Methane leak at Russian mine could be largest ever discovered

About 90 tonnes of methane an hour were released from the Raspadskaya coalmine in January, data shows

Blast at the Raspadskaya cola mine, Russia. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images Theguardian.com

 

Possibly the world’s biggest leak of methane has been discovered coming from a coalmine in Russia, which has been pouring out the carbon dioxide equivalent of five coal-fired power stations.

About 90 tonnes an hour of methane were being released from the mine in January, when the gas was first traced to its source, according to data from GHGSat, a commercial satellite monitoring company based in Canada. Sustained over the course of a year, this would produce enough natural gas to power 2.4m homes.

More recently, the mine appears to be leaking at a lower rate, of about a third of the highest rate recorded in January, but the leak is thought to have been active for at least six months before January’s survey.

The leak, which comes from the Raspadskaya mine in Kemerovo Oblast, the largest coalmine in Russia, is about 50% bigger than any other leak seen by GHGSat since it started its global satellite monitoring in 2016. The company believes it is bigger than any leak yet traced to a single source.

Brody Wight, director of energy, landfill and mines at GHGSat, said that methane was an often overlooked side-effect of coalmining that added to the climate impact of burning coal. The Raspadskaya leak would add about 25% to the greenhouse gas emissions of burning any coal produced from the mine, he estimated.

“We are seeing an increase in methane from this site generally, which could be the result of increased coal production, linked to global trends in coal use,” he said.

Russia is one of the world’s biggest sources of methane from fossil fuel extraction. The country’s gas infrastructure, including production facilities and pipelines, is notoriously leaky despite calls for the government to take action.

Paul Bledsoe, a former White House adviser to Bill Clinton and now with the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC, said: “Deeply cutting methane is the only sure way to limit near-term temperatures and prevent runaway climate change, yet every month brings new evidence that Russia is hiding the world’s most massive and destructive methane leaks. Putin is desperately hiding these enormous emissions so he can continue to profit from sales of Russian coal, oil and gas and fund his war-making regime. But those nations like China who continue to buy Putin’s oil and gas are equally abetting his climate and war criminality.”

Advertisement

All underground coalmines produce methane, which can cause explosions if it builds up. A blast at the Raspadskaya mine in 2010 killed 66 people.

Venting methane can be done for safety reasons. However, there are ways of capturing methane when it is produced at a high rate, or venting through oxidisation, so that it causes less harm to the climate.

Methane is about 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though it degrades in the atmosphere over about 20 years. In February, the International Energy Agency warned that most countries were under-reporting their methane emissions, and the true amounts pouring into the atmosphere were far greater than had been thought.

Recent studies have shown that cutting methane could be one of the fastest ways of holding down global temperature rises, and that sharp cuts now could prevent a rise of about 0.25C by 2050.

Durwood Zaelke, the president of the Washington-based Institute for Governance, said the Raspadskaya leak showed the urgent need for action. “It’s critical to set up a comprehensive satellite monitoring system for methane. We also need to deploy a system of incentives and sanctions that can remedy these emissions, focusing first on the super emitters,” he said.

The IEA also found that at current high gas prices, the cost of capturing methane was far less than the value of using it or selling it as a fuel source, which should give companies and governments an incentive to capture the gas rather than venting or flaring.

At the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow last November, more than 100 countries agreed to reduce their methane emissions by at least 30% by 2030. Russia was not among them, however.

GHGSat said it measured 13 distinct methane plumes, ranging in size from 658 to 17,994 kg an hour, from the mine. The discovery was made on 22 January, but the company took time to verify its findings and contact the operator of the mine, which has not responded.

A lot of Arctic infrastructure is threatened by rising temperatures

 

Russia will be particularly badly hit

By The Economist.

A quarter of the northern hemisphere’s land is covered by permafrost, defined as ground that remains at or below 0°C for at least two years in succession. Most of this is above the Arctic Circle, a part of the world that is warming at a rate double the global average, with significant consequences for the rest of the planet. Arctic permafrost is thought to contain some 1.7trn tonnes of carbon, most of it in frozen organic matter. That is double the amount of the stuff currently residing in the atmosphere. Rising temperatures mean that much of this material may turn into carbon dioxide and methane as the ground thaws and micro-organisms get to work. That will drive further warming, causing a feedback loop of more melting and yet more greenhouse-gas emission.

These risks are re-emphasised in a paper just published in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. It warns that warming of the top three metres of permafrost alone could result in the release of 624m tonnes of carbon a year by 2100, a figure similar to the current emissions of Canada or Saudi Arabia. But a thawing Arctic poses other, more immediate, problems. Another paper published in the same journal highlights the threat posed to circumpolar infrastructure as the ground beneath it thaws.

