NASA Flew Gas Detectors Above California, Found ‘Super Emitters’

[danielfoster]

As an individual I'm happy to make sacrifices for the greater good, and this is an example of why we should not accept the narrative that consumers bear the brunt of reducing emissions.

Maybe California should do a few more of these flights before finding something else to ban?

[lukifer]

I only recently learned the history of "anti-littering" marketing campaigns [0], conceived to push responsibility for waste onto consumers rather than producers, who were switching from metals and glass to much cheaper (but no longer reusable) plastics.

Whatever individuals can do to reduce inefficiency and carbon footprint is surely a good thing; but it's no replacement for systems thinking, and applying incentives on the production side (IMO, best accomplished by setting a price on externalities, through Pigovian taxes and dividends [1]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful#History

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

[bravo22]

Per the article, most of the sites were landfills, dairy farms, and natural gas facilities. All of those are directly controlled by consumer demand.

[tyrust]

>Maybe California should do a few more of these flights before finding something else to ban?

I don't see why these two can't be done in parallel.

[punnerud]

In Norway we place plastic over the (food) landfill, gather the methane and use it for electricity production. When there is no more methane the same landfill is used as soil for food production.

[acomjean]

The US does the same... sometimes.

Some states(US) cap landfills with large sheets of plastic (the new ones have plastic on the bottom, making a "giant bag") and punch holes for venting methane and other exhaust gasses. They vent because the gas is flammable and having it build up under a sheet of plastic is risky. Landfills catch on fire frequently. [2]

Some sites collect the gas and burn it, but it isn't common.

You can see the venting tubes on this photo of liner repair after lightning strike...[1]

[1]https://comanco.com/blog/comanco-makes-liner-repairs-on-clos...

[2]http://www.mowastecoalition.org/resources/Documents/2018%20c...

[mogadsheu]

I interned for a landfill gas capture company a long time ago. Apparently it’s quite tough to make payback on the investment.

If value is applied to the degradation and GHG abatement, some groups might find it worthwhile.

[tastyfreeze]

That sounds very efficient. In the US organic and non-organic "kitchen" waste is often combined. While it is becoming more common to separate compostable materials from others it is still more of an exception.

Many landfills do harvest methane from the combined heap of trash. However, after methane production ends we are still left with compost with tons of plastic.

[hanniabu]

That's a great idea, but also requires an organized garbage collection system where items are separated at the source (consumer). Unfortunately the US doesn't have such a system in place, which is partially a social issue.

[loeg]

> In Norway we place plastic over the (food) landfill, gather the methane

That is also common for US landfills.

[ping_pong]

How is the land not contaminated with chemicals, poisons, etc? Do they test for all of that?

[dubyah]

Landfill gas to power used to be more prevalent, but an AQMD rule change to reduce NOx made them switch to flaring instead because it couldn't compete against subsidized renewables.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-methane-gas-co...

[stolsvik]

I believe it is mandatory to capture it, and either find a use for it (electricity or heat, or both), or you must flare it.

[TrevorAustin]

Some very smart friends of mine do this with airplanes to find leaks in natural gas plants and pipelines: http://kairosaerospace.com/

[donarb]

Here's a talk one of their guys did at the last US PyCon that described how they collected the data using airplanes then analyzed it. They sell the service to oil companies to identify leaks from capped wells.

https://pyvideo.org/pycon-us-2019/fighting-climate-change-wi...

[AWildC182]

Their wing strut mounting of that sensor pod causes me a lot of concern... I don't think Cessna ever expected crazy torque loads on strut meant for tension.

[apawloski]

This project is also using aircraft: https://avirisng.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html

[azernik]

The most interesting sentence isn't the headline, but rather:

> Landfills accounted for 41% of the source emissions it identified, manure management 26% and oil and gas operations 26%.

i.e. perhaps the best reason to recycle or compost is to avoid the methane emissions from natural decomposition.

[jobseeker990]

Compost IS natural decomposition, my dude.

[scottlocklin]

> i.e. perhaps the best reason to recycle or compost is to avoid the methane emissions from natural decomposition.

Uhhh, I think you may want to rethink that. Rotting things, whether in a landfill or in your ecologically principled compost heap in your back yard releases methane.

[aphextim]

Still waiting on Elon Musk to make "WasteX" which will take vast amounts of garbage from landfills and fly it directly into the Sun.

[vlahmot]

Wouldn’t composting have the same issue as tossing it in the dump though?

[mc32]

Manure is pretty manageable, transportable, etc., are they can they use this to produce energy rather than just let it dissipate into the atmos?

[Spooky23]

That sort of undermines some of the carbon arguments used against recycling.

[mthoodlum]

272,000 sites surveyed. 0.2% of the sites account for 46% of emissions. 272,000 sites * 0.002 = 544 sites.

544 sites account for 46% of the state's emissions.

Yet the article states, "A handful of operations are responsible for the vast majority of methane emissions."

[jashkenas]

Here’s a quick and dirty notebook that uses NASA’s published data to visualize where the ‘Super Emitters’ are located around California:

https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/californias-methane-supe...

