If we want to quickly combat climate change, we need to deal with “the other” greenhouse gas: methane. Methane leaks are heating up the planet and harming people who live where gas drilling takes place.
Reporter Elizabeth Shogren introduces us to a NASA scientist who’s devoting his career to hunting down big methane leaks. Riley Duren and his team have figured out how to spot methane pollution from airplane flyovers, and in an experiment, his data was used to make polluters plug their leaks. Scientists have answers to the methane problem. The question is whether governments will step up to fund a comprehensive methane monitoring system.
Next, Shogren zooms in on Arlington, Texas, a community that bet heavily on drilling for methane, the main ingredient in natural gas. There are wells all over Arlington, next to homes and shopping centers, even day cares and schools. Arlington’s children have unwittingly been part of an experiment to see what happens when gas wells and people mix.
We end the show with a story from Reveal’s Brett Simpson about a serious source of methane that is often overlooked. Cows and other livestock produce 14% of the world’s methane emissions, in many places belching more of the gas than oil and gas wells. We meet a scientist who’s figured out how to reduce methane emissions from cows by 80%.
Dig Deeper
Read: Life in the drill zone
Credits
Reporters: Elizabeth Shogren, Mohamed Al Elew, and Brett Simpson | Leader producer: Elizabeth Shogren | Editors: Taki Telonidis, Soo Oh and Esther Kaplan | Production manager: Amy Mostafa | Digital producer: Sarah Mirk | Episode art: Molly Mendoza | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda, with help from Steven Rascón and Claire Mullen | Executive producer: Kevin Sullivan | Guest host: Michael Montgomery
Special thanks: Malia Wollan from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Inasmuch Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Speaker 1: | Reveal is brought to you by Progressive. Have you tried the Name Your Price tool yet? It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance and they’ll show you coverage options that fit your budget. It’s easy to start a quote, and you’ll be able to find a rate that works for you. It’s just one of the many ways you can save with Progressive. Get your quote today at progressive.com and see why four out of five new auto customers recommend Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, price and coverage match limited by state law. |
| Michael Montgomery: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Michael Montgomery, one of the producers on the show. I’m sitting in for Al Letson, who’s working on a big project you’ll be hearing more about. We’re going to start this week’s show with something a little different, a science lesson, about the gas methane. |
| Michael Montgomery: | When you turn on your gas stove, you’re burning methane, the main ingredient in natural gas. It comes from hundreds of thousands of wells around the country but a lot of it, millions of tons of methane, never reaches your stove or furnace because it leaks into the air. That could be from a worn out valve, an aging pipeline, or storage tank. Some companies just vent methane into the air because it’s mixed in with the stuff they are really after, crude oil. Once methane’s released, the wind carries it whichever way it’s blowing, and eventually it spreads through the atmosphere. |
| Michael Montgom…: | Methane’s a greenhouse gas, that means it traps heat almost like a blanket causing the earth temperature to rise. Climate change. And there’s more and more of these gases piling on all the time. Up until now, most of the plans to curb greenhouse gases have centered on carbon dioxide but scientists say, if we really want to stop the earth from heating up, and fast, we need to deal with methane. That’s because methane traps way more heat over the short-term. |
| Michael Montgom…: | Let’s compare how much heat a pound of carbon dioxide traps in 20 years, to how much a pound of methane traps. Carbon dioxide, methane. Methane traps nearly 90 times more heat than CO2. But there is a silver lining. While CO2 stays in the air for hundreds of years, methane breaks up after only about 12 years. So experts say the quickest way to address climate change is to plug up methane emissions, and within a few years the atmosphere will start opening up. More heat will escape, and relatively soon, about a decade later, the earth will start to cool, and we should have fewer heat waves, wildfires, and catastrophic hurricanes. |
| Michael Montgom…: | Today, we are looking at methane and why we need to control it to protect both our planet and also the people who live in communities where drilling takes place. Reveal’s Elizabeth Shogren has been following one scientist who’s dedicating his career to finding big methane leaks. |
| Elizabeth Shogren: | Since he was a kid, Riley Duren was captivated by… |
| Speaker 4: | Space. The final frontier. |
| Riley Duren: | I grew up watching Star Trek. I was a classic sci-fi nerd. I was excited about space exploration. |
| Elizabeth Shogren: | And he never outgrew his excitement. Riley eventually became an engineer at NASA. He focused his work on looking for other planets that might be home to intelligent life. |
| Riley Duren: | I got this passion for exoplanets, the idea of finding planets like the earth around other stars. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Our planet on the other hand… |
| Riley Duren: | Earth was the place where you launched the spacecraft, it wasn’t part of the exploration. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Then as climate change became a more urgent problem, it struck Riley that rather than looking for other habitable planets, maybe he should use his skills to keep this one habitable. |
| Riley Duren: | I had this epiphany that maybe I should look down some more and pay more attention to earth science. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | That new passion led him to methane. Riley wanted to figure out how to measure big methane leaks and pinpoint their sources. Not an easy task when you think about how oil and gas fields, not to mention pipelines, are spread out over large areas. And methane, it’s invisible. So while the Trump administration was busy cutting back regulations on the oil and gas industry, Riley’s team was quietly getting more federal dollars from NASA. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | And over the past several years, the science of tracking methane emissions has taken off, and so have Riley and his team. They flew scores of flights over several states to see how much methane pollution they could identify. |
