 All right, so the topic for today is natural gas broadly speaking. At the end, we're going to discuss different forms of energy a little bit. And we should have plenty of time to hear from you. I'd love to hear your opinions, your questions, however. But for right now, what they asked me to talk about is natural gas. In particular, I'm an environmental scientist. I was trained as a chemical engineer first before I became an environmental scientist. I worked for the Dow Chemical Company right out of college for about four years and then went back to grad school in the environment. So I'm interested in making things better, using data, finding new ways to gather data to illustrate different environmental issues and provide data to help solve those problems. So here's an image of a well pad I took from a helicopter in this case. This is in the Marcellus. This is why hydraulic fracturing operation is going on. Of course, it's only like this for a relatively short period of time. But you see compressors, water tanks, lots of trucks. And then, of course, you see that house in the back, which you might think about how your view of this operation might differ, depending on whether you own the mineral rights to that operation going on outside your door, whether someone else owned the mineral rights below ground for the property you own, or whether it's perhaps your neighbor's operation. And they put that well pad right next to the fence line on your house. So that, I think, explains some of the controversies over hydraulic fracturing and such. It is an industrial operation. But we're going to talk about some of the benefits and some of the potential environmental costs to today. Just a little bit more background to give you some idea of other things we do in my group. I also chair an international group called the Global Carbon Project. So we're based in Australia with our executive office. But every year we put out an annual carbon dioxide budget for the COP that's coming up this year in November. We do a CO2 budget that incorporates not just fossil fuel emissions, but also land use change, ocean emissions. So different, both biological and anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases. We do a methane budget as well. We're just starting a nitrous oxide budget. And the idea is to gather as much information and to attribute that sort of regional and global scales where emissions are coming from and what those sources are. So if anybody interested in that kind of operation, feel free to talk to me later. And here's what I want to talk about today then. We're going to hone in on how we can lower the emissions, either planned or unplanned through leaks from our natural gas and oil infrastructure. We're going to talk about upstream and downstream. So upstream, as many of you know, perhaps all of you know is sort of starting with the well pad. And downstream is all the way to the consumer through pipelines, might be distribution lines to a home. The power's your stove or my water heater. Could be to an electricity plant to provide the right power for all of us. So upstream and downstream, I'll give you a couple of examples from each of those. I'll talk about some of our work. We'll also talk about other groups around the country and world and what they've done too. So we do in our group road based work I'll talk about. Aircraft, helicopter work, centers on skyscrapers in that building in Boston. And I'll tell you kind of what we can learn from these kinds of measurements. Here's one premise for today. So reduce methane and hydrocarbon emissions from oil and gas infrastructure through best practices, new incentives, and regulatory enforcement. So natural gas currently provides a little net climate benefit compared with coal, but it could. And I'll explain to you what I mean by that here in a minute. And there are other reasons to think about our fuels and our energy sources, including air pollution, water use, human health aspects, cost. But that's sort of the roadmap for where we're heading today. All right, what do I mean by that? Why when natural gas has such a distinct benefit at the smokestack level? Is the net climate benefit in question? Well, as many of you know, natural gas when burned in a power plant, especially a combined cycle plant, has about half the emissions of CO2 that a typical coal plant has. It also doesn't emit particulates like 2.5 particulates. It doesn't emit mercury. It doesn't emit things that kill 10,000 Americans a year and a million people worldwide. So let's keep some of those things in mind as well. It's not just about the greenhouse gases. But the greenhouse gases are important. So if you just do the CO2 balance, you get this benefit from natural gas. But then you have to take into account the methane that leaks out of the oil and gas operation, and the methane leaking out and other gases leaking out of the coal mining too. Because coal shafts and mines leak as well, or emit as well. So if natural gas is 1% of production. So for every 100 cubic feet, you leaked one to the atmosphere. You would have a climate benefit of about 60, 65%, almost two thirds. That's a best case scenario. If it's 2%, you're up about in the low 80s. If it's 3%, you're about at the break even point. And if it's 4%, even though we're saving that CO2 on a net basis, it's a loss for the climate. So that's a very simplistic