least 18% of their retail operations from gas-fired
generation. In 2000, coal seam gas was providing less than 5% of Queensland’s gas
requirements. Today it is supplying more than 70%.” From: THE SURAT BASIN ENERGY PROVINCE
THE WHERE, THE WHY AND THE WHO!
September 2008.
A little research on your part would help you to avoid such absurd claims as. “I find it hard to believe that you can get coal seam methane cheaply”
As I have stated you also get 4 times the amount of electricity per unit of CO2 emitted.
I hope your research on Nuclear is better than your research on CSM!
It is in fact the un-researched blather and wishful thinking about pure nuclear “too cheap to meter” electricity that holds back near term technologies such as electricity generation from CSM.
Don’t worry fellers soon a great green nuclear Goddy God will descend from the heavens and save your sorry arses-not.
If the Queensland Govt had any balls it would mandate all base load and peaking generation from CSM. Would not cost the taxpayer or the consumer a single red cent because the profits from electricity generation would shoot right up. Have to retrain a thousands of coal miners but.
Huggy
Huggy.
HB: You forgot the salient point.
Danny,
Evaporation ponds? No way.
The water will be put through multi-stage flash evaporation systems THAT USE THE LAST DREGS OF ENEGY FROM THE COMBINED CYCLE ELECTRICITY GENERATION SYSTEM. The evaporation comes free!!!
No fucking ponds. You finish up using ALL the energy available from the gas – 100% utilisation. (Almost – thanks M.Carnot – you bastard)
You get millions of litres of pure water and sodium chloride (lots) and a number of very valuable other chemicals as well.
We are going to need the Sodium for energy storage; but that’s another story. I need to spend a deal more time educating the masses on this one.
Huggy
Huggy,
the fact that nuclear isn’t as bad as you say can be seen in countries like France. Why do you think France produces hardly any CO2 in comparison to many other places? Is it because they use nuclear power and recycle their uranium or is it because they use magic? Last time I checked, they also had a such surplus of energy, they were exporting it around Europe. So a few nuclear reactors really do go a long way, and you also get to buy your uranium off countries that won’t screw your supply up. No doubt we’ll see more and more as Russia plays nasty buggers with the gas supply and countries use either that or coal.
Also, pointing to Queensland and CSM use is hardly great evidence (Queensland being a tiny speck in the world of hydrocarbon use), so I still don’t believe your suggestion (although I’ve no doubt that you can get CSM and that it isn’t especially rare). Alternatively if it was really so cheap an abundant, why arn’t Shell or the plethora of other companies whose business is hydrocarbons flocking to dig it up all over Australia? Surely that must preferable to digging up hydrocarbons in the ME (or the middle of the Ocean on the NW shelf), and there would be literally trillions of dollars at stake, gas being a huge export after all. Or are they just too dumb and lazy to realize it?
Huggybunny – CSM is fine in the abstract. The problem is that it’s dissolved in highly saline water, and extracting it involves getting all that saline water onto the surface. This has two effects – first the obvious, what to do with all that highly saline water, hundreds of km inland? Second, removing it from underground will likely drain the (less saline) artesian water on which many regional industries depend. Pumping it back down removes much of the energy gained from getting it up in the first place.
And on the ruminant discussion, the point needs to be made that ruminants (at least the grass-fed ones) are a part of the ecosystem. If they don’t eat the grass, it will be replaced by other plants – grass depends on grazers. I don’t know if there is any research on the carbon cycle effects of this.
Conrad
There is truth amongst what Huggy has said as well as that of Danny. Believe me Coal Seam Gas is a big deal here in the Surat Basin. It is plentiful & there are companies here getting their rocks off at the potiental of its extraction. After the intial set up costs, it is cheap to extract. It is not possible to extract when the coal seam is less than 80 metres from the surface. So from a mining company’s point of view once the economics for open cut mining decrease because of an increasing depth of the seam CSG takes over.
Unfortunally good agricultural land & nature reserves are destroyed forever with open cut mining. Agriculture & CSG can co-exist as long as there is good will & co-operation. Danny has rightly pointed out that in current operations coal seam water is a real curse. If Huggy knows a way to solve this, then wonderful. Another problem with CSG is subsidance of the landscape.
HB (58): “You get millions of litres of pure water and sodium chloride (lots)”
That sounds like a desalination process, conceptually obvious of course, but I find the numbers problematic…
This multi-stage flash-evaporation scheme of yours, can you give a link showing it operational at the hundred megalitres per day scale?
Let’s see… 100 million litres per day, latent heat of vaporisation H2O 2.26 million J/ litre…
You sure you’ll only be using only “THE LAST DREGS OF ENEGY FROM THE COMBINED CYCLE ELECTRICITY GENERATION SYSTEM”, and it won’t need a power station of its own just to power this still of yours?
Please show working. (Peak insolation townsville, .8kW/sq mt, if you wanna plug max ‘free’ evaporation in, mind you 100 million litres/day implies a lot of tubing/troughs since you can’t contaminate the soil, so ‘free’ is a helluva fudge)
Average salt concentration Bowen Basin CSG water: 3000 ppm or 3000 mg/l or 3g/l. 100 million litres /day = 300 million g/day or 300 thousand kg/day or 300 tonne/day. That is a lot of salt to move and store or… what are you doing with it again, and how? That’s per CSG operation.
Again, please show working.
You haven’t just bought shares in, or been employed by, or had your children kidnapped by, a CSG operative have you Huggy?
“It is plentiful & there are companies here getting their rocks off at the potiental of its extraction”
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Let’s have a comparison:
According to our friendly government statistics here:
http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/minerals/geological/overview/regional/sedimentary-basins/methanensw
There are around 500 billion m3 of extractable CSM in NSW.
You can compare that to the NW shelf alone here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_West_Shelf_Venture
where they have already got 33 trillion cubic feet of gas out already (which is about 1 trillion cubic m3), and you don’t have all the extraction problems.
So no doubt lots of CSM could be extracted at some price, but there other more plentiful sources of gas which are easier and cheaper to get at (although perhaps I’m biased — I remember losing money on one company trying to get CSM a decade ago — perhaps it’s easier and cheaper to get now). I also assume that once the technology arrives to get the methane from calthrates that Brian worries about (which are almost infinite), all of these smaller sources are either not going to be viable or they are really are just going to be smaller sources.
Danny,
).
Multi stage flash distillation produces over 80% of artificially desalinated water in the world. Many of the plants are driven with the vast quantity of waste heat from your favourite nuke (60%). Fly up the Gulf of Arabia and you will see what I mean.
I agree that water is a problem for CSM but it is not intractable. The problem will be solved.
The big thing it has going for it is that it is not going to create a radioactive wasteland for our grandchildren.
As for France, the chickens are coming home to roost. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,568467,00.html
No I have no shares or other interest in CSM (apart from my endless quest for truth
Conrad, CSM is almost pure Methane, Natural gas has other hydrocarbon volatiles and carbon monoxide and is probably not as good from a CO2 emissions standpoint.
Huggy.
You do realise HB that what you guys have been arguing over is still a fossil fuel, and one that is safely sequestered for the time being. Meanwhile the sun is still shining, somewhere.