| Speaker 6: | Threshold down to 700. [inaudible] detections looks like [inaudible]. |
| Riley Duren: | One of our team members developed some really clever software that can show you methane in real time, so as you’re flying along you see this moving map of the ground underneath the airplane as seen by the imaging spectrometer. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | And when that instrument spots methane? |
| Riley Duren: | There’s software that’s showing red blobs, that is the best way I can describe it, on the map where there are sources of methane. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | The team flew back and forth patterns, almost like mowing a lawn over landfills, pipelines, dairies, and oil and gas fields, places known for emitting methane. |
| Riley Duren: | And it’s definitely exciting when you’re flying over oil and gas fields because these are huge areas. There may be thousands of potential leak sources. And you’ll fly along and you’ll see nothing and then all of a sudden you’ll get to a part of the oil field where it’s just plum, plum, plum, plum, plum. And sometimes you’ll see a really big one, you’ll hear somebody go, “Wow, look at that.” |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | They discovered that as much as half of the methane pollution was coming from just a small number of what Riley calls, super emitters, they are responsible for the big plums or gushes of gas. This means you could get huge reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by targeting a small number of polluters. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | The California Air Resources Board is the state’s clean air agency. Officials there were so impressed with Riley’s methane tracking, they wanted to use it to try to get companies to quickly clean up methane leaks. Several, including Chevron volunteered. |
| Speaker 7: | I think today we’ll do McKittrick. And [crosstalk]- |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | It’s November 2020, and Riley’s crew is heading to McKittrick, one of Chevron’s oil fields in California’s San Joaquin Valley, an area known for farming and energy production. Over 16 days they spot an enormous amount of methane. When the team spies a big plum, they send the geographic coordinates to the state. |
| Jorn Herner: | We would then turn around and give that to our industry partners and they would go out the next day and see what they could find. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Jorn Herner heads the research division of the California Air Resources Board. |
| Jorn Herner: | And it turns out if you provide it to the operator and they can go out and inspect, then they will find something that they can fix. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | In more than half of the cases, the companies stopped the leaks. That’s the kind of impact that makes the scientist in Jorn giddy. |
| Jorn Herner: | It seems insanely exciting. I mean, that’s just absolutely wonderful, right? I mean, as a researcher at the California Air Resources Board, you’re trying to put in place research that actually has a real impact out there in the real world so that was very, very satisfying. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Jorn has seen how powerful this data can be. |
| Jorn Herner: | Well, I have every confidence that if we end up having this data on a regular basis, California will do what is needed to have the data acted on in the State of California. But I don’t know what’s going to happen in the rest of the world, in other countries, in other States, and you need to get them on board as well. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | That means setting new rules for an influential industry that usually fights regulation at every turn. President Obama set modest requirements for companies to start hunting down methane leaks at new wells, but under the Trump administration… |
| Trump: | We launched the most dramatic regulatory relief campaign in American history by far. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Those rules and others were gutted after heavy lobbying by energy companies. Congress is expected to restore Obama’s rules, but they apply only to new wells, they don’t affect hundreds of thousands of existing wells, which leak too. I wanted to talk to energy companies about methane monitoring, but even Chevron, which took part in California’s methane trial, wouldn’t agree to an interview. Neither would Exxon or other big companies. Only one company, Jonah Energy, was willing to talk. In fact, VP Paul Ulrich was eager. |
| Paul Ulrich: | We produce enough energy to power about 3.3 million homes on a daily basis, or cook 1.4 billion eggs. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Jonah Energy drills in rural Wyoming, where for years the pollution levels violated federal air quality standards, so the state stepped in and required Jonah to use infrared cameras to find leaks four times a year. Paul’s company decided to check monthly. This helped Jonah cut methane emissions and get certified as a low methane gas field. A private company checks to make sure that Jonah is minimizing what’s released into the air. |
| Paul Ulrich: | We’re reading the tea leaves. Consumers are continuing to demand cleaner energy resources. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | And so are importers of US natural gas. Last fall, a French company canceled a $7 billion deal to buy liquified natural gas from Texas reportedly because the field it would come from leaks too much methane. Now the US company that lost the deal says it will source its natural gas from fields certified as low methane. Paul says energy companies should welcome monitoring. |
| Paul Ulrich: | So whether it’s drone based or airplane flyovers, sign us up. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Tracking methane leaks is turning into a business with companies cropping up with new tools to spot the gas. |
| Rachel Ward: | Oh, I can see the drone flying right through the plum right now. It’s awesome. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Rachel Ward is an atmospheric scientist who works for a company called Scientific Aviation. With joystick controls, she flies a drone over an oil well site in the middle of a vast sandy landscape of drill sites and dirt roads. She’s in the Permian Basin, a gigantic oil and gas field that straddles Texas and New Mexico. |
| Rachel Ward: | The drones are really good for getting really up close and personal to individual methane-emitting sources. Today we’re looking at these flaring stacks but there’s all sorts of other things that might emit methane. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Oil companies use flares to burn off methane that they don’t want to put into a pipeline, but if flares aren’t working well, a lot of the methane goes straight into the atmosphere. Rachel’s partner navigates the drone towards a 20-foot flame, blazing on top of a skinny metal stack. It’s several storeys tall. |