generalization. It's much more complicated than that. But just in general, Alvarez and colleagues with EDF published a paper a couple of years ago suggesting that the break even point was about 3%. For this depends on the time frame you use and other things. But just keep that 3% number in your head, all right? Now in the last five years or so, there have been a lot of studies looking at emissions from natural gas infrastructure, oil infrastructure, particularly upstream around well pads. And these studies find a real range in that leakage term. So 3% roughly for the break even point. There are studies that indicate in parts of the Marcellus the total leakage upstream only might be as low as half a percent. That's as good as it gets and that's really, really good. There are other studies like in the Uintah basin where emissions are as high as 10%, maybe as low as 6% to 8%. So well above that break even point recognizing that that Uintah basin is also a condensate and oil producing area as well, not just natural gas. So when you add all of the recent studies together and I'm summarizing broadly and you sort of weight them by the production. You get an average upstream loss of about 2%, all right? Then you add maybe another half a percent, maybe 1% depending on whether it's going to a consumer to a plant. And you get a number that's as low as perhaps two or two and a half percent. Maybe three or slightly above three. So that's the basis for my statement in the beginning which was that that right now we're not seeing much climate benefit from natural gas. In my view, my opinion based on the evidence. But that we could be very quickly through additional reductions in loss, okay? So right now we're somewhere at least in this area with the one being the break even point compared to coal, possible we're up here but I don't know that yet. All right, let me show you some of our work then. So how can we understand leakage? How can we understand the factors that would help us predict the occurrence of large leaks across the system? So one of the studies that we did, we published just a couple of months ago. This was with EDF, David Lyne was the first author. We flew 8,000 well pads randomly across the country and took a video image with an infrared camera of those well pads. So this is like a restaurant inspection, right? So you can show up at a restaurant and you inspect their operation. But you get a different answer perhaps if you say, I'll be at your restaurant Wednesday of next week at 2 p.m. Okay, now you'll get some information doing that and you'll see maybe the place where they cut the chicken is too close to the place where they wash the dishes. But you're not gonna get a random cross-section of how things work on a day to day basis. So with a helicopter survey like this or a satellite or something else, we'll talk about some of those other technologies, you're getting a real time view of who's leaking, what's leaking, and perhaps why it's leaking. So here's one image, let's see if I can run this, and it's not, it's okay. Okay, so this is just one example of what you see with an infrared camera. So you're flying over a well pad, that's an image that's not normal, that's unusual, that's not visible with the naked eye, right? So those are thermal, it's an infrared image that those emissions are being absorbed by the hydrocarbons in the air. That's coming from the top of a couple of tanks. So we did that in 8,200 places and looked at how often we saw emissions and then where they came from. Well, here's an example of what we found. The percent of sites with large emissions, visible from at least a few hundred feet from a helicopter, so fairly large, was 4% nationally. That's not an emission amount. That's the likelihood of observing one from a helicopter, okay? So that's a big difference. So about one in 25 operations had a leak that we could see from the helicopter or an emission that we could see from the helicopter. But it ranged from less than 1% in the Powder River in Wyoming and some of the dry gas areas to 14% in the Bakken. So about one in seven operations. It's a huge range in the likelihood of observing a leak. Emissions were three times more likely in oil producing plays and in oil producing regions of mixed basins. So in the areas where companies are focusing on methane and natural gas in a dry gas zone, or that is their focus, then the emission frequencies are pretty low. But in the areas where the companies are getting oil, or butane, or pentane, or heavier gases that are more valuable. And perhaps in some of these areas, flaring the natural gas because they can't get it to market. They're much less careful, or they have a lot more tanks and valves and vents and infrastructure on those well pads that can leak. So one of those two things is true. I would wager to say it's some of both. Even in the same region, in the Barnett, so same regulatory agency, same field, when you were in an oil and gas condensate, wet gas producing area, you were 20 times more likely to see emission than in a dry gas area in the Barnett. Now that tells you something. And then finally, 90% of the emission sources we saw were from tank vents, tank vents, and hatches. That doesn't mean it could be upstream. There's pressure that builds up, and then the pressure pops at a tank. So that doesn't mean the cause necessarily is at the tank or the vents. But that's