The Methane Hunters - Ep157: Dr. Sebastien Biraud & Sharon Wilson

Bryony Worthington 
Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington and this is Cleaning Up. This week's episode, in a break from tradition, features two guests as we explore the topic of methane emissions and how to find and prevent them. My first guest is Sebastian Biraud from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California. Sebastian is an expert in using a range of technologies to trace greenhouse gas emissions. He oversees scientific detection projects across the USA. I wanted to ask him whether he thinks we have the right technology and regulatory frameworks in place to speed progress. And my second guest, Sharon Wilson, approaches the topic from the perspective of a local citizen impacted by the fracking boom in the Permian Basin in Texas. She set up and runs the NGO oilfield witness and is a certified "methane hunter", using handheld devices to uncover gas leaks, making them visible to a wider audience. Both guests bring many years of expertise to bear on this topic of methane hunting which recently has seen a flurry of interest. Thanks to the successful launch of MethaneSAT, the first civil society-funded effort to find methane super emitters from space. I hope you enjoy this episode. I think we're going to need a range of approaches to crack this problem. And whilst Sebastian and Sharon may have different styles, they both agree that more visibility is key to driving the urgent action that's now needed. Please join me in welcoming first Sebastien and then Sharon to Cleaning Up.

Michael Liebreich  
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BW  
Sebastian, thank you so much for joining me on Cleaning Up. I'm sorry, we're not in person even though we are in the same part of the world. But I wanted to just begin by asking you to introduce yourself in your own words and say a bit about what you do. 

Sebastien Biraud  
Hello, Bryony, yeah, it's a pleasure to talk to you today. It's been a while but hopefully we'll do this in person soon. So my name is Sebastian Biraud, you notice a slight accent right? I'm gonna say slight but probably not as slight as I'd like it to be. I'm a geophysicist by training. I have a masters in fundamental physics and a PhD in remote sensing, where I developed a method to use tracers to estimate greenhouse gases in Europe when I was doing my PhD in Europe. I am a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley national laboratory, which is one of the 17 national laboratories in the US, where I lead the climate science department and a few projects. My work is mostly on greenhouse gases, emission estimates and understanding carbon cycle. So I lead the project for the California Energy Commission called Summation, which looks at methane emission from the oil and gas sector in the southern San Joaquin Valley. I also lead the Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Carbon Measurement programme where we look at greenhouse gases, emissions and doing a lot of measurements all over the US. And then I also co lead the AmeriFlux Management project which is a network of more than 600 pi-managed sites, where we measure the exchange of carbon water energy between the land surface which could be vegetation, trees, crops, water bodies, in North Central and South America. I was born when global average atmospheric mission ratio was around 325 PPM. I joined the lab when it was 369 PPM and now it's almost at 422 PPM. So that gives you an idea of what my carbon dioxide age is.

BW  
Oh, well, that is the metric that matters, right, that parts per million as measured by the Keeling Curve. And Mauna Loa is the thing that, you know, keeps us all up at night right? Worrying about the effect of that concentration rising. But let's talk a little bit about methane, because I know that's something you've worked on. But globally, methane is a little bit still of a of a puzzle, right? 

SB  
So yeah, methane is the second anthropogenic greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, right. The challenge with methane is it has a warming potential 28 times higher than carbon dioxide on 100 year time horizon. And since 1750, the atmospheric methane concentration has more than doubled due to human activities. So after, you know, what we've seen, using global atmospheric measurements, we've seen that after a period of standardisation in the early 2000s, methane concentration has started to rise again after 2007 with no slowing- any slowing down of those accumulation rates. I mean, and we know that the increase of methane concentration right now follows trends of future scenarios which is- which are not in line with the objective of the Paris Agreement to keep global temperature below 1.5 degrees. So we need to tackle also methane emission. I'd like to make the parallel between- so we need to take on both, right, CO2 and methane, but I see, because of the short- shorter lifetime of methane, we have ways to act really quickly and seen impacts rapidly. It's like running a marathon and a sprint right, I think we still need to do the marathon at some point for CO2, it's gonna take some time, but we now have to run the sprint for methane and tackle- reduce methane emissions. And so methane emissions- human activity contributes to about 60% of the total methane emissions, and natural sources are also multiple and diverse and not as well-quantified as the others, you know, from lakes, reservoirs, termites, and so on. Emission from the agriculture and waste activity contribute about 60% of those human activities, you know, it's enteric fermentation from cows and manual management, oil and gas production and use, handling of solid and liquid waste, coal extraction, rice cultivation and so on. So they are clear pathways on how we could reduce those methane emission from those human activities. We just need to have a good way to implement.

BW  
But does all- do all of those that you- so you talked about the trends in methane rising after plateauing, and I seem to remember reading that there is still a little bit of a question mark as to what's causing that steep rise at a global level. Is that correct?

SB  
Yeah, there's still a little bit of uncertainty between where is the change happening, right; it seems to be clear that the oil and gas industry, for instance, in the US doesn't explain completely that change. You know, we've seen an increase of fracking, increase of natural gas emissions and production, but that trend doesn't explain the amplitude of the change that we're seeing. So there might be some- there's probably some phenomenon in the tropics that we don't have a good handle on, because it's hard to do measurements in the tropics, for instance, and we don't have yet good satellite coverage. So there's still a bit of a puzzle. So we know it's rising. We do not yet fully understand why. And there's also observations that it's hard to get, like from other countries.