| Rachel Ward: | Oh wow. Oh, that flare just kicked out. Can you hear that? Wow. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | At oil and gas fields scattered across the globe, other scientists working independently are looking for methane from tall towers, helicopters, and even from space. |
| Speaker 12: | All systems are go for the launch of the European Space Agency’s latest satellite Sentinel-5P. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | In October 2017, the European Space Agency launched a satellite. Instruments on board measured methane pollution and found the Permian Basin, where Rachel was piloting her drone, was the leakiest oil and gas field they’d ever seen in the US. Nearly 4% of the gas was escaping into the air. Daniel Zavala was on the team of scientists that published the research. |
| Daniel Zavala: | We have enough data to say that the premium gas is significantly dirty. That we know. Using that gas would be contributing in a major way to speeding up global warming. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Daniel’s a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group that’s taken the lead on methane. One study he worked on shows how clean the industry can be. Scientists flew over clusters of gas equipment in the Netherlands and found very little methane leaking. |
| Daniel Zavala: | And it makes you wonder, if that’s possible, why don’t we see this replicated in all these other places? |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | The difference, Daniel said, is that the Netherlands has strict methane rules, so to drill there, companies like Shell have to use cleaner technology. |
| Daniel Zavala: | But the most important thing is it became very clear that no one needs to reinvent the wheel here. The technology is available and it’s already being used. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | And yet, methane concentrations in the atmosphere grew faster last year than at any other time since scientists started measuring. |
| Daniel Zavala: | I think it’s a little bit frustrating and scary that we have this extremely limited time frame to do something about it and all we see is that action is not happening as fast as it should be. And every new data point we collect, it sort of points that we should be acting even faster. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Daniel’s group is building a new satellite that will be able to trace methane plums more accurately. And so is NASA engineer, Riley Duren, who figured out how to pinpoint methane polluters from airplanes. This spring he started a nonprofit called Carbon Mapper, funded by big philanthropies. His partners include NASA, California, and a private satellite firm. Carbon Mapper plans to launch two satellites in 2023 and a whole fleet two years later. They’ll find methane sources Riley would never be able to fly over in a plane. |
| Riley Duren: | And there are parts of the world where it’s difficult to get to because of the logistics and/or, quite honestly you don’t have the airspace permission to fly there. So satellites have the benefit of being able to see the whole planet. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Not to mention, satellites can observe the planet every day, which is important because methane plums, even big ones, can come and go relatively quickly. But the way Riley sees it, scattered trials and research projects can only take you so far. |
| Riley Duren: | You have a patchwork quilt of people making measurements onsite using low altitude drones, using aircraft overflights, testing the satellites that exist. The challenge is or the uncertainty is, is those are mostly uncoordinated. It’s not like there’s one government or one industry that’s saying, “Hey, we’re going to invest in all this. We’re going to make it happen.” |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | For Riley, making it happen means creating a comprehensive global methane monitoring system. The science is ready but leaders around the world have to commit to it and come up with the money, which he estimates will run into the billions of dollars. |
| Riley Duren: | My opinion is that the governments haven’t caught up. The government agencies are still getting their minds around the idea that this is a priority. To be honest, I think it’s lack of ambition. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | But Riley’s trying to change that too. |
| Speaker 14: | I now recognize Mr. Riley Duren for your testimony. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | In May, Riley got to make his case at a congressional hearing. He showed a film from one of his flyovers. |
| Riley Duren: | If you can cue the movie, please. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | It was a lot like what he described earlier in the story. As a NASA aircraft flies over oil and gas wells, you see dozens of multi-colored plums, methane leaks, that normally can’t be seen with the human eye. |
| Riley Duren: | These super emitters are broadly distributed across the landscape, almost like invisible wildfires. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | He asks Congress for help and leaves them with a warning. |
| Speaker 14: | Mr. Duren. |
| Riley Duren: | I just wanted to chime in quickly. What I would say is, there is still time and an urgent need to act quickly. The window is closing. It is an all hands on deck moment, for not just the federal government, but all government branches, private sector and civil society. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | President Biden says addressing methane is urgent. I tried to get White House and EPA officials to talk about Riley’s idea for an international methane monitoring system but they wouldn’t. The science for tracking methane leaks has come so far so fast. Scientists like Riley Duren are offering world leaders a rare opportunity to do something that could help slow down climate change in a decade. The question is, will the leaders take them up on it? |
| Michael Montgom…: | The methane leaks that are heating up the atmosphere are also hitting much closer to home. |
| Wanda Vincent: | It makes me wonder, down the road, will some of our babies become sick or ill because of this. |
| Michael Montgom…: | Coming up next, when natural gas drilling is happening in your backyard. This is Reveal. |
