methane

natural gas/shutterstock

Natural gas is a fuel for electricity generation that serves as a bridge to a Smart Grid that fully integrates renewables and energy storage into the energy portfolio.[read more]

fracking and water

David Biello over at Scientific American had a story in 2011 that looked at research establishing a link between methane contamination in well water and nearby hydraulic fracturing of shale rock.[read more]

landfill energy harvesting

Another alternative waste management option that America has not significantly utilized but that could help stem the flow of waste, and thus pollution emissions, in our country: energy-from-waste, or EfW, facilities.[read more]

shale gas/shutterstock

While this reduced air pollution is an unmitigated good, the long-term climate benefits of this historic coal-to-gas shift hinge on the ability to control the amount of methane leaking from gas wells and pipelines.[read more]

methane/shutterstock

Japan produced natural gas from offshore methane hydrates Tuesday, a breakthrough with potentially explosive consequences for both global energy markets and the effort to tackle climate change.[read more]

methane hydrate

Japan says it has successfully extracted natural gas from frozen methane hydrate off its central coast, in a world first. Methane hydrates, or clathrates, are a type of frozen “cage” of molecules of methane and water.[read more]

greenhouse gas emissions

Reducing emissions of carbon dioxide is critical to long-term efforts. But curbing greenhouse gases with shorter atmospheric lifetimes will have significant near-term climate benefits.[read more]

Fracking for oil in North Dakota is so lucrative that when natural gas bubbles up alongside the oil, most oil companies simply view it as waste. It's cheaper, in the short term, to burn the gas than it is to build the infrastructure to pipe and sell it--so they burn it. Across the North Dakota prairie, natural gas flares light up the night sky like huge torches. Every day, they burn off enough gas to heat half a million homes.[read more]

On February 16, 2012, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and environment ministers from five other countries introduced the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-Lived Climate Pollutants. The Coalition’s members are the governments of Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico, Sweden, and the United States, with the United Nations...[read more]

For those who read this blog, this following story from The Independent is nothing new. Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. The scale and volume of...[read more]

Earth’s natural resources grow increasingly more limited every day, but humanity’s consumption guarantees an abundance of one unlikely “resource.” A typical American throws out about four pounds of trash per day, or more than 240 million tons every year. Most of that garbage winds up in landfills and releases methane as it decomposes. But what if that gas could be harnessed as a clean energy source for vehicles? energyNOW! correspondent Peter Standring visited a California landfill to see how one waste disposal company is turning trash from landfills into clean-burning fuel for trash trucks.[read more]

Actually, the lessons were learned from the media’s reporting — and the reactions to that reporting — of a recent paper on climate change. The paper I am talking about is a study by Tom Wigley, who is a senior research associate at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The title of the study is Coal to Gas: The Influence of Methane Leakage.[read more]

How’s GE’s ecomagination  going? I put that question today to Mark Vachon, who is vice president for ecomagination at GE. He replied by talking about natural gas. “The large macro trend of gas is massive,” he said. “Our oil and gas business will be a huge beneficiary.” An abundance of shale gas in the U.S., and methane gas reserves...[read more]

Sometimes a news item informs us about much more than the event in question. I think the recent announcements of new petrochemical projects in the US fall into that category. Both Shell and Dow Chemical are planning new ethylene crackers in the US, a market in which established ethylene facilities were being shut down only a few...[read more]

As long as no tipping points are crossed, many believe, there will only be insignificant rises in temperature and sea level, while any dangers are far away in the future. However, the boiling point analogy may more appropriately describe the risk of Arctic methane releases, and the window of opportunity we have to act.[read more]