BW  
Yeah. And before we get on to more local subjects, just pausing there at the global level, you and I have both been involved in conversations where we've talked about the need to invest in sort of more infrastructure to enable us to solve some of these puzzles. So you mentioned that it might be in the tropics, I guess there's possible changes happening within forests, sort of large scale due to temperature changes or changes in precipitation. And maybe we don't have the right measurement equipment to really help us solve that. Or what about the polar extremes where temperatures are rising at three times the global average or even more? Are we worried about changes there in terms of methane as well?

SB  
So I do believe we have the tools to really better understand, it just- it requires a little bit of investment either- from different stakeholders, right? It could be federal agencies, state agencies, foundations, philanthropy and so on. I mean, we've talked about all those. It's clear that we have a good handle on the framework on how to do this, it's just the implementation. So for instance today, and I wanted to check the news today - on March 1st, there was MethaneSAT, which is a private-public partnership between EDF and philanthropy and University of Iowa - was going to launch. And I was gonna check before we talked, but I don't know if it launched or not, it's been delayed from March 1 to today. And I don't know if it launched today. So- but I need to check. But there's a lot of effort across the board to get more handle on the measurement side of greenhouse gases, because, as you know, there's some discrepancy between bottom-up and top-down approach, right, when we- bottom-up is we try to get a number of what the emission profile looks like, using economic statistics and emission factors and so on, while the top-down is really observation driven. And you cannot buy with observation- but they're costly and more- they're more costly and more difficult to maintain and implement.

BW  
Yeah, so I was at Environmental Defense Fund when they started talking about raising money from philanthropy to put a satellite in the air. And it was very exciting times because the cost of the equipment had come down and the cost of space- putting things into space had come down to such a point where it was conceivable that philanthropy and civil society could launch its own detection satellite. And by the time this airs, we will know and we'll put in the show notes whether the satellites in the air have successfully or not. But that's- that is an example where, you know, perhaps member states' budgets are being squeezed or international budgets and science budgets might not be as available. But philanthropy has a role to play there in perhaps filling the gap.

SB  
Absolutely. And there's another satellites. So, I don't know if you remember Jerry Brown in California, you know, when he gave a talk at AGU like a few years ago, in 2016, saying, 'yes, California, we launch these satellites.' And actually, indeed, in a partnership between the California Air Resource Board in California and the Carbon Mapper, decided to launch another satellites dedicated to methane measurements in the fall of this year. So that's another example of great partnership to give us some additional constraint on our budget for methane, for instance.

BW  
But let's go back to more what you do then, because whilst you're across the combination of satellites, and then the more ground-based measurements, you're looking after, what I call "tall towers" or "flux towers", that are capturing on-the-ground kind of quite large scale measurements aren't you. Do you want to just talk a bit about that and the network that you look after?

SB  
So there's a lot of instrumentation that we can use to do measurements for different purposes. One of the purposes we want to address is really understanding greenhouse gases emissions at the more either regional, state, regional or local scale. And a way to do this is to use tall towers that have sensing upstream conditions from the towers, using different technologies where it could be- and with a range of cost and effort and ease of use and detection limits, and so on, so that we all use. So what we've done is, for the Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Carbon Program, we've developed a framework to do this in the eastern North Atlantic in 2015. And then we did also, at the same time, we did this in the North Slope of Alaska. So two regions who are very important: the eastern North Atlantic is because it was a really great background sight for Europe, for instance, because you know, the way we do emission estimate using atmospheric inversion is we want to look at, you know, continents as a box, and we want to know what's coming in the box and out of the box and using more difficult mathematical models. Basically, we, you know, we use the difference between the two and atmospheric transport and dispersion of those chemicals to assess what the land surface is emitting, basically, or absorbing. right. And so those sites in the eastern North Atlantic were really important for this. In the North Slope of Alaska, as you described, it's one of the region that has seen the fastest increase in temperature of all the Arctic Band, and so we wanted to have a constraint of local emissions, both because the North Slope of Alaska is also oil gas industry-heavy, but also the stabilisation of the permafrost which, you know, makes carbon available to microbial community which could have - depending on the surface condition, wet or dry - could lead to increase of methane or CO2 emissions. So we wanted to monitor all this in those regions. And then we have a site in the south central of the US, in Oklahoma, which has been key to actually show that the US EPA estimates of methane emissions have been severely underestimated for years. And we're hoping you know, getting that budget under control.

BW  
And you've also - bringing it back to our state of California -you've also been looking at oil and gas, methane emissions right, Bakersfield; I've been exploring the state and all roads lead to Bakersfield essentially, if you're heading South. But it's a huge area of oil and gas exploration, quite an old field. So do you want to mention a bit more about what you were doing there? 

SB  
Yeah, so that's part of Project Summation where we basically want to develop a framework for California, when we throw everything we can at the problem, we try to optimise the cost and usability for different conditions, right. So we have- so I'm gonna go from the ground up, we have people walking around trying to sense methane emission from the distribution network of natural gas in the city of Bakersfield, we do a mobile vehicle survey where we drive around the oil field, or in cities to refine larger leaks. We use aircraft observation to really try to get an understanding of Bakersfield Metropolitan Area emission, but also oil and gas fields in the southern San Joaquin Valley which are the largest producing region in California. And then different types of remote sensing, leading to usability of remote sensing satellite based estimates that we're seeing coming in the next few years. So this project has been very, very interesting because it brings together different scale, but also different communities, because we will see that where we have the largest methane emissions area are often where disadvantaged communities live also. And so we're working also with different outreach groups like the Central California Asthma Collaborative to really let people know in those communities what we're doing and what we're finding.