| Speaker 1: | Support for Reveal comes from Wondery’s In God We Lust. A story of a sex scandal and a very public fall from grace. A hotel pool attendant in Miami meets a couple. What begins as an unconventional proposition will soon throw them all into the international spotlight, because the couple is none other than Jerry Falwell Jr., and his wife, Becky, two of the most powerful figures in evangelical America. Listen to In God We Lust on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or you can listen ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Wondery. Feel The Story. |
| Speaker 1: | We get support from FSAstore.com. If you have an FSA account, chances are you are not taking full advantage of it. So many everyday purchases are covered by your FSA, from prescription glasses to sun care, acne treatments, tampons and pads, and even new items like masks, hand sanitizing wipes, and so much more. Trusted by millions of Americans, FSAstore.com is the largest site with thousands of exclusively FSA eligible products guaranteed. Head to FSAstore.com and use the code Reveal to get a one-time discount of $15 off your order of $150 or more. That’s FSAstore.com, code, Reveal. |
| Ike Sriskandara…: | Hello. I’m Ike Sriskandarajah, a senior radio reporter and producer here at Reveal. We are a nonprofit newsroom, and we rely on support from listeners like you. To become a member, text the word, reveal, to 474747. Standard data rates apply and you can text, stop, any time. Again, text, reveal to 474747. And thank you for supporting the show. |
| Michael Montgom…: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Michael Montgomery sitting in for Al Letson. For most of us, natural gas drilling happens in some barren far away place, but millions of people across the country live with it every day. Arlington, Texas is one of those places. |
| Speaker 17: | I’d now like to call a meeting of the Arlington city council to order. |
| Michael Montgom…: | Last summer, the city council held a virtual meeting to discuss a French company’s plans to drill new wells. People from the community logged on. |
| Wanda Vincent: | Hi, my name is Wanda Vincent. I am the owner and the director of the Mother’s Heart Learning Center, and our clients are about 80% African American and about 20% Latino. |
| Michael Montgom…: | The company, Total, is one of the biggest natural gas producers in the world, and Wanda doesn’t like what they are proposing. |
| Wanda Vincent: | To my understanding, they want to drill or fracture three new gas wells in our backyard. It’s literally in the back of our playground. |
| Michael Montgom…: | Arlington and nearby communities have approved thousands of wells, and there are already wells near Wanda’s daycare. When she looks past the playground, she sees several large storage tanks and a big pipe sticking out of the ground. |
| Wanda Vincent: | This company should have never been approved to be in the backyard of a children’s learning center. |
| Michael Montgom…: | The past two decades have been a boom time for natural gas in the US, that’s due and large part to fracking. Also a big push from the federal government, which saw fracking as key to America’s energy independence, but it’s come at a cost. We heard in the last story just how dangerous methane is for our planet. Methane and the other gases that come out of wells also pose dangers to people’s health. Arlington has seen that up close. Here again is Reveal’s Elizabeth Shogren. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Arlington sits on top of one of the country’s biggest natural gas fields, the Barnett Shale. It’s the birthplace of fracking. The city is part of the Dallas Metro area. The Cowboys and Rangers play in Arlington. It’s also home to about 400,000 people and hundreds of natural gas wells. They are everywhere. Close to houses, shopping malls, schools, and daycares. Arlington’s children have unwittingly become part of an experiment. What happens when gas wells and people intermix? It’s something Wanda Vincent worried about at that council meeting. |
| Wanda Vincent: | It makes me wonder, down the road, will some of our babies become sick or ill because of this. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | What Wanda’s referring to are gases, some toxic, that can leak from the wells when they are first drilled and for as many years as the wells produce gas. There’s the methane itself that contributes to smog which harms people’s health, and cancer-causing fumes like benzene and formaldehyde. |
| Wanda Vincent: | And my question would be, can this company guarantee me 100% that you’re not putting any of us in harms way, now or in the future? |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Local state and federal officials haven’t studied whether Arlington’s wells cause health problems. Using state data, we found that more than half of Arlington’s daycares are within half a mile of a well, and a lot of Arlington’s kids have health problems. Childhood asthma rates in this part of Texas are way above the state and national averages. The rate of birth defects is the highest of any large county in Texas. |
| Speaker 17: | Thank you, Mr. Baskin. And as a reminder to the public [crosstalk]- |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Back at the council meeting, Total’s representative, Kevin Strausser, defends his company. |
| Kevin Strausser: | There’s no one better in the business. And we have been at this site for over 10 years now. I appreciate the residents around the site and particularly the school that’s just the north of us. I feel like we’ve cohabitated there for the last 10 years without any issue. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Council member Marvin Sutton is not convinced Total is doing all it can to keep the air clean. |
| Marvin Sutton: | Mr. Strausser, my question is that you said you would have noise monitors, would you have air monitors as well on that side? |
| Kevin Strausser: | No, we don’t do the air monitoring. We don’t do that directly from our company. We rely on the TCEQ for that. |
| Marvin Sutton: | Okay. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | TCEQ is the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. I checked, and they told me they don’t monitor air pollution from individual drilling sites. Ranjana Bhandari also speaks at the meeting. She leads a small group of volunteer activists called Liveable Arlington. When she learned about Total’s plan for drilling, she went door to door in the neighborhood, alerting Wanda and others. |
| Ranjana Bhandar…: | And we discovered that nobody was aware of this. We did the job that Total should have done. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | And tonight she urges city leaders to reject the permit. |