Huggy CSM sounds good, but having some experience in the area it ain’t that flash regardless of what you’re told by gas companies. In the next couple of years when the proposed projects get up there will be 1000 tonnes of salt removed per day from these wells. It has to go somewhere and will absolutely decimate the environment. This is occurring in the headwaters of the Murray Darling basin. Even if they desalinate, what are they going to do with the salt?
Huggy,
It seems to me the big problem with reactors is not small leaks coming from France (it sounds bad, but it’s hardly worse than oil spills, breathing in the smog cloud that lives over the northern hemisphere a fair chunk of the year etc. — it just sounds worse). It’s all the shitty old reactors that should have been decommissioned that arn’t for one reason or another. In rich countries, it’s not such a problem (except to the taxpayer, who sometimes ends up paying when the company that owns them goes broke), but in poor countries, it really is, since they essentially can’t close them down due to no other energy sources (the last reactor at Chernobyl, for example, wasn’t closed to to 2000, despite the obvious risks). If I lived in some places of Europe, I’d be far more worried about that than any methane burp or the possibility of a small leak.
TBW,
I would turn the 1000’s of tonnes of salt it into Sodium Sulphur or Sodium Nickel chloride batteries and store all that energy from intermittent sources such as wind and solar and use it in electric vehicles. Sell the left overs to the rest of the world.
See I have a hidden agenda.
Huggy.
S@D @61: You said:
Open cut mines are required to return land to its previous condition. This process involves collecting top soil before mining starts, reshaping the overburden to close to original contour followed by respreading the topsoil and replanting. Sure there is a temporary loss of ag land but it is misleading to talk about ag lam]nd being destroyed forever. It is instructive to google earth central queensland to see how little area is affected by opencut mining.
Land subsidence can result from the underground mining of coal but it is a bit hard to see how this can occur from CSG. The actual process involves pumping high pressure water to open the cleats followed by the extraction of gas leaving all the solid coal still underground. Besides most of the CSG will come from coal considered too deep to mine.
I happen to believe that, where practical, at least all the large coal fired power stations should be converted to gas. However, tha case for this conversion isn’t helped by inaccurate information.
Has anyone got any hard information re the CSG/saltwater issue and the options being seriously considered?
The key points seem to be:
1. It is very good to capture/use methane that is going to get into the atmosphere anyway. Think landfill or clatherates that are on the brink of decomposing. Even capturing/flaring is beneficial. While methane oxidizes with time not putting it in reduces the average atmospheric average.
2. It is good to replace coal with methane even if the methane is fossil methane.
3. Not so good if clatherates are used to extend our use of fossil carbon beyond what is available as oil or natural gas.
4. There are concerns that clatherates may be destabilized by proposed extraction processes. The problem is that, unlike natural gas, clatherates do not sit under a thick cover of rock that allows flow to be stopped by simply blocking off a well.
Question Brian: There should be lab data available showing the relationship between the temperature and pressure of clatherate decomposition. Would give us a better idea of how much clatherate there is that is likley to start decomposing in response to small rises in temperature.
It is worth noting that the Vostock ice core data shows CO2 moving up and down roughly in line with temperature over at least the last 400,000 years. Suggests that it is unlikley that extra CO2 will be compensated by more carbon being tied up in vegetation. Would also not be surprising if some of this rise and fall were tied up in changes in the amount of methane tied up in permafrost and clatherate.
Clathrates are stable under the knee of a pressure temperature gradient. I have lost these data will attempt to reconstruct. Ah here is a set: http://www.killerinourmidst.com/methane%20and%20MHs2.html
Huggy
Longish comment coming up.
I’ve updated the post with some graphs showing trends in methane emissions with an emphasis on the anthropogenic. This is largely in response to discussion about ruminants, the most recent of which were Andrew B at 43, The Brown Wiggle @ 44 and Yaz at 48.
To be frank on this one I’m waiting to see more research and discussion about it. Yes, I’m sorry, more discussion. I know that various proponents see the matter as dealt with, but they don’t agree and possibly never will. I’m not accusing anyone of being irrational, far from it, but I think our positions tend to be framed by our stance on vegetarianism. I have to confess that my wife and I went vegetarian for a time in the 1980s, with enthusiasm. We failed. My gut simply couldn’t handle it and I was on the way to emitting as much methane as any ruminant. My wife’s hairdresser told her that she’d last seen hair like that on someone still not recovered from third world starvation. I believe my wife’s cooking and food preparation was not the problem.
So I’ve come to see lean meat, not in excess, and with heaps of fruit, veg and carbohydrates, as a handy nutritional package.
On the other hand my daughter was vegetarian for many years and didn’t seem any the worse for it.
I’d have to say though, short of banning it, which isn’t going to happen, it will continue to be a niche product at the very least.
I don’t think the argument that it’s always happened holds water. The Stern and Kaufmann graph shows that anthropogenic emissions have increased by more than four times in the last 150 years.
In the comment thread on the Crikey article Andrew B linked to someone called Douglas Purser, who I think might be a journalist, said that “of the C consumed in the forage only 4.5% is belched as methane”.
still@downfall @ 27 tells us that there is a three-pronged attack on the problem: “genetics, ruminant bugs to make better use of feed so less becomes methane, & lastly the impact of different feeds & feed supplements”. I’d be surprised if the ‘problem’ couldn’t be halved. If meat producers were allowed by the government and the greens to manage their own operations I wonder whether they couldn’t offset the rest by setting up an on-farm biochar operation. My dad made charcoal 70 years ago, it can’t be too hard. If the price of carbon is as high as it will need to be to get net emissions near zero, on-farm sequestration could become economic.
Peter W @ 11 mentioned kangaroos, which is fine by me but I can’t see them being more than a niche product. One reason is that they are likely to be even less efficient than beef in converting fodder into edible protein.
Peter W makes the interesting point that the effect of GHGs needs to be considered over 100 years or more. Perhaps, given the work on the essential irreversibility of climate change by Susan Solomon and colleagues a thousand years might be a more appropriate time scale. I simply don’t know the answer to this, but whatever is settled upon will essentially determine the carbon price of methane, or it should.
That doesn’t exhaust the subject but it will do for now. Personally I’d hope that meat could continue to be available at not too high a price. But it may occupy an even smaller niche in the future. Recently I saw two articles, one saying that the Australian industry was aiming at the quality end of the market, the other that the American industry was aiming at sausages. I suspect the Australian strategy is the more appropriate.
John D @69, I don’t think you’ll find anywhere in the world where good quality agricultural land has been restored to its former state after open cut mining. It is absolutley false to assert this has happened. You only need to take a drive through the hunter valley or up through Moura to see the wastelands that was originally second class grazing land to see how poor rehabilitation works.
S@D, I think you’ll find the subsidence occurs during Underground Coal Gasification (UCG), where the coal is burnt underground, giving off coal gas for burning. Apparently one company has this sorted out by burning ‘chambers’ so that the land above does not slump but I think it’s yet to be proven completely. This is a much better idea though than CSM as there is no water whatsoever. From what I’ve witnessed there’s been a complete lack of transparency and goodwill so far from gas companies when it comes to dealing with landholders. Also a key condition of there license to extract water – that being monitoring of underground water BEFORE CSM works begin have not been done. This obviously means they have no baseline to work off and they cannot possibly then lay claim to any effects they are having. To me, this is pathetic and an attempt by the gas companies to sweep under the carpet the effects they are having on the underground water.