BW  
And, I mean, my interest in this always comes back to, "well, once we found that there's a source, well what can we do about it and what do our policymakers and regulators need to do about it?" And the particular challenge with older oil and gas fields, I guess, is that you've got bigger firms moving out, and maybe leaving behind smaller firms or you have orphan wells. I mean, if you had a magic wand, what do we need to be doing with these older fields do you think? 

SB  
That's very interesting. There's another project that I lead here in Berkeley Lab that's called the Catalogue Program where we're looking at undocumented orphan wells that have been abandoned once their production- so very applied project, right? Once the production is not sustainable for, you know, to make money, basically, for oild producers, some companies haven't done that well, you know, they file for bankruptcy. And then the states get the well back, the lease back, and it's up to the state to plug it. Production started really, really early in California, and so a lot of documentation had been lost. Some of those wells we don't even know where we are, and they're still leaking either methane on the surface or contamination of groundwater, and so on. So you can imagine it's a pretty tall order at the scale of the US. We think about 2 million wells fall into that category. And what we've been doing is trying to find- assess state of the art technology, but also find low cost technology to really scale this effort to find the wells, detect methane emissions and quantify those emissions in order to prioritise those wells for plugging and abandonment. It's a huge, tall order, but very exciting because we are, you know, we're making an impact on this. Where should be our strongest efforts? Those are usually not the largest leakage point that we find, but there's a lot of small sources, right. So although there was a study published a couple of weeks ago by a group in Colorado, really made that paper, where it found undocumented orphan wells lickileakingng up to 80 kg per hour, which is massive. And so, if you look at the distribution of emissions across the world, either producing or non-producing, you see that there is a strong bias towards super-emitters, wells that are emitting more than 30 kg per hour. That means that if we cater our efforts towards those super-emitters as well, we can find and we can work with operators or state agency to plug them, we would go a long way, right?

BW  
And are the regulations sufficient in California, would you say? Have you got the right powers, the right- is it a question of just enforcement? Or do you actually need new laws?

SB  
Oh, that's a tricky question. So I do believe we need to work with the operators. So this is a science project. I don't worry about the regulation, because that's not my goal. My goal is really to understand the profile of methane emissions and really work with operators; we've developed very good partnerships with, for instance, the California Research Corporation, who operate one of the largest oil and gas fields in California, the Elk Hills in Bakersfield, and they've been absolutely responsive to engagement, positive engagement, right. So I think my approach has been really bring all the stakeholders on board, have open, honest conversation, and try to fix the problem. I'm not at all into refusing to talk to all the stakeholders, I think it's very, very important that we all we're all part of the solution, right? 

BW  
Yeah, no, I think that's right. I suppose some people might question though, that, you know, this is a sector that's made a huge amount of money over the years. And the true cost of that production hasn't really been paid by those companies, right, not least, the greenhouse gases, but also now this clean up job that, as you say, it's too easy to just declare bankruptcy and then let the state deal with it. And it's kind of- I totally hear you about the stakeholders and trying to find a sort of mediated solution. But ultimately, this is about economics, isn't it? 

SB  
It is absolutely about economics. So there are ideas right now; so it's hard to reinvent what was done in the past, right, to change the rules as we go. I think there's a new model that should be put in place for when you allow companies to have a new lease, for instance, or new- that should factor in the cost of plugging and abandonment of the well, which is not the case right now. So upfront, we should be putting into the way you factor the cost of your production. And I think that would go really, really a long way.

BW  
Yeah. And as you say- well, it's interesting, you can't go back and change history, but what I do see about America is that they're quite- they quite like law courts and litigation to solve problems. And in a way, you know, a civil society case could be made that this was negligence, or that this was reckless, or that this should have been dealt with at the time. And I don't know, perhaps there is a way of going back through time and holding people to account. I mean, it I suppose it depends on your perspectives, but it does feel like this- more and more attention, at least has been paid to this problem right, would you say? 

SB  
I think so, I think it's true. My main concern is, if you really want to have a positive impact on the ground, you need to have all the stakeholders in the room and have an honest conversation. If we start demonising them, conversation is over, and that's it. And as you said, I mean, litigation is a huge, fun job in the US. People love to litigate. And 

BW  
Well just to put the other side there, when EDF announced that they were going to put up a satellite, it was surprising how much easier it was to get oil and gas companies to pick up the phone, you know, like there's sort of a dance, isn't there, between- you have to have some stick, I think, or at least some plausible policy response that's gonna-

SB  
Well rather than a stick what I'd really love to see - and just a suggestion - is and it needs to be done through probably feds or the states, why don't we create a green label, because- that says "this, [whatever] oil/gas was produced with, you know, minimum impact to the environment"? I mean, I don't know how we assess this but- because, again, there's a lot of players and the US is very unique in the world, right? Most producing countries are one-state companies or one company you have to deal with. The US is 1000s and 1000s and 1000s, like family owns 20 wells, and they have been doing business for 150 years. There are a few majors but it's really a different scale of the problem and the complexity is very different. And so we have to also understand this. I would love to see, as I said, a green label that says, "this was-" you know, like, you can quantify the maintenance costs that people are doing, the emissions estimate that they have [etc] and have this being the good player- reward the good players, right? Because most of them, what I'm seeing is, a few bad players give a really bad rep.