where we see them. So that's the focus. That's where the focus should be based on our survey. All right, we do work on legacy wells. For instance, Mary Kang is a postdoc in our group. What happens in 25 or 50 years? What are the things that we're doing now that we might regret a long time in the future, the same way we regret acid mine drainage in Pennsylvania, where streams turn orange and other things? Are there things that we're gonna regret? I think one of the things that we haven't done a good job on in the past, and that I hope we do a better job on the future are legacy wells. So we have millions of old, abandoned, unplugged wells in this country. Most of them, or many of them, we don't even know where they are. These are pictures I took on one property in Pennsylvania, for instance. So we chamber these emissions like this, and then measure the gas building up in those so that we can get a sense of how much is coming up from the ground. In a case like this, as always, it's not just about the methane and greenhouse gas emissions. If there's a pathway for methane to move, there's also pathway for brines or other things to move upwards too, less likely than for a gas, but possible. So some of the biggest issues with these abandoned wells are when they show up in cities. There's a big controversy going on right now in Los Angeles where I don't remember the exact numbers, but the county just spent its entire budget for plugging abandoned wells on two wells in a neighborhood. So there is, we aren't setting aside enough money to take care of these legacy issues in my opinion. Okay, let's talk downstream a little bit. Those are some examples from the work we do from helicopters. We've done other work as well. Our group, my colleagues, Nathan Phillips at Boston University, so we published the first studies of publicly available maps of natural gas leaks in cities. So we took new laser-based instruments, put them in the back of cars, and then drove them literally block by block across every street in Boston, every street in Washington DC, every street in Manhattan. And mapped the, how often we saw natural gas coming out of the ground and also did some isotopic work to understand the cause. Was it sewer gas? Might it be generated by microbes? Or was it in fact a thermogenic gas consistent with a natural gas pipeline? So here you see, here's just a picture of the instrument in the back of the car. You've got an anemometer that tells you the wind direction. So if you get a ping on the car, you know what side of the road it's coming from, and things like that. Here's Washington DC, that's Capitol Hill. Capitol Hill happens to be one of the oldest neighborhoods in DC. Each of those yellow bars is a natural gas leak we mapped. And then sometimes, as I mentioned, we'll hop out of the car, grab a sample of the gas when we identify the source. Take it back to the lab, do the isotopic work to say where it's coming from. Here's a map of Boston. This was the first paper, 2013, red, road miles driven, yellow mission sources. Not volumes, but concentrations observed in the car. Number one predictor of a leak in Boston, old cast iron piping. Unprotected steel piping. Some of the piping that goes back into the late 1800s, even still underground, still functional. So this is an infrastructure issue just like water mains, bridges, roads, and other things are too. That paper came out in 2013, the next year. So the day the paper came out, we had comments from the mayor. That time, Congress and Markey, now Senator Markey from Massachusetts, obviously, July 2014, a year and a bit later, Massachusetts passed an accelerated pipeline replacement bill. Based in part on our work, certainly not all, but our work played an important role in that. Driven not really by greenhouse gases, but by safety. The public was energized by reducing the emissions, reducing the eliques, first and foremost, to reduce the chance of explosions, which are very rare. And the record, the safety record of companies, has gotten much better in the last 20 years. We get sort of half the number of accidents, typically, that we had around the time some of you were born. So things are getting better, but those accidents still happen. All right, so it's accelerated pipeline replacement. It basically helped companies front end repairing these pipelines. So they could take some of those old pipelines out of work. It cost money. It's expensive. We never said go fix all 3,000 leaks across Boston. It's not cost effective. So we use the information to prioritize. How might we get at the volume of gas? And how does the volume of gas coming out of the infrastructure, compared to what the states or the feds think is coming out of infrastructure? So here now we can take a top down approach, in this case not from a helicopter or an aircraft, but from the top of skyscrapers in the city. So you can put skyscrapers in the city, measure methane, 24 hours a day for a year. Put some sensors outside of the city. So when the air blows into the city, you know what's clean there. You know what's building up over Boston. So we look at the methane concentration building up in the air. We did not just methane, though, in this case. We did ethane as well. Because ethanes are really important gas because it's not generated by microbes. It's not generated biologically. And so when you see our hypothesis was if most