I don’t know if it’s through council yet, (it’s definately before council at least) but there are plans for 42 000 CSM wells, in 500m grids West of Dalby. Each of these wells needs to be joined by a pipe and a formed up road so the impacts on the environment, especially when you start moving onto floodplains would be enormous.
I was talking to the agronomist at one of the gas companies the other day where they have tree plantations to try and use up some of the desalinated water for something useful. I can’t remember the exact figure, but I do recall that they couldn’t treat the water for anywhere near what people on town water supplies actually pay for water. The water is just too expensive to be economically viable for anything due to the amount of salt and the expense of getting that salt out.
Brian @ 72, I think it’s true that there are more ruminants here now than there ever have been and hence more man made methane from this sector, but for me the point is the methane only lasts in the environment for 12 years. What happens after 12 years? Does the cattle producer get any tax he paid back, plus interest, because the methane no longer exists in the atmosphere?
One more thing about CSM. It is still a fossil fuel, and the burning of the methane still adds to the CO2 in the atmosphere. You’d still have to say that it’s not renewable, so why continue to muck around with non-renewable energy sources and put off what is inevitably going to have to happen – that is using renewable energy sources when fossil fuels eventually run out. In the meantime we’re destroying our environment to get them out.
Just on open cut mining: I agree with JohnD that the restoration of landform using topsoil is a requirement in Australia. This is a relatively recent requirement. If it hasn’t worked in some instances, there should be room for improvement or stronger regulation in the future. Perhaps futher “restoration” work there? Yes: more expense.
But there’s a bigger factor: open cut mining is basically cheaper, if you can do it in a particular location. Basically, because less labour and less ENERGY are expended. Keep in mind the embodied energy of every process we undertake or propose.
I doubt if the water from Coal Seam Methane production is the problem that the nuke wonks and other conservatives would have us believe. I have looked into it and there is a huge amount of work going into water re-injection into CSM beds around the world. Damn, there go the evaporation ponds and the huge salt piles. I guess I will have to find my sodium source elsewhere.
I just love it when a real and relatively simple method of reducing our CO2 emissions by at least 70% comes along the greenies come out of hibernation and bleat noo you can’t do thaaat we desperatley want the globe to descend into a globally warmed dystopia. How else are we to get the global population down to a couple of billion vegetarian folks then?
Huggy
Huggy@75
You just need to make CSM more huggable. After all, you can hug a windmill like you can a tree, and you can stroke a solar panel just like a lovely piece of timber. CSM is so ‘industrial’ and proletarian.
Perhaps the CSM folks need to transport the gas in enormous brightly coloured balloons, to increase its street appeal…Or perhaps rebadge it as ‘Cool stream gas’?
Yaz, Thanks for being so understanding.
I blame the green mentality for all our problems, especially since they have gone over to the nuclear lobby. All they want is a return to some imagined state where the noble savages thrived on mung beans and frequent colonic irrigations with radioactive water.
For chrissake you want to totally fuck the Auatralian deserts? Fill them full of vast solar farms, with huge powerlines and maintenance roads. Or chop down all the trees in Sydney to provide solar access for Dinky PV systems.
All that stuff about us eating green stuff instead of red meat, that’s the real agenda.
Meantime they attack the honest working class solution to the problem. Bloody limp wristed effete midle class poseurs – wait until they feel the sharp edge of proletarian steel.
Gotta go, the men with that funny jacket they put me in are coming.
Huggy
Huggy, how is 25 x 25 kms of solar panels as suggested in Christine Milne’s paper filling the deserts with vast solar farms?
TBW @ 73, your view of the importance of the methane boost coming from ruminants depends on how you view global warming and where we need to go for a safe climate.
The position that the scientific world seems to be heading towards is that if we want to get back to conditions similar to what prevailed for 8000 years in the Holocene, and was so good for our species, we’ll need to get back to atmospheric trace gas loadings that prevailed at that time. That’s if we want stability and safety in things like sea level and ocean acidity as well as the climate itself.
Over the last 800,000 years there have been times when the sea level, for example, has been meters higher than it is now with CO2 levels below 300ppm. Recent work in Antarctica has shown the the West Antarctic ice sheet has substantially melted 60 times and reformed with the CO2 no higher than it is now.
So the problem is not what happens to the emissions made by an individual farmer over 12 or 20 years. It’s the existence of a continual methane wave that wasn’t there before the industrial age that is the worry.
What this means and what we should do I hope can eventually be agreed upon by rational vegetarian and non-vegetarian scientists and policy makers.
Meanwhile I understand that Australia and NZ are the only countries seriously intending to incorporate the farm sector into all these emissions trading schemes being introduced. Whether and how much that will disadvantage Australian farmers remains to be seen. But the issue won’t, I think, be talked away. I’d hope the three-pronged attack mentioned above can ameliorate the situation.
Anyway that’s how I see it right now.
“For chrissake you want to totally fuck the Auatralian deserts? Fill them full of vast solar farms, with huge powerlines and maintenance roads.”
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“Huggy, how is 25 x 25 kms of solar panels as suggested in Christine Milne’s paper filling the deserts with vast solar farms”
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I’m personally happy with either of those possibilities (especially as solar is becoming and cheaper and cheaper). I’ll been even more happy when China fills up some of its vast deserts with them too.
While we’re speaking of deserts, I’m quite fond of the idea of covering some of our marine deserts with floating solar islands.
I’m sure we could improve their popularity by also making them part of the tsunami early warning system, or as part of various other marine paraphernalia.
And if those nimby greens complain, make them swim laps of them until they’ve changed their minds…
Well you guys don’t have a monopoly on hyperbole. How about the vast evaporation ponds and huge piles of salt that will be created by Methane extraction accoprding to the critics of CSM?
I wish it was all as easy as CM pretends. Lets have the solar farms too.
The real point about CSM is that its all leaking methane out into the atmosphere right now and every coal mine makes it worse. The seeming paradox is to burn it to CO2 and water , these are “better” (less effective) than methane from a heat trapping perspective.
Huggy
Ambigulous @74. Restoration is a requirement of open cut mining. Of course the devil is in the detail. Miners are required to restore the site to a stable condition. There is no mention or need of restoring the land to its previous quality and has not been able to be done anywhere in the world, at least on a large scale. Basically if the mine site doesn’t wash away and you can maybe get a couple of tree species to survive there than that’s ok.
Brian at 78. Why are we so concerned about CO2 levels with your facts in mind. Isn’t it true that 80-90% of greenhouse gases are water vapour? Is it also true that the world has in fact cooled for the last 8 years? Is it also true that one volcano can emit more CO2 than humans can do basically forever? Is any of this stuff fair dinkum? Maybe we should just start working on renewable energy sources for the simple reason that fossil fuels will run out eventually and we’re degrading the environment extracting them.
Just a small note about water vapor, because of the vast extent of the sea the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere remains roughly constant. Turn some water into steam and very soon it condenses back to water again. Most of the Global Warming Denialists have basically given up on the water vapour canard. I note that the famous old fart Freeman Dyson is still banging on about water vapour and global warming.
Huggy
Brown Wiggle@82 …
Water vapour is fairly constant in the atmosphere and shortlived. While it does underpin temperature, it can’t on its own force rises in temperature. CO2 is rising but water vapour is not (though as near surface temperatures rise due to CO2 increases, water vapour does remain in the air longer — so in connection with CO2 there is an amplifying effect).