BW  
So I'm a little bit sceptical because it's such a fungible commodity, right, that the consumer, you know- all these barrels, they all end up in refineries and come out as products. And I think labelling might be too softer. I hear you though, that if it was about just a small fragment of bad actors, I would have thought, a lot more transparency and a lot more instruments like the ones you've described, that you're using, or even citizen science initiatives to try and make this more visible, that that kind of visibility- because the best label is only as good as the amount of scrutiny you put onto the data that goes into the label. right? And if they're not accounting for it correctly, how do you know?

SB  
Absolutely, absolutely. No- it's a complicated problem. As you can tell, probably, I'm walking on eggshells, right. I mean, it's a very thin line. And yeah, it's very complicated.

BW  
Yeah. So when it comes to you're work in California, you're working closely with the oil and gas companies and the regulators to try and find, you know, sources that can be fixed quickly, right? Because that's what we all want: less methane emissions in the atmosphere. Is this common? How are other states in America? How do they compare to what's going on in California?

SB  
So yeah, as we all read in the in the news, I mean, the state of California is, I don't if I say, once we move away from use of oil and gas in the state of California, which is very different from what I've seen in other states, in the US. So in California, the state is pretty - I don't want to- maybe I could say - hostile to oil and gas in general. But I do believe companies are trying their best in California, the companies I work with, to really comply and find the leaks and addressing the problem. I do work also in other states, for instance, in Texas, where the oil and gas industry is regulated by the Railroad Commission, which is an interesting historic precedent and tells you a little bit, you know, how much the oil and gas industry is being regulated in Texas. But clearly, oil and gas companies in Texas have more leniency. And legislation applies in a different fashion than in California, right. And we see this across the nation: different basins, different agencies are responsible for enforcing methane emissions. So they're trying to, you know, the EPA has put new regulation in place, new laws in place, but we'll see how it applies to individual states.

BW  
And even taking it beyond: so if we think there's quite a high degree of variance within the United States, you can imagine what it's like then at a global level. I mean, the variance and the leniency must be so different.

SB  
So, so look, I was talking about superior-emitters in California, right? So in California, when we assume super-emitters, is that, you know, 30kg per hour. It's- there's no rule, but roughly, that's what it is. They need to help scale up on the technology we want to use, usefulness of remote sensing technologies and so on and what we do on the ground. There was a paper a couple of years ago by a french group that was looking at ultra-emitters, not super-emitters, ultra-emitters. Ultra-emitters are people that are emitting 2.5 tons of methane power. So the scale is a little bit different, and there's a few of them in the world where, I mean,  remote sensing is a great way to get to it because in Kazakhstan, for instance, in some part of Russia, where there's no enforcing mechanism, and it's a different approach to this. 

BW  
Yeah, and then that's where satellites really can come into their own right, for those ultra emitters? And ultimately, maybe we do then get to a point - like we did with the ozone or with the atomic test ban - where there is a kind of global enforcement because, you know, as the impacts of climate change get ever more, you know, urgent and apparent, I feel like we need to go up a gear in terms of our urgency and the seriousness with which we treat this? 

SB

Absolutely. I think enforcement is going to be difficult, unless there's multilateral agreements on limiting not only global temperature but also emissions. It's a complex problem, but I think, yes, we have good partners on the international communities to do this, but not all the partners are playing- contributing equally to that goal that we're trying to achieve. So remote sensing is a good way to do this because you don't need to request access of anything and you can tackle, you know, those big super emitters that really, really are the low hanging fruits for us to fix. So then it's- those are no-brainer; we should go fix them or find a way to fix them.

BW

Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much, Sebastien. Fantastic talking to you, and I look forward to seeing you in-person before too long.

SB  
Thank you, Bryony.

BW  
Thank you.

Sharon. It's really great to be speaking to you today. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Do you think you could start us off just by introducing yourself in your own words and telling us what you do?

Sharon Wilson  
I'm Sharon Wilson, and I'm Director of Oilfield Witness, and environmental non-profit. And I'm a "methane hunter". So since 2014, I have been using an optical gas imaging camera. It's an instrument with an onboard camera that makes visible the normally invisible pollution from oil and gas facilities.

BW  
And can you tell us a little bit about kind of how you became a methane hunter? I mean, it's not a job you can apply for. So how did you get to this point?

SW  
It's not a job I ever wanted or ever thought about. But I moved in 1996, I moved out to Wise (W I S E) Wise County, Texas. And I didn't know that at the time- I didn't know this that George Mitchell was experimenting, learning how to marry the two technologies: hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to produce oil and gas from shale. And he did that all around me. The first well that produced oil and gas from shale was drilled in 1997 and I moved there in 1996, so I saw it happening in real time, and was right there on the front line. My air turned brown, my water turned black. And that made me really mad because I had this idyllic beautiful place in the country where my kids could run around free and I could have horses and. you know, grow a garden. And then, the next thing I know, I'm watering my garden with who-knows-whats in my water and the air is foul. And so I had a crash course in the fracking boom. And I was right there on the very ringside seat to the circus that is fracking impacts. And so that's how I got interested in what was happening. And I learned about this technology. And in 2014, I became the first just regular person, not-governmental, not industry person, to get certified, an optical gas imaging thermographers certification.