| Ranjana Bhandar…: | Otherwise as fracking continues, we are going to see a lot more illness and disease, and we know who it affects. In that part of town, it affects our African American brothers and sisters. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | The science backs her up on this. According to the American Lung Association, black children and children from low-income families are more likely to suffer from diseases such as asthma. They are also less likely to have health insurance. After about an hour and a half, the council is ready to decide on Total’s wells. |
| Mayor Williams: | I believe we’ll need to do a roll call vote on this one. |
| Speaker 17: | Mayor Williams. |
| Mayor Williams: | No. |
| Speaker 17: | Council member Sutton. |
| Marvin Sutton: | No. |
| Speaker 17: | Council member [crosstalk]- |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | The drilling is rejected six to three. It’s a stunning reversal for a city council that’s okayed almost every drilling request for 15 years. Here’s council member Marvin Sutton. |
| Marvin Sutton: | It felt great. And so I was proud that I was able to advocate, but not only advocate, but to mitigate risk to our citizens in the underserved community. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | After years of defeat, Ranjana wanted to see the victory as a change of heart on drilling, but she worried the no vote was a temporary reaction to what was going on last summer. COVID-19 was disproportionately hitting people of color and the nation was facing a reckoning on civil rights after George Floyd’s killing. |
| Ranjana Bhandar…: | The city council was very concerned with issues of racial equity. They had just passed a resolution vowing to work for racial equity in our city. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Even so, she half expected Total would fight back. |
| Ranjana Bhandar…: | I’m on tenterhooks waiting to find out what mischief they are planning. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Ranjana had good reason to be dubious. For years, natural gas drilling has been nearly unstoppable. Starting in the early 2000s, fracking and natural gas were promoted as job creators and they were also going to make us less dependent on energy from overseas. Drilling was a rallying cry for Republicans. |
| Speaker 22: | The chant is, “Drill, baby drill.” |
| Crowd: | Drill, baby drill. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | And President Obama backed it too. |
| Obama: | We, it turns out, are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. We’ve got a lot of it. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Natural gas was also going to help tackle climate change. |
| Obama: | And by the way, natural gas burns cleaner than oil does so it’s also potentially good for our environment as we make this shift. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Gas companies pushed that message in ad campaigns. |
| Speaker 25: | We are ExxonMobil, and the cleaner burning natural gas we produce [crosstalk]- |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | But producing this fuel pollutes the air and water so companies lobbied heavily on Capitol Hill and convinced Congress to give them exemptions from environmental laws. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Like the country as a whole, Arlington made a big bet on natural gas. So last summer when the Arlington city council rejected drilling near Mother’s Heart Daycare, it seemed like the industry’s special status was in jeopardy. But just weeks later, the city gave Total permission to drill and frack seven wells close to two other daycares in council member Sutton’s district. This time the approvals came without any public meeting or even a vote by the city council. |
| Marvin Sutton: | This particular site is the Rocking Horse site. Right next to it is a daycare called Childcare Network and then you have Bizzy Kid right across the street, which really concerns me because it’s one of the most diverse districts in our city and even in our county. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Sutton knows his constituents, busy working families who don’t have time to fight political battles. Like Alexis Richardson, who was picking up three kids from Bizzy Kids. |
| Alexis Richards…: | It doesn’t make me feel good if they are going to be around something that’s harmful like so close. Now, I didn’t know it was across the street. If I knew more about it it’ll probably be bothering me, but I didn’t know anything about it at all. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Why would the city reject drilling near one daycare and then turn around and let the same company drill seven wells near two other daycares? |
| Richard Gertson: | I understand those who may say, well, they are exactly the same, aren’t they? It’s drilling and you’ve got daycares and all these other users, but it’s a different situation as far as we are concerned. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Richard Gertson is Arlington’s assistant director of planning and development. His office okayed the drilling at Rocking Horse, not the city council. The reason, the city council set it up that way. Eight years ago the council approved what’s called a drill zone there. |
| Richard Gertson: | Once the council establishes that drill zone, as they did in 2013, then any future permit applications, if they are inside that drill zone, they may be approved administratively because the council has already determined that anything within that drilling zone is allowable. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Richard says may but in practice his office’s default is to approve permits in drill zones. So does that mean forever no matter how many and for how long? |
| Richard Gertson: | Currently under our ordinance, yes. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | The only reason the Arlington City Council got a chance to vote on and reject the wells at that first daycare was that it wasn’t in a drill zone. There’s something else that really makes it hard for Richard to say no to gas companies. |
| Richard Gertson: | The fact of the matter is, here in Texas, as far as the cities, our authority is very much restricted, very much limited. We cannot here in Texas ban a certain type of drilling. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Richard is referring to a 2015 state law, a ban on drilling bands, that passed after another city, Denton, tried to outlaw fracking. Even most Democrats voted for the law. It prevents local governments from setting any restrictions that block gas companies from drilling or make it too expensive. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Three months after the city approved the wells at the Rocking Horse site, a drill rig was up and running. Companies are required to use electric powered rigs, they are quieter and don’t pollute the air. That’s what Total was supposed to do anyhow. But Ranjana says that’s not what happened. |