[semerda]

Where is EPA in all this?

Mountain View Shoreline (right behind Google HQ) used to be a landfill site for 3 decades before being turned into a park. Plenty of families visit it for the nature walks, kiddie play areas and water activities. Then few weeks back I heard a bang and hissing; a methane release valve opened https://youtu.be/kq3CnXU5OtU

I don’t know if this is normal for it to be so low but since then I’ve learnt the whole area has these to stop it from combusting. Methane is also a dirty gas that affects cognition.

Add to this the SuperFund sites water & land pollution and one has to question what the heck is going on here.

It gives a whole new perspective on how we are killing our earth hoping the problem will be solved by someone else in the future :(

[FollowSteph3]

Almost feels like running a code profiler to find the hotspots

[kaycebasques]

80/20 rule [1] strikes again?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

[therealdrag0]

I feel like this is brought up every time a minority number is responsible for a majority number, regardless of how far off 80/20 it is. That seems silly.

[dev_dull]

> The report doesn’t identify these “super emitters,” but notes that landfills give off more methane than any other source in the state. NASA’s equipment found that a subset of these landfills were the largest emitters in California and exhibited “persistent anomalous activity.”

Is the problem here that the trash is breaking down, or it's breaking down in a suboptimal way (such as anaerobic activity) that's causing methane to be released instead of a more benign gas?

[newnewpdro]

We really need automated continuous monitoring and alerting of these things. It doesn't take much time for an event to release huge quantities of what was thought to be contained gas into the atmosphere.

I'm surprised to not see any reference to the Aliso Canyon leak in this thread yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak

[branchan]

There's also currently a push by many countries to have carbon monitoring satellites above their countries.

For example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-satellit...

[gniv]

So what can be done about landfills? Burying stuff seems expensive/energy intensive.

[wongarsu]

Many European countries (Germany, Sweden, Norway, etc) don't allow landfills for common household trash. The solution obviously has many facets. Mostly it breaks down to waste separation (e.g. different bins for plastics, compost and paper that are emptied for free, with high fees for the rest to encourage people to separate), recycling what you can and burning the rest. Burning trash produces energy and you can deal with produced gases at one central location, what's left after burning is easy to landfill because it's much less volume and basically doesn't decompose.

[briffle]

Many landfills [0] now recover the methane, and treat it, or burn it in generators to create power. They can sell the power, and change the methane to carbon dioxide (which is less of a greenhouse gas)

In Madison, WI, [1] they create enough power to offset all the energy the county operations use, plus create CNG for their heavy equipment at the landfill to run on.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_gas_utilization

[1] https://isthmus.com/news/news/dane-county-might-sell-the-met...

[ars]

You can burn the garbage for energy instead. Then you don't need as much oil from the ground.

It also takes care of the plastic problem, since it burns the plastic very cleanly.

[ohples]

Not sure how effective it is, but it's possible to collect methane from landfill and use it to generate heat and electricity. From my understanding the emission from burning it are way better then just letting it leak into the air.

My university had a big methane line run from a landfill 2 towns over and used it in the cogen plant to generate power and steam for heat.

[marcosdumay]

It's not that much. People do landfills all over the world without much economic impact.

And you can recover the methane from them, what requires a small investment, and has a low, but positive ROI.

[ip26]

Diverting compostable material to an industrial compost operation is one option that can save money on building new landfills. Another is just good landfill design that ensures good drainage & aeration, which is a well understood problem but probably not always done well.

[mtnGoat]

this is interesting data... im not a scientist, but what causes the methane from the garbage dumps? rotting organics or just everything in general? is there not a better way to dispose of specific types of trash creating these gases?

Obviously not a small problem to solve. I think if the gov started identifying and fining these emitters, they would invest more into these types of solutions.

[magic5227]

So most importantly, how can we follow up and ensure the state works to capture/fine these locations? The article is paywalled, is it likely this will be actively followed up on?

Maybe all of us HN readers should write a note to Gov Newsom?

[neonate]

https://outline.com/97yPNJ

[tjbiddle]

Are there any composting services in the US? I'm living in Bali right now and I found a local service that gives me a bucket, I put all my organic waste into it, and once a week they come to replace it with a clean bucket.

If I wanted, I could request the compost back - but I don't have any use for it and would rather other consumers get a bit extra.

I pay ~$2/mo for the service (Again, Bali prices).

[totally]

Great example of gathering and using data to effect change.

[jeffdavis]

The following says that methane is not an important greenhouse gas:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/11/methane-the-irrelevant...

Can someone who knows better tell me if that's good science or not?

[donarb]

A website that quotes Breitbart is a signal that they are not serious about providing accurate scientific information.

[vpribish]

dude. use some critical thinking, please. a quick glance at the contents of that page shows that it is a lunatic fringe right-wing propaganda site.

"@AlGore to launch climate brainwashing campaign for students"

"Asians Better Hope It’s A Trump Win In 2020"

"Fauxcahontas must be dumber than schist"