of the methane in the air over Boston is coming from natural gas infrastructure, then we should see the same ratio of methane to ethane in the air over Boston that we see in the pipelines feeding that city. And that's what we saw. So the blue line is the ratio in the pipelines. Each of these is an observation dot. And here's an example of the slope that we saw. 90% of the methane in the air in winter was coming from natural gas infrastructure, not just pipes, but other things, too. In the summer, it was lower, about 60%. The amount was approximately the same. But in summer, temperatures were warmer. You've got more activity from landfills, microbes, and other things. So you have other sources moving into the air. 2.7% loss just within the Boston Metroplex. So really high, 2 and 1 half times higher than the state suggested it should be based on their inventory. Might be 2.3. Might be 2.7. It's not 1.3. It's also not representative of most of the cities in the country. So this is an issue primarily for eastern, particularly northeastern cities that are old, and then western cities that are old, Chicago, Detroit, the other cities that I talked about. So let's finish up by just talking about how can we do something about it? How can we do something about it cost-effectively? So here's an analysis I did a couple years ago with colleagues where we looked at the replacement rates of old pipelines. So it's a little complicated. The Y-axis, number of years to replace cast iron pipes. So we took a decade of replacements that each company had done in a city. We looked at how quickly they were doing it over that 10-year period, and then extrapolated it to say, if they did that, if they continued at that rate, to replace all of the old cast iron and unprotected steel pipe, how long would it take them? So Boston actually is certainly not a great example, but they're sort of in the middle of this group of cities, and there are lots of cities out west that are newer where this rate would be irrelevant, because there's none of this kind of piping. But here's Boston, about 60 years, to replace those old cast iron pipes. Baltimore, Maryland, 140 years on track to replace the pipelines that are already 100 years old. That's not good enough. Then there are cities that have done a lot, like Cincinnati, Ohio, where the state, the city, the Public Utility Commission, and the companies involved got together and said, we're going to do something about this systematically over many years. They started in 2000, and by this period of time, they were essentially done. So when we used that analysis to go to some new cities, we drove Cincinnati block by block. We drove Durham, North Carolina, where they had also completed pipeline replacements. Then we drove Manhattan at the same time interval, compared it to Boston DC. And we found 90% to 95% fewer leaks in Cincinnati and Durham. So these programs really do make a big difference. That accelerated pipeline replacement bill in Massachusetts costs ratepayers about $1 a month per household. So it's not free, but it's not bad. They get some of that money back, because guess who pays for natural gas that leaks out of pipelines in cities? We do. It's a fee that's passed on to ratepayers. So we can do something about this. Finally, just to say that it's really exciting to work in this field now, because there's so much technology that's going on. There's satellites, new aircraft. This is a paper, not our work, that came out just a few weeks ago. We're democratizing leak detection. So there will come a day in not very many years where you would be able to sit at a desk and look at any operation in the US or around the world and see whether it's emitting hydrocarbons to the atmosphere. And that is really, really good, because it will make it cheaper to detect leaks. That's something that Adam works a lot on. And it will also make it more transparent. So for fixing leaks, at least downstream in cities, these are some examples why you might do it. $2 billion worth of lost and unaccounted for gas. Each year, the ratepayers pay for job creation, consumer safety, air quality, and greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. So later this week, there's a Stanford forum some of you may know about at the National Press Club, being organized by David Hayes, the Woods Institute, and I believe the pre-court as well. So I wrote a paper for that. Here's the end point then for my presentation and for the discussion. So these are four premises in that paper, some of which we talked about today. Number one, so coal use is plummeting right now in the US, 15% drop in 2015, 20% drop so far in 2016. So allow coal use to continue falling, cutting greenhouse gas emissions. You save water, coal plant is water intensive, reduced mercury particulate and sulfur pollution that killed 10,000 Americans a year. So in that sense, natural gas, even if it's just even with coal, in terms of climate benefits, it doesn't emit particulates in the same way, it doesn't emit mercury. So as I've already said, natural gas could be better than coal for greenhouse gas benefits, but it's not much yet. And then finally, there are other options. There are renewables like solar PV and wind that are no carbon, no water, no air pollution that we should also be promoting. They're expanding rapidly. And then, as always, as scientists, I have to talk about better