It’s also not true that the world has cooled for the last 8 years — it has somewhat warmed. If you compare the last ten years with the preceding ten years you will find the average global temperature is higher. But periods of 10 years are too short to wash out non-anthropogenic forcings such as the solar cycle (approx 11 years) and El Nino/La Nina. Sea temperatures also lag insolation increases by a long way. That’s why 30 years is considered the minimum for a climate trend. It stops this kind of cherry picking of start and end times. I can pick two dates ten years apart in the last 15 years and give you two different “trends” but it would be bogus.
No, volcanoes don’t as a matter of practice emit more CO2 than humans do. One should never say never, but they just haven’t.
Yes we should phase in renewables and also do a lot on energy efficiency and reduce our per-capita demand not merely because it will slow the anthropogenic forcing of the current temperature anomaly or lengthen the time we can use those fossil fuels at low cost but because so much of what we do in the process of using fossil fuels also does other damage — like making the oceans less “base” and destroying the marine creatures at the base of the food chain, and because we poison the air and the living with 57 toxics (including actinides and mercury) when we burn coal in air and because the number of lives shortened by coal mining is way up there per KwH of energy produced — especially in the developing world. We should do it because dependence on fossil fuels exacerbates world inequality — much of the budget of LDCs is consumed paying for these fuels — and because we know that our own dependence on them as messed with our politics — most obviously in relation to the middle east.
I note that there has been some discussion of the farming of livestock and GHGs. As a vegetarian, I do agree that it would be a far better thing if far less land were given over to raising livestock, for reasons that have been well-covered here. That said, can I recommend Michael Pollan’s excellent book (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) in which he discusses the efforts of one Joel Salinger — a self-declared “christian conservative libertarian” (not someone who’s pitching for my favour, plainly) who has also called himself a “grass farmer”. Following in his father’s footsteps in West Virginia, he implements a very labour-intensive method of artisanal rotation farming with cattle on composite grasses. He has integrated chickens, rabbits, and pigs into his enterprise. The quick summary is this — he has created as close to a closed loop on his 100 acres as its possible to get and the result has been high yields, healthy produce and improving soils — all done with no resort to pesticides, artificial fertilisers or antibiotics and this on land that would not otherwise have been capable of supporting other protein crops without inorganic fertiliser. I have to concede — that’s a win all round. If all meat were raised this way, I’d have very little objection on either humanitarian or environmental grounds.
Fran
I reckon all ruminants should be fitted with inflatable bags to recover the methane. When they are milked, the methane can be “milked” also, to provide the struggling dairy farmers with a profitable byproduct.
No harm in fantacy…
I tried to get a link for that included this passage out of Quarterly Essay 31 but failed to, so I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Professor Tim Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, said in his recently published Quarterly Essay, Now or Never (issue 31 2008)
Huggy @ 71 Thanks for the link – a real treasure trove. could keep Brian in posts for months.
The case for converting coal fired to gas fired is that it is a relatively quick way of cutting power generation emissions by 60% and we would need fossil fuel electricty for decades even if we adopted the greens emmission target. However, to meet longer term targets we would either have to replace gas fired with something cleaner, acheive the sequestration dream or evolve the power plant into something fully solar thermal powered with molten salt heat storage.
Huggybunny@83: “Just a small note about water vapor, because of the vast extent of the sea the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere remains roughly constant. “
Untrue, sorry. The vast expanse of ocean just ensures that the atmosphere can always equilibrate rapidly with salty water. The actual partial pressure of water vapour in the atmosphere increases more or less exponentially with temperature, from about 0.006 atmosphere at 0oC to 1 atmosphere at 100oC. Cold air cannot carry much water vapour; hot air can, the amount adjusts fast as the temperature varies, and it doubles with every increase of 13-14oC.
Water vapour is a potentially powerful positive feedback mechanism. Warming from CO2 or CH4 > more water vapour > more warming.
andyc I agree, my understanding is that water vapour is a feedback as you describe, but I also understand that it is not a forcing agent like CO2.
However the change in water vapour content is very small for the few degrees rise that we expect. As you point out actually.
Interestingly it only the high relative humidity that makes the tropics habitable as you would know. Where you get large areas of land far from the sea you get really hot deserts.As you get closer to the poles you get bigger temperature excursions due to the lower RH, Melbourne gets 45c Brisbane never gets (seldom) greater than 32C. Hot and humid one day and hot and humid the next.
JohnD
That site should scare the pants off the denialists eh.
I have thought long and hard about this and I believe that CSM will buy us time to get the energy storage systems up and running.
10-20 kWh of energy storage in every home in Australia would radically change the entire energy generation system. Intermittent sources then be as useful as base load. The After Diversity Maximum Demand would be reduced by at least 80% with huge network benefits.
Huggy
still@downfall @ 86, I was going to mention that a lot of beef is grown on land that would not be suitable for cultivation. With global warming as rainfall becomes more intermittent there is likely to be more country where cultivation is uneconomic.
The point about having always to manage rangelands is also important. I heard an item on Bush Telegraph recently about a property southeast of Lake Eyre that is as big as Belgium. In good years they can stock 15,000 head (as compared with over 3 million in Belgium).
The guy said that the dilemma was that if you took away the beasties you wouldn’t be left with some pristine arcadian landscape but a mess of weeds and ferals. He wasn’t particularly advocating for the pastoral industry but he said that it necessarily involved landcare and we aren’t willing to face the cost of proper landcare if we turned it into national park.
TBW @ 82, Fran B has provided a really interesting response @ 84 to your queries about CO2 and climate change. Without meaning to be discourteous I tend to think it is a case of the dog hannah and her ball. People who are not disposed to accept mainstream science and think extremely well-qualified scientists are a bunch of deluded wankers seem to latch onto some factoid and when that is explained they simply come up with another one.
It’s essentially about trace gases and what happens at the margins. The whole greenhouse effect happens at the margin. It’s worth about 30C which sits on top of quite a bit of heat already when you consider that absolute zero is -273C. Real scientist Gavin Schmidt explained here that
And that:
Plus he explains why those numbers add up to more than 100%.
So there is no simple number to be handed out. Elsewhere he explains why the number is not 95% as a certain Australian scientist (Bob Carter) who gave a paper at the conference Senator Fielding went to the US to hear would have you believe. BTW Carter is not a climate scientist.
Changes in CO2 cause warming which increases the dew point and hence the water vapour carrying capacity of the atmosphere which provides further warming. So part of (I think three quarters) of the warming effect of increased CO2 is actually from water vapour. Real scientists and other knowledgeable persons feel free to correct me. But as I understand it the physics of what is going on is fundamentally straightforward.
The Queensland Country Life back in May did a poll on the question “Do you believe human activity is the cause of climate change?”
The answer was Yes 43.6%, No 48% and Undecided 8.4%. I was surprised the yes vote was so high because the other lot seem to make a lot of noise.
The NFF at their recent congress invited Ian Plimer as well as a real climate scientist, thus ostensibly meeting the needs of their clientele. In truth they did not do well by their clientele. In this comment I assembled links to some of the commentary by qualified and knowledgeable people on Plimer’s work. If you can read all that and still say Plimer has anything to offer then I can’t do anything more to persuade you.