BW  
And so having done that, like kind of- talk to us a little bit then about, you know, what were you doing before you became a kind of campaigner or a citizen scientist, I guess, in this field.

SW  
I was a mom, you know, going to work every day, taking my kid to baseball practice, and I would see all of these horrible things on the side of the road. At first, I just saw these towers of lights, and they were encroaching on our land, creating a situation where we could no longer enjoy the stars at night, which was one of our big forms of enjoyment. I drove to one of these towers during the daytime and what I saw was just- I couldn't even process it because there was black, slimy liquid shooting out in a pit dug in the ground and diesel - think, thick black diesel fumes everywhere. It was very loud. It smelled horrible. And I watched the process from drilling to fracking, which was also extremely loud. And, you know, big clouds of this frack sand - which is silica, which is very harmful if you breathe it - huge clouds of that, big- lots of diesel. And then, after that they did the flowback, which was the worst part, because that's when all the chemicals they put down a hole, mixed with the hydrocarbons and heavy metals and everything, and they come back up the hole to the surface, and they just- they put flow back in these tanks that have a 14x14 open vent on the top. So it just vents out to the open air. And then, you know, the whole process - from there, they start producing, they put the liquids in tanks but it's mixed with gas, so the gas rises to the surface, creates pressure, and that pressure has to be released. So they actually have on the tanks, pressure relief valves. But then eventually, they developed vapour recovery systems that are supposed to take care of that. But we find those failing about 75% of the time. And even the vapour recovery systems have to have pressure relief valves. So you know, this is- it's physics: it's a physics problem where the gas is volatile, it expands and, you know, it's inside steel, and the steel is not going to going to expand. 

BW  
So this is all- you've learned this really, haven't you. So having gone from being, you know, a concerned individual upset about your local environment - is it true to say that then the methane problem was kind of the second thing you got involved in and realising that that was also not just locally-damaging, but globally damaging because it's such a powerful greenhouse gas? And so is that the journey you went on from local to worrying more about the global?

SW  
Right I was- at first I was very concerned about the water because I had a well, a water well. And then I was concerned because I realised how much freshwater they were pulling out of the aquifers, and then using that water and permanently removing it, when they inject it in the disposal. Well, it's permanently removed from our active hydrologic cycle. And that's a pretty- I mean, that's a lot of hubris. I can't- I can't- it's very hard to grasp, you know, the amount of hubris it takes to take clean water and turn it into trash and then throw it away. But so that was my first concern. And then I was concerned about the emissions because it's volatile organic compounds, and people were complaining, people were getting sick. And then in about 2011 - it was before them that I tuned into the climate impacts, but in 2011 - when Bob- Robert Howarth, and Tony Ingraffea released their study showing that the impacts of shale gas were worse on the climate than coal, that's when I really realised that it's not about a local issue, it's a global issue.

BW  
And so when did you set up your charity? Tell us a little bit about that.

SW  
Well, Oilfield Witness is just about - it's less than a year old, because I was working for a big nonprofit - Earthworks for 13 years. But now I'm working for Oilfield Witness where I don't have to follow talking points, I don't have to worry about telling the truth. 

BW  
And so this has given you a platform. And so, now, I mean, tell us a bit about that. You're only a year old so you know you're funded philanthropically and you have - is it you plus a team of volunteers. How are you set up?

SW  
Well, Miguel was working with me - Miguel Escoto, worked with me at Earthworks and he left Earthworks after- actually I was fired at Earthworks and, you know, there was a difference in our theory of change. And so Miguel believed in my theory of change, and he left. But I did a lot of work at Earthworks: 13 years, I published many reports, I was on a lot of different media, PBS, several different platforms on PBS, BBC. Just all the media really. So- and I'm still doing the same work only we can follow our theory of change.

BW  
Okay, so tell me your theory of change, then. Let's hear it.

SW  
I'm not opposed to regulations, we need regulations. But incremental change is not following the data, the scientific data. We are past the point of incremental change. And the UN says that, the International Energy Agency says that. We have to move very quickly to transition away from oil and gas. So I've always supported anything to do with regulations, but regulations will not save us at this point. We have to stop expanding oil and gas. It's expanding like a contagion. When we travel out to West Texas, everything you can see; they are razing off every bit of ground, bulldozers everywhere, back holes, they're drilling these giant impoundment pits where they put fresh water for fracking. And they're just- it's everywhere; drilling rigs everywhere, they are expanding like mad. And that is, you know, not at all the direction we need to be going. And so, I'm critical of the current administration, you know, I know that the other choice is not viable. But if you're not- if you don't critique someone who is in power, then there's not much chance that you're going to be able to change the situation. And Joe Biden has the power to turn this around; he could declare a national climate emergency and use his executive powers to reinstate the crude oil export ban. The largest greenhouse emitter in the world is in Texas, in the Permian Basin. The only reason that the Permian Basin is booming, is because in 2015, Congress overturned a decades-old crude oil export ban. So now, they can export that light, sweet crude that we can't refine, they can export that. They can export the gas. And so, if the crude oil export ban were reinstated, that would really slow down the Permian Basin. We should ban LNG exports and, you know, think very carefully about how we help other countries that need the gas - because we don't want them to get the gas from Russia - we need to think very carefully about helping them with alternatives, move forward with our alternatives. It takes a very long time to build these export terminals, and then once they're built, they're going to operate for 30 years or more. So we are locking ourselves into decades of more oil and gas. And that's not survivable at in our current situation.