| Ranjana Bhandar…: | So there was some machinery operating. There was this really tall rig and big plums of black smoke rising up. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Ranjana sent a video of the rig to a city inspector, who confirmed Total was using a diesel rig. She also shared the video with Marvin Sutton, a rare ally on the council. He demanded an explanation from Total. |
| Marvin Sutton: | They just said they couldn’t find electric drill at the time and they thought it would be okay, which is willful violation of our ordinance. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | The city ordered the company to switch to an electric rig, which for Ranjana wasn’t good enough. |
| Ranjana Bhandar…: | The bigger question is, should drilling really happen right next door to two preschools? And science tells us, public health research tells us absolutely not. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | More kids go to school near wells in Arlington than just about anywhere else in the US. Reveal found that in Arlington more than 30,000 children go to school within half a mile of a well. 85% of these children are kids of color and most come from low-income families. Total is based in France, where fracking is outlawed, and it offends Ranjana that the company is doing in her backyard what it can’t do in its own. She compares what’s happening in Arlington to what multinational companies have done in poor countries. |
| Ranjana Bhandar…: | We have this ingrained sense that this couldn’t happen in America so we are willfully looking at it and choosing not to recognize it for what it is. This is ecosite, it’s environmental harm. I think there are human rights violations. Somebody asked me the other day, why do I care? Don’t we all consume oil? I’m standing in front of two preschools. Those little children have no voice in this. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | And in the case of one daycare, they are just 359 feet away. Other parts of the country are starting to agree with Ranjana, that wells and people should not be so close. In Colorado, the state commissioned a health assessment and decided that new wells should be at least 2000 feet from buildings. We wanted to talk with Total about it’s drilling near schools and daycares in Arlington but the company turned down requests for an interview. We did get to talk with Stephen Lindsey, VP of another company with gas wells in Arlington called GHA Barnett. It’s a Chinese company. I asked him whether wells are too close to daycares in Arlington. I’d be curious what you would think is half a mile too close. Is a quarter mile too close? Is 600 feet too close? |
| Stephen Lindsey: | I would not have an issue if my daughter or my son was at a daycare or school that was, I’m going to say, within what the current ordinance standards are of a protected use of 600 feet. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | You said 600 feet isn’t too close. Is 359 feet, and the playground even closer? Is that too close? |
| Stephen Lindsey: | Yeah. I mean, I’m not saying, is it too close, but yeah, I think as you get within 600 feet, the further away it is, absolutely the better. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Stephen used to be on the city council of a town next to Arlington, and he says gas brings benefits. In Arlington, royalties from drilling fund a hundred million dollar foundation to support city projects. But a study by the University of North Texas found that people closest to wells see very little benefit from drilling. Still, Stephen says companies expect cities to stand by their agreements. |
| Stephen Lindsey: | In so far that you gave someone entitlement 10 years ago to do something and now you change that, that puts that investment at risk. Unfortunately, we live in a litigious society and people are quick to say, “Okay, well we don’t like it so we are potentially going to threaten legal action.” |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | It makes it hard for a city council to exercise its decision-making, and these wells keep producing for a long time. |
| Stephen Lindsey: | I mean, you’re right. It’s a great observation, but it’s the law. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | That’s exactly what council member Sutton got tangled up in this year when he tried to increase the distance between daycares and drilling. He wanted to require 600 feet from a daycare’s property line instead of its building but Total intervened. It warned that Sutton’s proposal would violate state laws. The council scaled back Sutton’s proposal. The end result is that Total could drill more wells near other daycares. But Sutton wasn’t done pushing. He ran for mayor and campaigned on the drilling issue. |
| Marvin Sutton: | How are you all doing today? I’m Marvin and I would love to have your support. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | On a windy April day, Sutton is decked out in campaign swag. Even his mask is emblazoned with the words, “Sutton for mayor.” |
| Marvin Sutton: | So hopefully you’ll consider me. Can I count on your vote? |
| Speaker 29: | Yes. |
| Marvin Sutton: | Thank you so much. [inaudible]. |
| Speaker 29: | Thank you. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | But there’s something on the horizon that could make it even harder to fight off drilling. Companies in Texas are betting big on the new frontier in natural gas. Exporting it. |
| Speaker 30: | With Cheniere’s Corpus Christi Liquefaction plant up and running, Texas and the coastal bend are ready to enter the worldwide natural gas market. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | Companies like Exxon, Shell, and Total are investing tens of billions of dollars in liquified natural gas or LNG, and they plan to ship it across the globe. It’s going to be really hard to put this genie back in the bottle. And it’s not clear if President Biden even wants to. In the same speech where he was announcing executive orders on climate change, he also said… |
| President Biden: | Can I be clear? And I know this always comes up, we are not going to ban fracking. |
| Elizabeth Shogr…: | So which is it going to be? Many scientists and environmentalists warn that fracking and LNG aren’t compatible with protecting communities and fighting climate change. So far the president hasn’t spelled out how he plans to have it all. |