But can I just say that most of the trapped heat from the CO2 effect goes into the ocean, which covers 70% of the earth’s surface, is on the average 3.6km deep and is really quite cold. If for whatever reason you get cold water rising as in a La Nina event of course you are going to get cooler surface temperatures for a time.
I believe the 2007 La Nina was the second warmest on record.
Also, finally, I say again that if you build a coal-fired power station it has a cooling effect for the first 7 years because of the short-lived aerosols it produced. But forever after that the long-lived GHGs like CO2 take over.
So anomalies that interrupt a smooth warming pattern are actually what you’d expect.
JD, HB and others trotting out this exploiting of what-has-been-quietly-minding-its- own-business geologically-stable ancient-sunlight-photosynthesized-and-fixed-as-fossilized-carbon not-contributing-to-atmospheric-CO2 of the subterranean coal oceans, and releasing the Coal Seam Gas Genie by next Friday, as a “relatively quick way of cutting power generation emissions by 60%”:
Do you you want it as yet another, extra, way of atmospherising already sequestered carbon, carrying its own set of considerable ecological ( water, salts) downsides, or is your idea to only bring CSM plant on stream as and when you negotiate shutting down the existing coal industry supply arrangements to replace them, ie by next Thursday?
Huggy, what’s happened to the discipline you used to have when you were up for the Huggy Bunny Dictatorship? You wouldn’t have let youreslf get away with the hand waving of “I doubt if the water from Coal Seam Methane production is the problem that the nuke wonks and other conservatives would have us believe. I have looked into it and there is a huge amount of work going into water re-injection into CSM beds”: reference please old chap, or chappette. “I have looked into it” indeed, shades of Joh BP “don’t you worry about that”.
I’m dubious it’s even possible since I thought that, at the existing endogeneous high pressures and over geologic times, the dissolved-CH4/water/coal forms a heterogeonous crystal (or is it colloid) structure, and brute-force pumping back of the released water is not gonna be able to re-establish or replace those lattice forces and simply stuff the same amount of water back into the hole it came from. I can’t re-find a reference, but it’s not the sort of thing I’d make up. It sounds a bit like what I gather happens with these clathrate cages. My instinct is, we’re on a hiding to nothing if we think we can disturb these intricate structures, formed only via the vast patience and continuous tough-love force of geologic pressure and temperature processes, have our way with the juicy resources and then fit the messed up bits back in the original wrapper. Gibbs probably would have something to say about it, along the lines be careful what you entropise.
While you’ve a mind to be ‘thinking long and hard about this’ Huggy, maybe you can decipher what this Tony Bigum guy is on about when he writes
I don’t like the sound of that, with mental pictures of runaway underground pressure release chain reactions uncontrollably releasing gas with only massive wasteful counterproductive gas flares as monuments to our greed and stupididity.
Lets not forget, it’s not science or strategy or planning or policy or vision driving these plays, just cowboy corporate greed. To augment that old description of the ‘mixed-ness’ of the Australian economy: If it moves, shoot it, if it doesn’t, chop it down, … if it’s in the ground, dig it up.
Brian @91 – thanks for that. Maybe the media should give more coverage of Plimer and Carter for the simple fact that then their claims could be refuted by science. At the moment it seems their claims are going unchallenged.
HB, I think you need to get in contact with a gas company about some of your ideas for the CSM water. They must have spent millions trying to solve that dilemma, mostly unsuccessfully, up until now. They’re still building massive evaporation ponds – as Danny said 50 000 ha – with 8m high walls. I don’t seriously believe they will stay sealed forever.
If ruminants are taxed and beef becomes more expensive I think all you’ll see then is a shift to pork, lamb and chicken, who aren’t ruminants and don’t emit as much methane.
Great thread and I’d like to thank Brian for all the effort he makes on this topic.
.
A minor point – as far as I understand things sheep are also methane emitters and the usual conversion for stocking rates means one cow is equal to 10 sheep. As such while the individual emissions may be smaller they will still be contributing and their overall numbers are greater than for cattle .
The national flock size has been declining for years now and while prices currently are very good I don’t hear of anyone gearing up to increase numbers.
If I can be allowed a metacomment – it is great to see a more nuanced appreciation of the Carbon cycle coming through in discussions.
Here is a rather good paper on the re-injection of CSM water.
It is a tad ambivalent about the feasibility in all cases but it does seem to say that it is really a cost issue. http://waterquality.montana.edu/docs/methane/reinjectiontech.shtml
Scrap the “clean” coal project and get with CSM I say
See also. http://www.dme.qld.gov.au/zone_files/mines_pdf/m2.pdf
Both the references imply that much of the water taken from the coal seam methane beds is already drinkable. So much for toxic chemicals and vast evaporation ponds and mountains of salt. (get a grip greenies)
There is so much CSM (it spreads down the entire east coast of Oz) that it should not be beyond the wit of regulators to insist that it only be taken from beds with potable water.
Huggy
I’m quoting AgForce with the 50,000 hectares of evaporation ponds reference.
I for one don’t think saying, “hey, there’s power left over after we pump energy into the brine and get potable water back, and the biggest salt lick in the world besides…. What’s yet another bunch of sources of pre-sequestered carbon being vented to atmosphere for profligate comfort and profit among friends?” is anywhere need good enough.
Lets not forget kiddies what happened when the central west was drenched last year, an estimated 100,000 megalitres of water drowned ensham open cut coal mine in a couple of days, and proceeded to poison the fitzroy river catchment. Recall also the fact that lake Eyre is in flood this year, with a nasty payload from the plethora of mining jaunts in Nort West Queensland, including uranium, that the causing rains covered.
Who that saw it can forget Brian’s photo of the Bright Blue Country Road left after the copper-salts-drenched run off dried out? Maybe you can repost Brian as a reminder of just how safe for the environment mining companies are, not.
Thanks, murph and TBW.
Fielding’s gonna try to change Gore’s mind. Well bugger me!
Danny, it was a blue creek, posted as an update at the end of the Toxic waste spreads across the land post, pic sent to me by still@downfall.
Thanks Brian, that’d be this then
Thank you Brian and contributors.
Once again, the results of above-the-line-Senate-voting and the brilliance of the Victorian ALP HQ are called to mind, as Senator Fielding goes up against Mr Gore (ineffectual, publicity-seeking ex-politician; what’s he ever done to reduce climate change detriments??)
The Family First voters must be so proud, but they can share the glory with a fraction of those who voted ALP in the Senate that time.
Ambigulous @99: wouldn’t be nice if we could allocate preferences above the line istead of being forced to either fill in seventy preferences or accept the results of the corrupt, party wheeling/dealing that gave us Fielding?
Fielding has provided a valuable public service by taking on the responsibility of giving us a work in progress case of the unskilled and unaware persona.
Danny, here is my proposwition:
Stop mining coal and “mine” Methane instead.
Advatages:
1. 4 Times the electrical energy per unit CO2 emitted than coal
2. The methane that would otherwise be displaced by coal mining is left in the ground
3. The cost of generation plant conversion is trivial compared with nuclear or solar. You could even use the existing steam turbines with Gas turbines up front.