BW  
So I want to come back a little bit to what you do in your charity, but I also want to dig in on this question, because the big challenge is, if we're going to get off fossil fuels, we know we're gonna have to replace them, and we're going to see demand for oil and gas particularly falling off, right, we're gonna have a reduction in overall demand. And then the debate comes, "okay, so who's it going to be the first barrels not sold, right? Who's going to leave it in the ground?" And I think there's a big debate - I mean, my home country is the UK, we've got this same kind of paradox where we're doing really well to clean up our act, but we're currently also seemingly intent on digging every last drop of oil out of the North Sea. And that seems to send a completely mixed message. So is your point that as a responsible global kind of participant in the in the global economy, the US should be starting to think about whose are the first barrels not sold, and, uh, not doing the opposite, which is expanding into this market? Because I can see the logic of that, but also, I suspect there are some people who would say, "well, the US is doing this relatively cleanly compared to some other actors," you know, maybe Russia as an example. So, you know, tell me how you feel about this because it's quite paradoxical, right?

SW  
The first fallacy is the US is one of the biggest polluters on the planet. The Texas Permian Basin is the number one geographical area, greenhouse gas-biggest polluter on the planet. I think the Permian Basin is 216 gigatons, or is it- anyway, it's 216 (I believe) gigatons. And the next geographical location is Russia, and it's number two: it's 166 gigatons. That's quite- that's a big bad actor. The number three geographical location is the Marcellus Shale on the East Coast. And then there's- there's the number four, or five or six, somewhere in there - is New Mexico, the New Mexico Permian Basin, and then you have the Haynesville Shale. ~ll of those areas, those geographical areas are in the top 10 of the biggest polluters on the earth. So, Texas, the United States is very far from one of the relatively cleanest producers. And I've been to the UK - I've seen how they produce oil and gas. And, you know, it's about the same, but not as much- there's not as much. And in some cases, it is a little better. But it's still pretty bad.

BW  
Yeah, I think one of the things that's difficult is that, throughout the world, there are different environmental standards, right? I mean, you could even just comparing Texas and California, there's a very different kind of approach to regulation. And so the standards do differ. But I suppose your point is, when you're extracting oil and gas in this way, it's just inherently difficult with inherently polluting. And the idea that the US is somehow better than everyone else, perhaps is oversold, that's your contention.

SW  
Way oversold. It is way oversold. And part of the US is Texas, and Texas is very belligerent about reining in oil and gas. And so there's- the regulation is almost non-existent; instead of regulating, tyey're protectors, they're industry protectors, they're lap dogs, not watchdogs. And- but you know, the number three place on the Earth is the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania and Ohio, so-

BW  
So, that- so will that now- because we're talking the very week that we've just seen this big kind of fanfare around a new satellite being launched, a civil society-funded satellite, which makes it quite interesting. And I used to work at Environmental Defence Fund, so I was there when they were starting to think about this project many years ago. But will that- will that satellite help tell that story that you're just telling me now?

SW  
I don't know. We have- we already have about 20 satellites flying over areas detecting methane. Some of them are able to detect at the granular level and tell us who is emitting the methane. We have towers, we have flyovers, we have people like me- boots on the ground, everybody showing, "here is- there's a lot of methane," and industry saying, "oh, we don't know where it's coming from. We need more monitoring. We need more monitoring." And, see, now they're not delay- they're not trying to deny any more, they're just trying to delay and monitoring fits in with their strategy of delay. So we've already got all the information we need. Now they're putting up you know, this new satellite. Well, yay. I feel like everybody all week is on a sugar high. They've had too much candy. I want to say, "okay, yay, there's now yet another satellite. All this money that could have been spent stopping, doing something to stop and enforce, pushing that- pushing that direction has been spent on yet another way to monitor it." And everybody has had way too much candy all this week, and I think it is affecting their thinking, you know, because I just keep saying, "okay, now what? What is going to be different? Because we've been showing you methane all these different ways for - I've been doing it for 10 years - for 10 years; nothing has changed except the levels of methane in our atmosphere climb higher."

BW  
That's a- that is a very, very good point. And I can remember having this debate with- within the Environmental Defence Fund, actually, when this idea was first being discussed. And it's certainly true that there are already satellites that have been used and are being used to identify leaks. But I guess there's one that- what happened was: so, when civil society announced they were going to do this, suddenly, the oil and gas companies answered the phone a lot more readily than perhaps they would have done, and it was almost a kind of wakeup call that this was not going to stay unseen and unheard and unnoticed, and that the very act that everyone kind of is now scrutinising this with with the technology has come down in cost to such an extent that even civil society can do it. It acted as a bit of a wake up call. But your point is: we've been sending wakeup calls for decades, and they've not been heeded. 

SW  
So, nothing has happened. And the only- the only difference that I see that this could make is if it is blasted far and wide, everywhere, enough to get the public's attention, which is something I've been trying to do for 10 years, because the regulatory agencies are not going to do it; they're underfunded, they are conflicted, many of them are corrupt, you know, so they're not going to do it. Our government is not going to do it for the same reasons; they actually get legal bribe money from the oil and gas industry. So it's going to have to come from a huge push from the public. And as our world heats up, it's like, you know, the sand in the hourglass is running out, and will enough people rise up and push whoever is in the White House to do something? Will that happen before the sand runs out of the hourglass?