Thawing permafrost is a particularly unpredictable environment on which to build. As its ice content changes and the volume of liquid water increases, the soil can experience vertical movements of up to 40cm a year and its capacity to bear weight drops dramatically. This can lead to landslides, to the subsidence of individual buildings, and to the appearance of cracks and deformities in long, linear structures such as roads and pipelines.

The conclusions drawn by lead author Jan Hjort, of the University of Oulu, in Finland, are stark. Of the 120,000 buildings, 40,000km of roads and 9,500km of pipelines currently built on permafrost, up to half are expected to be at high risk by 2060. By then, he estimates, the bill for maintenance could exceed $35bn dollars a year.

Russia is the country most threatened by such changes. Almost 65% of Russian soil is permafrost, and it is here that 60% of the Arctic’s human settlements and almost 90% of its population can be found (see maps). Russian sites are also more likely than those in other parts of the Arctic to contain heavy apartment buildings and large industrial facilities. North America’s permafrost, which makes up half of Canada’s territory and more than three-quarters of Alaska’s, tends to be more sparsely populated than Russia’s, with human impact dominated by roads, airstrips and oil pipelines. Nonetheless, degradation is still an issue. Authorities in the Northwest Territories, one of Canada’s largest and most northerly regions, calculate that permafrost-induced damage amounts, even today, to $41m a year, which is about $900 per resident.

Dr Hjort’s paper also looks at the Arctic conditions which prevail in mountainous regions at lower latitudes. Nearly half of the Tibetan plateau, for example, is covered by permafrost, and this area contains 200,000km of roads and 3,900km of railways. The cost of repairs here runs into the tens of millions of dollars a year. In the European Alps, by contrast, a combination of higher investment and more favourable conditions mean thaw damage is minimal.

Dr Hjort and his colleagues suggest three approaches to increasing resilience, some of which have already been implemented to various extents in different Arctic locations. First, enhance the extraction of heat from thawing soil near structures which need protecting. This can be done by adding porous stone layers to road beds to generate convection, which helps hot air to escape. Decreasing the angle of embankment slopes also helps, by increasing wind flow and reducing the accumulation of snow, which traps heat. Second, limit heat intake by the ground. This means insulating the embankments of roads by increasing their thickness, and also increasing the reflectivity of paved surfaces to minimise the amount of solar radiation absorbed. Third, the ground can be reinforced to create better foundations. One way to do so is to replace layers of permafrost with more stable materials. Another is to thaw the permafrost in a controlled manner, and then build on that consolidated layer.

None of this innovative construction will help, however, if there is a lackadaisical approach to maintaining what has been built. In an earlier study cited by the authors, which looked at the period from 1980 to 2000, most damage to structures in areas of Russia where permafrost abounds was found to have arisen as a result of poor maintenance. Climate change will make that worse. But if local authorities cannot even get the basics right, then large sections of the Russian Arctic may end up being abandoned altogether. 

Nippon Paper and Cosmo Oil to develop bioethanol production technology

Moscow. Jul 24, 2009. /Lesprom Network/. Nippon Paper Chemicals Co., Ltd. and Cosmo Oil Co., Ltd. have conducted a feasibility study on biomass ethanol production since April last year, which revealed several technological challenges regarding the second-generation biomass ethanol production using woody materials, as reported by Nippon Paper.
Aiming to resolve these issues, the two companies teamed up with to respond to a call for parties interested in undertaking the 2009 Leading-Edge Biomass Energy Technology Research and Development, one of the areas covered by the new energy technology research and development projects by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). On July 7, it was announced that the team had been selected to undertake the research.
Nippon Paper Chemicals and Cosmo Oil will conduct research for two years together with the University of Tokyo and Kyushu University, studying the efficient production of ethanol from woody biomass using the sulfite delignification process.
The estimated project cost is about 20 million yen per year (funded by subsidies).

Nippon Paper and Cosmo Oil to develop bioethanol production technology

Moscow. Jul 24, 2009. /Lesprom Network/. Nippon Paper Chemicals Co., Ltd. and Cosmo Oil Co., Ltd. have conducted a feasibility study on biomass ethanol production since April last year, which revealed several technological challenges regarding the second-generation biomass ethanol production using woody materials, as reported by Nippon Paper.
Aiming to resolve these issues, the two companies teamed up with to respond to a call for parties interested in undertaking the 2009 Leading-Edge Biomass Energy Technology Research and Development, one of the areas covered by the new energy technology research and development projects by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO). On July 7, it was announced that the team had been selected to undertake the research.
Nippon Paper Chemicals and Cosmo Oil will conduct research for two years together with the University of Tokyo and Kyushu University, studying the efficient production of ethanol from woody biomass using the sulfite delignification process.
The estimated project cost is about 20 million yen per year (funded by subsidies).