4. The entire conversion program could be carried out in less than 5 years
5. Lots of water
Disadvantages:
1. Lots of water
2. Not sexy like solar so greens hate it
3. Resource is so big that we may never wean ourselves off it and into sexy solar
4. Red neck denialist farmers organisations don’t like it. Too utterly stupid to see that here is a source of water for crop growing. Like Australia is really awash with water.
On desalination of water from CSM, my information is that the salinity ranges from potable to mildly saline. Ideal for desalination then, put it back into another aquifer or send it to Brisvegas. Blend the water from diffrent sources properly and you would not need desal The brine (if any) can be pumped back int the CSM formation.
Its a matter of will.
Huggy
Ambigulous @99
Yes that would be a step forward, and it would probably simplify senate counting too, assuming people could get their heads around it.
Personally, I am not all that happy with the current structure of elective governance. I favour a system that would be far more inclusive in practice –sortition + deliberative voting for the legislature plus direct democracy for broad goals or seriously controversial issues.
I’ve put quite a bit of thought into this but it’s is far too detailed to reproduce here and so in deference to Larvatus Prodeo’s requests for brevity I post the following link:
Sortition
Fran
Brian @ 90, just curious, do you remember what station that was, or the name of the bloke being interviewed?
I’m not sure the post-pastoral land-management would be as big a dilemma as he suggests. Finniss Springs is just south of Lake Eyre and I believe it is currently managed by the Aboriginal Lands Trust, it was de-stocked in the late 80’s/early 90’s {I think] and I think whilst there is grazing pressure by rabbits inhibiting natural regeneration, particularly of the Mulga scrub, the weeds are not especially problematic. The worst seems to be the ruby dock that arrived as stuffing in the saddlebags of the cameleers [sp?]. I seem to recall reading something about even that weeds becoming less of a problem as native insects etc are starting to graze it. Weed management in arid zones should actually be quite a bit easier than in more temperate regions. But really I think it’s fairly fallible logic to suggest a weedy environment is worse than a grazed, trampled, eroding arid ecosystem [with it's associated dust-storms].
There are some areas around Strangways mound spring complex [Anna Creek Station, I think] that have been fenced off to keep stock out – the result is quite spectacular. The cost to the landscape of grazing in those areas does not justify the return, weeds or no weeds, de-stocking the desert should be a priority.
That’s a practical suggestion, John D @100
Furious Balancing #104
As you suggest in the inland desert enviroment weeds are most likely to be a far less of a problem than higher rainfall country closer the coast. The rabbit has the highest enviromental impact of all pest animals. However there is a feral animal having a impact by its increasing numbers & is making a major negative impact contributing to your “grazed, trampled, eroding arid ecosystem”; i.e. the camel. It was covered on Landline last week.
Landline has been out in the Central country a couple times of late & in this story they covered the differing viewpoints of locking country up against activily managed sustainable production systems. Land has been bought by the likes of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, the nieghbouring pastralists have many concerns about the level of management & loss of cultural heritage.
still@downfall, I’m familiar with the feral camel problem, I’m more concerned by the notion being presented that pastoralism in arid regions shouldn’t be stopped because it would cause a major weed problem, the camels and rabbits [and wild horses for that matter] exist, grazing or not.
I’m not anti-grazing or anti-meat-eating, in fact I regularly advocate for grazing as one of the tools to be used in restoring the landscape. In areas of reasonably predictable rainfall it is actually a very useful conservation strategy, it happens in Terrick Terrick conservation park in Victoria, amongst other places. I work in areas where I see farming and conservation happening side by side pretty much every day, it doesn’t need to be an either/or situation.
BTW: Pastoralist’s in outback Australia using the loss of ‘cultural heritage’ argument brings a wry smile, they didn’t seem to worried about it when so many Aboriginal stockmen lost their jobs to helicopter mustering, or indeed, when Aboriginal people lost their culture and their livelihoods to pastoral activities to begin with.
PS: I do see some problems when land is ‘locked up’ for conservation too, I think we are a long way from the best and most sustainable situation. There are plenty of conservation/grazing – win/win situations that I think could be explored, I just have very strong doubts that they exist in those arid areas.
FB
Looks like we are only disagreeing on minor points. I presume you are aware of the massive different approach to land management between running cattle on the likes of King Island to the arid centre. There is far more diversity in rural enterprises than many believe. We are in danger of moving away from the methane debate into one of more general land management. But as I said back at comment 86 that removing livestock from the landscape will only create bigger problems.
FB I think it was Bush Telegraph on Radio National.
Really I was only trying to reinforce still@downfall’s point about the conservation element involved in land management for pastoralism. I’ve been thinking about a post for some time about this and the very topical issue of regrowth conservation in Qld.
In thinking about it I don’t know whether the bloke mentioned weeds at all and it might not have been the best example. Certainly where I am in the coastal subtropics weeds are a humungous problem. This afternoon I spent 4 hours ‘liberating’ one tree, albeit a jacaranda, that had a vine that usually provides cow tucker right up through the crown.
Getting a bit off topic.
In the AFR yesterday there was an article about the upcoming LNG boom. The particular focus was on the Gorgon project to build a $50 billion LNG plant which could be signed off on within weeks. It’s being held up for some reason by the EPA and the WA premier has smoke coming out of his ears.
The article mentions that there are $220 billion worth of projects on the books, two-thirds in WA and nearly a quarter in Qld. On the latter it seems they are talking about “several big competing coal-seam gas projects [which] are at various stages of feasibility assessment and development.”
In a recent BRW article they had a graph of projected “Australasian LNG Project Output” showing an increase from about 16 million metric tonnes in 2008 to over 90 in 2018.
So we are up to our eyeballs in gas production and development. Shares in Leighton Holdings should do well.
Meanwhile Anna Bligh’s conversion from center-right to extreme right is now complete:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,25784257-2702,00.html
Steve, as far as I can see Qld, NSW and Victoria are paying scant regard to the need to reduce emissions and are heading in the other direction. SA has the prospect of the Olympic Dam expansion which will add considerably to emissions here, however much the uranium might save when used elsewhere.
We are no certainties to even achieve our modest 5% cut by 2020.
I now expect a large post from the nuclear boosters to explain why in situe leaching of uranium presents no danger to any-one and is better than huge humungously big mountains of salt and absolutely vast evaporation lakes that accrue to CSM (not)
Huggy
Apologies for the tangent then. It’s an area that interests me and I didn’t think land management was irrelevant to this particular discussion. I just think a change in thinking about meat production in those regions could yield huge benefits, and when people [pastoralists] talk about land being ‘locked up’ for conservation, they are deliberately and self-interestedly putting an obstacle in the way of the alternatives being discussed. I’d be interested to know what the carrying capacity for that land would be under conservation management..that is to say, I’d like to know if more kgs of kangaroos could be ‘grown’ there than cattle. Kangaroos don’t produce methane, and there is no pastoral aristocracy to advocate for the kangaroo meat industry.
I confess the CSM stuff goes right over my head, the tendency for throwing around hyperbolic ‘greenie’ stereotypes doesn’t help when trying to genuinely understand what is being said.
FB This isn’t an answer to your Kangaroo in the top story question. I have been debating the posibility of a win/win senerio for climate change & livestock production. These links below may be in an odd setting but have a listen to what they have to say.