BW  
So, I'm- it's funny, because I'm now living in the US, and so I am following the politics here as I was following it in the UK. And it's never- never a dull moment. But I do think perhaps appealing to the White House is one route, but actually it probably needs a supranational fix, right? Because this is truly a global issue, and there are there examples of regulations at a global level where we've regulated ozone-depleting chemicals, right, and we did that at global level. It feels to me like- I mean, Europe actually has, I think said this: they're going to try and start policing their borders more effectively, so that they can penalise imports that have got high greenhouse gas attributes. So in a way, you know, one way out is that this we find the region that's got the tightest roles, which is probably Europe, and then we build from there and try and get a much more international response so that the White House isn't the only place we can go knocking on the door of.

SW  
I keep hoping that there will be an international push and pressure on the United States, because an every time a foreign journalist calls, I try to do my best to go meet them and take them around and show them what's happening because I want that outside pressure on the United States, because we have- we live in so much privilege over here. And people keep saying, "well, what about China?" How many people does China have compared to us? And they're not even number one, two or three on the worst greenhouse gas polluters. So, I don't know who's number four but I think it's Russia again. But-

BW  
That's in terms of geographically-concentrated.?

SW  
Yeah, yeah. 

BW  
Because I think it's- anyway, we can talk about the total volume. It's per capita, your point is that-

SW  
It's per capita. I mean, China has a lot of people over there, so yeah, they're gonna have a lot of pollution. But they are moving forward with renewable energy faster than we are. 

BW  
Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that because your home state is Texas. It's a strange state in the sense that it's not really connected to the rest of the grid. I'm actually going out there and in a couple of weeks, so I'm looking forward to visiting the first time, but you know, it has got wind power and solar power and it- but it's still predominantly a petro-state in your view.

SW  
The problem so far, I mean, there's this huge explosion in renewable energy, and they're just building it out everywhere. The problem is it's not displacing oil and gas.  The demand for energy is growing so oil and gas just keeps growing. The highest amount of oil produced under Trump was 4.9 million barrels a day - 4.9 million barrels a day. And under Biden, we're at 6 million barrels per day.

BW  
Yeah, and I think it's- it's going to be really interesting, because as we discussed, somebody somewhere is having their oil production displaced, right, because if demand flattens for the product, which is likely to as we electrify transport and find more efficient ways of moving around, somebody is going to be displaced. And if it's not- it might be that it's the poorer nations who can't protect themselves or who can't, you know, shore up their oil and gas sector. So we - the richer countries - carry on being even richer, because we're continuing to produce, whereas countries who might want to try and follow us up that ladder are unlikely to be able to because demand is going to start falling. So, it seems very kind of- an injustice that we both caused the problem and we continue to cause a problem, and people who haven't had the benefit of decades of oil and gas riches are not even be able to get on the ladder.

SW  
But they can have the same level of lifestyle with renewable energy. I mean, really, our lifestyle is pretty obscene when you think about other countries. One thing that I love about Europe: you can go in the store for a package of gum and there might be five or six choices of gum. Here, there's an entire aisle, and you could never be- I get so overstimulated wondering which kind of gum or which kind of toothpaste or which kind of shampoo. We don't need, you know, a whole aisle with just gum on it. I want to- I want to be like Europe. I mean, there's some really good candy over there, but it's not, you know, this ridiculous amount.

BW  
Well, there's a- there's the question of choice, which clearly, yes, but there's also the question of volume consumption, right, which, you know, definitely everything in the US is slightly bigger, and it just is that per-capita emissions here are way higher, distances are longer, everything's a bit more extreme. But you're right; we've got a very privileged environment, we've become wealthy off the back of fossil fuels. But, you know, we're, I mean, as a continent, the US is not immune to the impacts of climate change, either, right, so this thing is a short term game, but probably long term, a lot of pain. I mean, continental weather patterns are going to shift faster than many other parts of the world. So, you know, on your- we're gonna- we're seeing it already right? Oh,

SW  
Oh, the summers are unbearable here, unbearable, and my dog is going to have to wear shoes, because last year, lots of dogs had third degree burns on their feet from walking on the pavement, and that's where I have to walk her so she's gonna have to wear shoes and she's not gonna like that. But, you know, just- when you look at oil and gas, they have been creating impacts locally, everywhere you go. I suffered impacts- I lost, you know, my beloved area, my farm that I lived on. I felt like I could not stay there anymore. And, you know, that was my dream. I didn't want my son to end up with leukaemia because of my dream. I had felt like I had to get him out of there. But so many people have ended up so much worse off, and people every day are suffering just horribly from these impacts from living downwind of oil and gas.

BW  
And your point is really that now we can do it differently, right. That used to be the case,. I think, you know, there's a lot of oil and gas messaging that says, you know, "you can't live without us. We are essential to modern society." But it's increasingly not true, right, that we know we can make electricity in lots of ways. We know that we can be more efficient, and we can know we can electrify. So that argument, I guess, is getting less and less persuasive to people like us. But I don't think the message has got out. And I guess, bringing it back to what you do, really what your charity is doing is trying to visualise and make real for people this particular aspect of what they do, which is this pollution which is otherwise invisible, right?