| Michael Montgom…: | That story from Reveal’s Elizabeth Shogren. A few weeks ago, Marvin Sutton lost his bid for mayor, and he is no longer on the city council, but in Washington, the EPA announced its working on new regulations for oil and gas. They would include older wells that haven’t been controlled. The EPA is seeking public input and Ranjana Bhandari is scheduled to speak during an agency listening session. |
| Michael Montgom…: | As important as it is to plug leaks from oil and gas drilling, that won’t make the methane problem go away. That’s because there’s another serious source that scientists need to deal with. |
| Rob Kinley: | There’s so much methane, so they burp and they burp and they burp. |
| Michael Montgom…: | That story next on Reveal. If you like what we do and you want to help, well, it’s pretty simple. Just write us a review on Apple Podcast. It’s easy and only takes a few seconds. Just open the Apple Podcast app on your phone, search for Reveal, then scroll down to where you see, “Write a review,” and there, tell them how much you love the host. Your review makes it easier for listeners to find us, and well, it really does make a difference. And if you do it, you will get a personal thank you from me like right now. Like thank… Not him. You. Yes, you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. |
| Michael Montgom…: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Michael Montgomery sitting in for Al Letson. The methane that’s escaping into the atmosphere isn’t just coming from oil and gas wells, sometimes it’s from landfills, and sometimes, yup, from livestock. Cows, sheep, and buffalo have a very specific digestive process and methane is one unfortunate by-product. Livestock alone account for more than 14% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. In California, where the beef and dairy industries are big, animals release more methane than energy companies. And just like with oil and gas, there is a whole group of scientists searching for ways to cut the amount of methane that escapes. Reporter Brett Simpson recently spent an afternoon with one of these scientists. |
| Brett Simpson: | In Davis, California, if you drive past miles of green fields and take a right turn off of Dairy Road, you’ll land at a lab, that doesn’t look anything like a lab. Low red barns, tractors moving piles of green alfalfa, scientists slogging through mud in jeans and rubber boots, and rows and rows of cows. |
| Mallory Honan: | That’s Bridget, that’s Gertrude. Gertrude’s one of my favorite. She’s one of our older one. |
| Brett Simpson: | That’s grad student, Mallory Honan. She works for Dr. Ermias Kebreab. He’s devoted 20 years to solving the methane problem, but as far as his kids are concerned… |
| Ermias Kebreab: | My kids would say that I study cow poop, so I guess it’s out. It’s funny for them. |
| Brett Simpson: | But contrary to what we might have heard, methane isn’t in the cow poop or in cow farts. Almost all the methane cows produce, 97% comes out the front end, in burps. And for years, Ermias has tried to take the methane out of those burps by changing what cows eat. He and his grad students have tried feeding them everything. Lemon grass, garlic, citrus, coffee. |
| Mallory Honan: | It’s kind of normal to me that we feed these weird things to cows and see what happens. |
| Brett Simpson: | What happens is, the food works its way through the cows, they start belching, and the team measures the methane using… |
| Mallory Honan: | A burp analyzer. |
| Brett Simpson: | A burp analyzer. Okay. |
| Mallory Honan: | That’s what I call it. |
| Brett Simpson: | That burp analyzer, more officially called a GreenFeed, is a metal box the size of a mini fridge. You pour in feed, and the cow sticks its head in to eat. Another grad student, Breanna Roque, shows me how it works. |
| Breanna Roque: | As the cow puts her head into the machine, it drops down alfalfa pellets, which the cows really enjoy. This machine is able to capture the gas that they are eructating and respirating. |
| Brett Simpson: | Eructating is a fancy word for burping. That is the sound of a dairy cow licking a mic, and the closest I could get to recording a cow burp. Turns out they aren’t that loud, but they have a big impact. The average cow burps 220 pounds of methane a year. In California alone, that’s the same amount of greenhouse gas created by two and a half million cars. |
| Brett Simpson: | Ermias had been running tests with the GreenFeed for years with little success, then he heard about a scientist in Nova Scotia, Canada named Rob Kinley. He tells me he was also obsessed with methane in cows. |
| Rob Kinley: | There’s so much methane, so they burp, and they burp, and they burp. And they can’t stop, if they do, they’ll blow and it can kill them. |
| Brett Simpson: | Rob didn’t work directly with livestock. He was doing experiments in test tubes and petri dishes to try to change the chemistry of a cow’s stomach so it would create less methane. A few years ago he got to know a local dairy farmer who’d been grazing some of his cows near the ocean, and they were eating seaweed. |
| Rob Kinley: | And he was seeing a little bit better milk production from them. He said those cattle were better behaved, easier to handle, and they had rip-roaring heats. |
| Brett Simpson: | In other words, seaweed was putting cows in the mood to mate, but Rob wondered, could it help reduce methane too? So back in his lab, he ran a test. |
| Rob Kinley: | When I first saw it I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I thought something had gone wrong. I went about checking instruments and checking gas files and checking samples and redoing it. |
| Brett Simpson: | Each time, the same result. When he added seaweed to the Petri dish, methane levels went down by more than 90%. But the question remained, would it work in a real cow? Back in California, when Ermias heard about Rob’s findings, he decided to find out, but he was skeptical. |
| Ermias Kebreab: | We didn’t know if this works in real animals because there are a number of additives that work okay in the lab but doesn’t work in [inaudible]. Curry, for example. If you put curry in a lab you can see there’s a reduction in methane but if you give them to animals they can adapt to it very quickly. |
| Brett Simpson: | Still, he ran the test using seaweed from the Coast of Australia. Breanna and Mallory show me what looks like dry stringy purple herbs. |
| Mallory Honan: | And as you can tell, it gets pretty powdery as you grind it. So as we are about mixing, it was just like [crosstalk]- |
| Breanna Roque: | [crosstalk]- |
| Mallory Honan: | We were purple at the end of it. |
| Breanna Roque: | And you just taste like salt. You just smell like the ocean. |
| Brett Simpson: | Finally, after weeks of feeding this to cows, they ran the data. |