This first link takes to a presentation given by two Aussies, Tony Lovell & Bruce Ward, at Manchester for a competition being conducted right now in real time by the Guardian’s newspaper. The competition is a search for the greatest plan to tackle climate change. More likely the greatest plan for the Guardians promotion. But that aside this is a serious presentation by two people who believe in what they are doing. They have made it to the final 10 judged by a panel of judges and now the winner is determined by an online vote.
They are coming 1/3 – This is the Ashes of Climate solutions -don’t let the Poms win.
Link to cast a vote. Poll closing in 8 days.
Quote from Bruce
“Tony and I are seriously concerned that most people throughout the world are totally unaware of the need for farmers to move from being ‘part of the problem’ to become recognised as a vital ‘part of the solution’. Soil Carbon provides that opportunity, so long as policy makers allow it. Time is running short, and Copenhagen is not far away.
The die will be cast one way or the other at that time, and we want it to be cast the right way. We may need more science before we get the detail right, but it is clear that the science can now be done. That is a major step forward from only 2 years ago when we were consistently told it could not be done.”
Over the weekend of July 4 and 5, twenty finalists (including Tony Lovell and Bruce Ward), made 30 minute presentations to a panel of four judges. We introduced Soil Carbon to the panel and the audience.
The panel was led by Lord Bingham, the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Bryony Worthington, an advisor and policy expert on climate change to the British Government, Dan Reicher, a Californian based and most interesting director of Google, and Chris Goodall, author of several major books on climate change and a freelance journalist.
You can see a 1-minute grab summarising our presentation here.
The comment”kangaroos don’t produce methane” is quite correct and “neither do cattle sheep or other ruminants produce methane”.Not withstanding while kangaroos cattle sheep and ruminants do not produce methane they do all to varying degrees emit methane. Cattle emit more methane than kangaroos and sheep somewhere in between , the amount emitted is related to the amount of bulk roughage matter they eat. Cattle eat bulk roughage kangaroos eat short fresh green pick when they can. Why is this so? Well grass the world’s biggest crop siting in the paddock has basically two things that can happen to it. 1)It can get burnt by fire reverting minerals and carbon nitrate oxides directly back to the soil and atmosphere .
2) It can be fermented and decomposed by microorganisms,this process can take place out in the paddock or in an animals ruminant or gut. Where ever this occures it is esencially the same process now a byproduct of this process is always methane inversely proportional to the amount of carbon in the vegetable matter decomposed. This is also the same process that forms methane in waters around coal deposits. It should be noted that methane is a highly reactive gas that will not last more than a couple of days in the atmosphere oxidising to form CO2 and water, this is why it is such a good fuel.
That’s interesting stuff still@downfall, thanks. I’m currently re-reading a book called, “The Forgiveness of Nature – The History of Grass”, in the chapter on the North American prairies they suggest that at there peak sustained a population of bison that weighed more than the modern human population of North America and Canada. Pretty amazing.
Chris, my understanding was that kangaroo produce a bacteria in their gut that does not produce/nor emit methane, and that it wasn’t just a matter of differences in the way the animal grazes.
FB
Given its capability any area of land will only produce x kg of meat. The denesity of the animals will determine weather those animals are in prime condition or staving. Between species it would have to come down to efficiencies of conversion of feed to be able to produce any more kg of meat on the same piece of country.
It is my belief from years of observation that the perception that its better to have softfooted animals against hooves is simply wrong. Its continual overstocking of any animal on a area of land that stuffs it up. If you wish I could dig up research from western Qld national parks, destocked of livestock but denuded by roo’s.
FB do you have any idea how kangaroos could be managed, any husbandary practises conducted, ownership verified & how I can keep my roo’s on my place. Have you observed roo’s in the wild. They are a high strung, nervous animal. Mightn’t look like it when they are having a camp durning the day. But disturb them……
FB if people want to talk about this here they might as well.
Still@downfall, I recall a small paddock of oats stripped bare because the wallabies got it. Their teeth are incisors that seem to be able to snip the grass off millimetres from the ground.
I always understood that if you made water available you’d get over-grazing by marsupials. In open country out west I gather that whenever a storm hits anywhere the roos come from miles around for the green pick.
And not easy to herd.
still@downfall, that’s my point, it’s my understanding that kangaroos are much, much more efficient in the way they convert energy to meat, I believe the gut bacteria/low emissions is crucial to this.
I not advocating for roo farming in the conventional sense, I think it should remain a wild meat. I’m advocating for the hunting and sale of kangaroo meat as part of the conservation management of arid lands in Australia. If it could happen as an indigenous enterprise, then that would be even better. BTW: the herding and husbandry of cattle in those area is no easy task either. I guess the cost:benefit would have to include the cost of maintaining fences versus the cost of the hunter, since fencing/land tenure is the only thing that makes pastoralism in that country any different from hunting from wild populations [from a management perspective, the difference in attitude and ego is very different].
My observations of kangaroo mobs are a little different from yours, though I understand the issue you mention, and see it regularly…it’s part of the reason I advocate for the sale of kangaroo meat, because at the moment kangaroos are being culled in large numbers on conservation land so that planting can take place…strangely kangaroos seem to favour planted tubestock over young, naturally regenerating plants – more nutrients/sugars in nursery grown seedlings perhaps [????]. I have some thoughts on that, but then we are moving even further away from the methane issue.
Any animal will do damage if the numbers are great enough, but I strongly disagree that the damage from kangaroos is comparable to cattle or even sheep, particularly around waterways. I think partly this relates to some of the things being discussed in the piece you linked to, kangaroos are a more mobile herd. I’ve been observing this a lot on land I am currently working on, kangaroos are in close to plague proportions, I’ve never seen roos in the kinds of numbers that are on this particular property, and yes, they are probably overgrazing, because as Brian points out access to water will mean unsustainable populations. Recently we started finding cow shit in the area and located a breach in the fence, and then we spotted the cattle – only a group of about 10 and the damage and the amount of effluent these creatures were responsible for was pretty amazing.
In arid regions, and I am particularly advocating this for those areas, kangaroo feet do do less damage to the microphytic crust, I think there is no doubt about that. The organisms that make up that crust, the lichens, the mosses etc account for over 20% of the ground cover in arid australia, and hooves are particularly damaging there. I think kangaroo population booms due to access to water there, is also less problematic than in the temperate zones, especially now so many of the artesian bores have been capped [some credit should go to the folks at Olympic Dam for that]. Water may be one way to ‘manage the herd’?
I dunno, like you all of this has mostly come from intuition based on years of observation, and perhaps waaaay too long out in the field looking and thinking. I should really look into whether someone has done a study on the roo carrying capacity in arid australia, as compared to it’s carrying capacity for cattle.
Oh well, my point here really was that rather than advocating for a meat free diet with the usual polarising debate that occurs around that, I wanted to talk about the fact that there is a low methane alternative, that could yield conservation benefits; perhaps some cultural benefits for indigenous people; maybe employment opportunities [mobile abattoirs?], that wasn’t just the same old ‘terra nullius’ approach that sees that empty country as wasted country.
FB
I will have to concede to your greater authority in reguards to natural systems in arid regions. Are there any indroduced species of dung bettle in arid regions to take care of fresh cow shit?
I don’t mind eating kangaroo. Its an interesting social stigma why Australians have an adversion to eating their own native game. Another point is the coast clingers getting upset at the shooting of cute, furry skippy’s. Look at the situation of wishing to control over populations of roo’s on defence force lands at Canberra & in Victoria in recent years.