SW  
I'm trying to show people- I've been doing this for 10 years, but I've been, you know, learning about oil and gas and living with it since 1996. They started promising in early 2000s when we were saying in the Barnett Shale, "oh my God, this is terrible. You're making people sick, we're breathing this stuff." They started telling us, "don't worry about the emissions, we can fix that, we're not going to make a lot of money, so don't worry about the emissions." So, I've been hearing that now for over 20 years and it's only gotten worse. So, I've- I've come to the point where I've learned enough about all the processes and everything to know that the problem is a physics problem, and the industry has not figured out how to defeat physics. And some of them don't really care, you know; some try to fix the problem, and some don't care. But now we're to a point where the weather is so severe that in the summertime, it gets so hot, that they have to release gas, because the gas gets so volatile, they have to release it. The engines that they use to move the gas through the pipelines and other things on the sites, the engines are overheating. When that happens, the gas that - wells are still producing gas - is still coming up, it's still going into a pipeline, but there's nowhere for it to go and it all over-pressurises They have millions of tonnes of gas they've had to release this last summer because it was so hot. In the winter, things freeze up, the gas can't get where it needs to go. And you know, people think it freezes up at the power plants, the gas can't get to the power plants, the gas is frozen-up upstream so it can't get there. So, it's all blasting out into the air so the industry has created the extreme weather that it can't really survive.

BW  
That's such a good point. I mean, that is what makes climate such a wicked problem, because, you know, we're in the midst of it now, and it makes everything harder now that- now that the extremes are with us. You know, just looking at, I was looking yesterday at some data around hydro-production globally, it's hugely down because we've got droughts. So that hydro power that we used to rely on, becomes less reliable. Everything gets harder and it's- yeah, that's such a sobering thought that this isn't- this is another feedback mechanism that we haven't got in our models in terms of how it gets harder. Sharon, I want to end on a more optimistic note. So I would love to hear like a little bit- you're about to go out into the field. Tell me a bit about your field visit and, like, what your hope is like in the near term, and maybe in the long term, like what's giving you hope and motivation at the moment?

SW  
We have a campaign that- well, we actually have helped a small group of opposition- a small opposition group form in the Texas Permian Basin. It's the first one ever, and so, they're getting ready to roll out their first campaign which is about air pollution. So in 2019, the Texas regulatory agency TCEQ - Texas Commission on Environmental Quality - determined that the volatile organic compounds in Midland Odessa are higher than all of Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston combined. Now, this is a tiny area 300,000 People in Midland Odessa - I don't know how many, probably 10 million in D, FW and Houston combined - and they have more volume that those people are being exposed to very intense levels of benzene, and other carcinogens and neurotoxins. So we're about to roll out a campaign around that to help people understand: this is about- this is not even about oil and gas, this is about your homes your safety, where your children grow and play and learn. And, you know, everybody's been impacted by this. So we're excited about that campaign. When we go out in the field, we will have several people with us. We're meeting another group from- from Europe, and they're going to go out in the field with us and see what's happening- Italians, so they're trying to fight a new LNG terminal there. And we're going to meet with a couple of different media outlets and we are going to wear all of this wastewater. So for every barrel of oil that's produced in the Permian, there's sbout 6 barrels of wastewater, and we're going where all this wastewater that's been injected, the Earth is vomiting it back up. And- there's my dog - and it's, you know, it's over pressurised everything and the wellbores are failing, and it's contaminating water; there's a 70-acre lake of this toxic water. So we're going to go see that and do some social media around that and more optical-gas imaging, bringing, you know, visualising the all the air pollution.

BW  
Yeah, well you're going back to your original roots then, aren't you, of like, this is a local problem and a global problem and you can help highlight it with new technologies, right, which are now affordable to be in the hands of activists like yourself, to really bring a spotlight on to the problem. Sharon, it's been a pleasure discussing this all with you and I wish you the best of luck in your campaigns and your field trip. And let's hope like, you know, I'm kind of hoping- yes, I agree with you, the satellite news is all a little, perhaps, overhyped, but it does signal to me that people are applying, you know, lots and lots of people applying lots of different tools to this problem. And if we all come together, ultimately, the lie that oil and gas is necessary and that it's somehow clean, you know, we can put that to bed a little bit.

SW  
Well, thank you for having me and I hope that- I hope that something works at some time, and we don't just keep monitoring: at some point we stop the methane.

BW  
Yeah, well, yes. Well, the pressure is building literally and figuratively, so I'm sure there'll be an inevitable policy response at some point. Thank you so much, Sharon, and best of luck.

SW  
Thank you.

BW  
So that was Sebastien Biraud from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and Sharon Wilson from Oilfield Witness. As Sebastian said, when it comes to reducing concentrations of greenhouse gases, we need to be both running a sprint, to reduce the very high impact of methane in the short term, and a marathon, to address the bigger longer term problem of carbon dioxide. And we can't trade one off against the other - both races need to be one to reduce climate risks. And to do that, we need the right investment incentives, which will likely be a combination of both carrots and sticks. Sebastian and Sharon have different theories of change and very different levels of trust in the oil and gas sector, but what unites them and the team behind MethaneSAT is a belief that greater visibility and transparency will be a forcing factor for positive change. I sincerely hope they're right. As usual, we'll add any relevant additional information in the show notes, including a link to the episode with Jason Anderson of ClimateWorks Foundation, where we discussed climate super pollutants. Thank you to the Cleaning Up team for their support in reducing this episode, in particular producer Zak Cebon and research at Eliza Tewson and thanks to you for listening.

ML  
Cleaning up is brought to you by our lead supporter, Capricorn Investment Group, as well as by the Liebreich Foundation, the Gilardini Foundation and our newest supporter, EcoPragma Capital.