data collection. So that's all I had. We should have 10 or 15 minutes to talk and answer questions, so thanks for your time. What are some of the things they can do? Well, first of all, there's a broad range in best practices, and I want to say, as I said early on, my first job was with the Dow Chemical Company. So I come from this with the perspective that people who work for these companies care about their operations and want to make those operations better. So they can survey more often. There's a big effort going on now to develop sensors that allow companies and regulators to detect emissions more quickly, more cheaply. So this is effectively a sensor issue. Imagine all these well pads, especially in places like West Texas and remote North Dakota. These are a long way from people, some of them. Others, like the Barnett or in Colorado, are right mixed in with neighborhoods. So when they're mixed in with neighborhoods, people are likely to see them. But when they're in remote areas and somebody has to get into a truck and drive some miles to take a video image of that well pad, it's done less often. It's more expensive. So good monitoring is part of it, and then just improving best practices. And in some cases, stronger regulations. A lot of states, Colorado, has led the way really in strengthening its air quality regulations in particular. The handful of you who might not know, the question was the Liso Canyon leak. Liso Canyon was a leak a year or so ago. It was huge for the three or four months. It was one of, maybe certainly one of the biggest natural gas leaks we've ever had in this country. So this was a natural gas storage field, an old oil and gas field that once you take the oil and gas out of the ground, there's a lot of pore space available, and you can pump natural gas down into those areas, hold it for when you need it. First of all, we have to have natural gas storage fields to meet demand as demand fluctuates for our natural gas uses. It was big. I don't know all of the history. There were some issues with the integrity of that well. This is a field where the wells were dated back to the 50s, some of them the 70s, so they were fairly old. And I think it surprised people, frankly. There was not a lot of work done on natural gas storage, and there is a fair bit now. It was also a dynamic. It happened right next to a very wealthy neighborhood, so it got a lot of attention, partly for that reason too. OK, fair enough. There are really two questions there, the relative warring potential. Some of you know this. CO2, well, water dominates the thermal budget of the atmosphere. We don't control water in the same way. We do these other gases. So carbon dioxide is the trace gas that's the dominant gas. It's not dominant because it's the most potent, mass for mass or molecule for molecule. It dominates because it lasts for a long time. Its half-life is approximately a century, so some of it lasts for many centuries. So when you put CO2 into the atmosphere, it's going to stay there for a long time on average. Methane is, and CO2 is now present at about 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, which you all know. Methane's about two, so it's a lot less frequent in the atmosphere, much more potent. So on a mass basis, it's about 35 times more potent on a 100-year time scale. On a 20-year time scale, it's 80 or 90 times more potent than CO2 is, mass for mass. So that potency is why we really care about methane, especially in the first few decades. So 100 or 200 years from now, that methane's all gone, and some of the CO2 is still in the atmosphere. Then things like CFCs and HCFCs are way more potent as greenhouse gases, but present much less commonly in the atmosphere. So the next most dominant one is nitrous oxide that comes primarily from ag activities. It's another long-lived greenhouse gas, too. So I should also mention the importance of agriculture for methane emissions, too. Globally, agriculture is as big as sort of fossil fuel emissions, approximately. There's one over here, and then it's not much. So first of all, I didn't answer a second question, so put that on hold. Your second question was about health. Okay, so the health, the emissions from methane are not directly, in general, a health consequence. So the extra methane that we put into the air and the rising methane concentration is not going to affect human health, unless, I mean, the most extreme cases are flammability and explosion. From a health basis, though, it's really more the fact that when you emit methane, especially in oil and condensate producing areas, work like the Colorado folks have shown, you also emit benzene and things that are, in that case, a carcinogen or hazardous air pollutants. But breathing the extra methane is not a real health consequences, a health consequence. So now tell me the question again. Yeah, not much. So the best data outside of the U.S. has come from Canada, at least the most publicly available data. We know very, there's some in Europe. We know almost nothing, at least publicly, about Russian emissions, African emissions, countries like Nigeria. So internationally, there's a big data gap on those kinds of numbers. So we really don't know very much at all. I don't know, go here next. So repeat it for me, why do we care about it? Or yeah, because at this point in time, the fossil fuel budget dominates the