I went to a talk about dung beetles a few years ago, unfortunately I was having one of my attention deficit days and can’t remember ANYTHING that was said, so I don’t know the answer to your question re: introduced species.
Yep, you have a point, there are some that will have a problem with eating kangaroo, likewise there are plenty of people who have a problem with eating any meat, a substantial proportion of them are environmental advocates, so it would be interesting to see how they would respond to the idea.
I really like kangaroo meat, it’s actually the thing that broke 10 years of vegetarianism for me. At first I just ate it to be polite…it was actually when I was traveling in the area we’ve been talking about..gawd it was good, cooked on a campfire in the middle of nowhere – yum.
still@downfall I’m not sure it is “coast clingers” as such but just a species of emotional conservationists who don’t like anything to be killed. I believe there is a similar problem with koalas on Kangaroo Island.
FB this is anecdotal but my mother reckoned that in the early days they sometimes fed visitors wallaby stew and then told them what they had just eaten. I think at least one threw up and probably the story grew from there.
Wallaby tail soup was always good.
I’ve never tried wallaby, my brother has them in very high numbers on his property in Tasmania.
Another anecdote: I went to a Port Adelaide vs Essendon game at westlakes with a friend from up north who called one of the Burgoyne brothers a “wombat eater”, apparently this is quite insulting, like you’d have to be desperate to eat a wombat, because they taste horrible.
If anyone has intereast in The Ashes of Climate Change as I oulined in comment 115 above, here is an update. In early voting 4 days ago Regenerating Grasslands was running 4th with 12% of the vote & the leader was at 36%. The latest result is Regenerating Grasslands is now 3rd on 23% & the leader 26%.
Here is a link to vote</a
FB With regard to kangaroos having a bacteria in their gut that stop or reduce their methane emission I have heard this too and it may be true but I can not find Any scientific documentation to substantiate this claim. I would be interested how this could work as in the process that I understand of breaking down grasses in order that an animal can use the nutrients the only thing this bacteria can possibly do is convert the methane produced by this process to co2 and water or maybe alcohol.Talk about eating kangaroo meat I might just eat the gut raw.A tip on eating kangaroo meat you can make it taste like any meat you like by adding a little fat of the meat you want it to taste like a when you cook it, this is because it is so lean it will readily up take any fat even chicken.Kangaroo is the cheapest protein in the world and also kangaroo skin makes the strongest most plyable leather in the world. Ask “NIKE” the only trouble is the animal liberation movement campaign against it use in sports footwear.
Chris still Re dung beetles The only dung beetles that get rid of cattle dung are imported. There were quite a few species imported from Africa in the 1960’s and early70’s and only a couple survived I understand. This was done because native dung beetles were adapted to utilizing the dryer pelated dung of mainly kangaroos and simply could not cope with sloppy cattle dung.The net result of this was a dramatic reduction in the bush fly population. Talk to any old ringer and he will tell you how when they whet mustering in the 50’s and 60’s on horse back you would be just black covered in fly We do no see that these days thanks to the imported beetles.
FB, Chris
There are quite a few species of dung bettle surviving & thriving. Possibly the most important insect introduced after the cacterblatus moth. The dung bettle plays a very important role in returning nutrient to the soil & reduces loss into the atmosphere. Its role in wrecking harvoc on the life cycle of the bush fly & the buffalo fly is worth millions. If you wait at dusk where cattle have camped you can actually hear the roar of the numerous dung bettle’s as they fly in. Landing is done by a nose dive straight into their belovered cow pad. Its amazing how much of a pad they can bury.
Downside is they are much less effective in drier seasons. I don’t know if they are operating in arid, semi – desert conditions.
FB, if you want to see how a blog thread would travel on the question of farming roos, check out this old blog posting.
Chris, there is a fair bit of information out there about the roo gut bacteria. The way I understand it the bacteria converts more of the food source to acetate which is an energy that can be used by the animal rather than needing to be emitted in the form of methane.
Most of the information floating around the net relates to how this bacteria may be used in conventional livestock, Google Dr Athol Klieve’s work with…er..I think it’s either the CSIRO or Primary Industries.
I think the kangaroo specific bacteria was first studied in the 1970’s.
Chris, regarding that blog, I don’t think this issue has ever been presented in a particularly thoughtful way, and I don’t think that blog is any exception. Again, I’m not advocating that kangaroos be ‘farmed’ in any conventional sense. We really do need to get over the same old ways of thinking, I reckon.
still I like the roo farming blog. I could not agree more with old RM Williams that you need fat, one of my favourite dishes is roasted sheep ribs and they as you may know are very fatty. Also nothing like a good home made beef rolled rib roast, one that has not had the fat trimmed by a professional butcher before it was rolled. This makes good meat sandwiches for lunch you don’t need butter. I always eat the fat on a steak and do wonder if eating animal fat is really that bad for you if I have muesli or something like it for breakfast I sure am hungry by mid morning yet a couple of lamb chops for breakfast one meat sandwich for lunch and you don’t feel hungry all day. I quite like eating properly prepared roo meat but I can not handle it strait from the roo to the fry pan cooked in a bit of oil as I have had served to me once. Just too strong Uh.
FB I have never tried eating them either but I have noticed western grey and eastern wallaroos are quite fatty . Farming kangaroos is not as silly as it might sound but would require a completely different mind set from a management and regulatory point of view.
Those dung beetles I could not agree more with you on their importance and defectiveness.They definitely operate in very arid conditions if they can not operate I doubt cattle would either, have noticed severe drought knocks them around like any thing else but they seen to quickly recover. You have to be careful with some insecticides applied to cattle as these will really wipe them out then you really will have a buffalo fly problem.
We have been eating a lot of kangaroo since it became available in the supermarkets because it is very low fat and a relativley cheap source of protein with k steak @ $14/kg and higher protein levels.
If we are serious about reducing the carbon footprint of the animal protein we eat we need to think beyond warm blooded animals – I have seen articles suggesting that it makes much more sense to eat crickets and other appropriate insects.
Johh Let us know when you find some tasty ctiters
I have eaten termites (once), John D and Chris – while I was in the Army we did a “live off the land” exercise for a few days. If you’re hungry enough, they’re quite tasty toasted on a skillet.
David Irving (no relation)@133
Maybe it’s time for a book detailing the nutritional profile of various insects and exotic pests and plants, their taste and ideal preparation methods?
Ants you have to be starving not just hungry I have tried them when they have got into my tucker box I went hungry. The trouble with trying to eat some of these criters is they produce chemicals to make themselves taste terriable as a natural defence mechanisume. The best ones to eat I can think of are whichity grubs you preferably need an experianced aboriginal woman to cook them for you or be very careful handling them otherwise you could end up getting very itchy, ther have to be roasted in coals of a died down fire making sure the outside is crisp and all the hairy bits are well and trully burnt off as these are what makes you itch. Another one I can think of is an earth grub that lives just under decaying leaves and timber.It is white with a brown head about 25 to 50 mm long and 5 to 10 mm in diameter. These things can be cooked in much the same way you would cook other foods to make them taster as they are a bit tasteless. Just a word of cation if you are inclined to be alergic be a bit careful with these foods until you are sure you can tolerate them