| Mallory Honan: | We saw about a 67% reduction in methane, which is phenomenal. I mean, [inaudible]. |
| Brett Simpson: | The team was ecstatic. And after perfecting the formula, they’ve seen methane emissions go down by more than 80%. So an average cow could go from emitting 220 pounds of meth in a year to just 44. |
| Brett Simpson: | It’s one thing to get wild seaweed from Australia to a dozen cows in a lab, but there are 95 million cows in the US, about a billion in the world. That’s a huge production and distribution challenge, and it’s sparked an industry of seaweed entrepreneurs, including Joan Salwen. |
| Joan Salwen: | I’m standing here in the seedling room, where we’ve got shelves and shelves of vessels. Each container holding about six and a half gallons of water and seaweed. All the seaweed I’m looking at here is a beautiful cherry red, and it’s all kind of bouncing around, almost dancing in the bubbling seawater. |
| Brett Simpson: | Joan was so excited about this seaweed research that she started her own company, Blue Ocean Barns, and relocated from California to Hawaii to oversee their seaweed farm. She says everyone is asking her, what do seaweed-fed milk and beef taste like? |
| Joan Salwen: | And the answer is, the milk tastes like milk and the meat tastes like meat. |
| Brett Simpson: | Joan says, if that all seems too good to be true, maybe that’s okay for once. |
| Joan Salwen: | We really need to make major changes to our fossil fuel infrastructure, to our transportation choices, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if beef and dairy were not one of those things where we had to dictate that for climate reasons, we had to take something out the menu? |
| Brett Simpson: | The future of the supplement is in the hands of the FDA, which is currently running safety tests. But Joan isn’t too worried. People have been eating this particular variety of seaweed for thousands of years so she’s optimistic they’ll get approval to start selling it to farmers and ranchers soon. But will they buy it? |
| Tony Toso: | [inaudible] |
| Brett Simpson: | That’s Tony Toso, president of the California Cattlemen’s Association. He said he already feeds his cows tons of supplements so he is not too worried about adding seaweed to the mix, especially if it helps California reach its goal of cutting livestock methane emissions by 40% in the next decade. So far, California is the only state to regulate animal methane. Tony’s open to the change as long as the additive meets certain conditions. |
| Tony Toso: | Guys are going to look at it, is it economically feasible? Does it accomplish the goals that we’re after? |
| Brett Simpson: | The state and federal government already subsidized animal feed for both the meat and dairy industries, so Tony hopes they’ll help with this too. The farmers and ranchers are on board and production’s underway. So does that mean a guilt-free burgers in our future? Not exactly. Methane isn’t the only greenhouse gas emission from the meat and dairy industries. There’s carbon dioxide from producing and transporting the feed plus concerns about overgrazing and water. It takes more than 600 gallons of water to make one hamburger, and critics say it’s just not practical to get seaweed into the bellies of all the world’s cows. |
| Brett Simpson: | Today there are plenty who think that society needs to make a serious shift away from eating meat, like the World Resources Institute, the UN Environment Programme, and Bill Gates. |
| Bill Gates: | Cows alone account for about 6% of global emissions. You have all the categories, the one that is gone better, is this work to make what’s called artificial meat? |
| Brett Simpson: | The meatless movement is becoming mainstream, even Burger King is in on the action. |
| Speaker 43: | The impossible Whopper is now available nationwide. You too can go to any [crosstalk]- |
| Brett Simpson: | Ermias Kebreab agrees that it can be helpful to cut back on meat as long as you have other choices for getting enough protein, but he worries that some activists behind the meat-free message are missing something. |
| Ermias Kebreab: | When people say how we shouldn’t be eating animals for food, they are not considering the whole of the world. I mean, most people in the world do not have access to nutritious food. |
| Brett Simpson: | In places where food is scarce, animal products are still the most efficient sources of protein, so Ermias says, we can’t take meat off the table. |
| Ermias Kebreab: | That’s what really bothers me. What about the voices? The majority of the world? All this noise is coming from North America and Europe. |
| Brett Simpson: | This is personal for Ermias. He grew up in East Africa, where malnutrition is a big problem. He believes it’s possible to solve the climate crisis without taking away options for getting a central protein. |
| Ermias Kebreab: | What we’re doing here is to get people that food that they need in a way that does not harm the environment. |
| Brett Simpson: | And that means thinking beyond seaweed for reducing methane, because it’s still too complicated and costly to transport it to farmers in arid regions like East Africa. So Ermias and his grad students are back to work, testing a new substance they are calling rumen proof. Ermias hopes it will work in places where seaweed’s not an option. What exactly is in rumen proof? Until the results come in, Ermias says that’s still top secret. |
| Michael Montgom…: | A recent United Nations report says slashing methane is the strongest tool we have for combating the climate crisis. It’s an urgent call for quick deep cuts in methane pollution, and it comes just as governments from across the globe are preparing for the next big summit on climate change this fall. |
| Michael Montgom…: | Our lead producer for this week’s show was Elizabeth Shogren. Taki Telonidis edited the show. Thanks to Mohamed Al Elew for his data reporting on our first two stories, and to editor Soo Oh, and Esther Kaplan, and to Malia Wollan from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production manager is Amy Mostafa. Score and sound design by Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda. They had help this week from Claire Mullen and Steven Rascon. Our digital producer is Sarah Mirk. Our interim CEO is Annie Chabel. Sumi Aggarwal is our interim editor in chief, and our executive producer is Kevin Sullivan. |
| Michael Montgom…: | Our theme music is by Camerado-Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Inasmuch Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Michael Montgomery in for Al Letson, and as he likes to say, there is always more to the story. |
| Speaker 42: | From PRX. |