increase in carbon dioxide that we're seeing in the atmosphere. And so this goes right back to the global carbon project that I discussed and lots of other groups who monitor this sort of information. When you look at emissions, we released a budget last year for the Paris COP. The good news was that CO2 emissions had stabilized. So for a couple of years, first time on record, that emissions of CO2 had stabilized while GDP was increasing. So emissions had stabilized or gone down during economic crises in the past, but this wasn't that. So 90% of the CO2 budget right now is coming from fossil fuel emissions. And 10% approximately from land use change, deforestation in the tropics and elsewhere. Then there are increases in methane that are coming roughly equally, maybe slightly more from ag than from oil and gas, but approximately the same. Nitrous oxide primarily from agricultural activities. But we talk about fossil fuels because the fossil fuel term is dominating the increase in climate change and global warming that we're seeing. Yeah, I think, first of all, I mentioned the Colorado regulations. And I mentioned the Colorado regulations because it was a partnership with operators who were working in the Denver-Julesburg Basin and other parts of Colorado where they really are ratcheting down the emissions and are under pressure to do so. Because if you've ever landed in DFW, you see the well pads on the airport property. When you drive around Fort Worth, you see well pads. Colorado Front Range, you got well pads mixed in with that really rapidly expanding population in the Front Range. So they have really, really are working hard to reduce air emissions with methane as the target, but also for the benzene and the heavier gases that catalyze ozone formation that are health consequences. Methane is actually easier to measure even though it's only present in two parts per million than those rarer gases. Another example downstream, the kinds of partnerships I mentioned in states like Ohio, Indiana has done something similar to accelerate the replacement of their pipelines. Other states are doing the same. So there are lots of good examples out there. There could be more. We're almost done. One more, one or two more. I'm sorry, say it again. Quality of drinking water or? I wouldn't say that's a little bit out of my field. I wouldn't say that the increase in air in methane in the atmosphere is affecting sea life in a way. Well, okay, let's back up. So carbon dioxide, ocean acidification such has very strong long-term effects and we're essentially acidifying the oceans just quite clearly. Methane doesn't have that same effect and it's much less abundant. Our group also did with my colleagues at Duke, we did the first studies of drinking water quality and hydraulic fracturing where we sampled homes in the Marcellus in Pennsylvania. Same sort of philosophy in that project that I've talked about here. We find in a minority of cases that water has been contaminated not so much directly from the hydraulic fracturing but from tried and true topics like well integrity, people being in a hurry, cementing and casing, things like that. So anyway, methane does not have the same global consequences that CO2 has if that was the context for the question. These guys will tell me when to stop or perhaps you will when you start ignoring me. Yeah, great question. There are new technologies. In fact, we had the, I was host to a team from the company called T-Lops last week who came and sell the hyperspectral camera. There was a paper in Nature Climate Change about a year ago that used very narrow specific bands to identify individual gases. So that IR image I showed you doesn't give you just methane. It gives you methane and propane and things like that. So the hyperspectral technologies are coming. There are flyovers going on in California right now. A team from JPL is flying transects across oil and gas producing areas in the state, landfills, CAFOs, feedlot operations and things like that. So that's just another example of how the technology is changing. We are not far from satellites that will allow you to hone in on any source and look at them. And I'll say it once again, that's gonna be a good thing. Quickly, other things anybody interested in doing work related to this, feel free to give me a call. My email is just rob.jaxson at stanford.edu. They asked us to say something about our classes. I'm the new chair of the Earth System Science Department. So I'm not teaching this fall because of that, but one class I teach in the spring I like, it's called Control of Nature. It's an undergrad class, not a grad class, although I do have some grad students who take it. We look at emerging technologies. Is Kate not here yet? Here, okay, we're gonna finish. Control of Nature, we look at, we use science fiction books and movies to look at what new technologies are coming true today. We do the technology, the ethics and the governance. So we do things like species resurrections, Jurassic Park, what can we do? Bring back the passenger pigeon, can't do that, but you're gonna, in your lifetime, you're gonna see the passenger pigeon brought back, probably the woolly mammoth. We do genetic engineering. We do climate engineering. So we talk about what's gonna happen, who gets to twiddle the knobs. Kate's gonna boot me off the stage here, deservedly so. Thanks for your time.