Reducing Methane Emissions

Joel Houle

Normally, when I put together an introduction for one of these episodes, it tends to write itself. But for some reason, it looks like I’ve hit a wall for this episode.

Today, we’re talking about methane. Methane is a really potent greenhouse gas. It’s a significant contributor to global warming. It’s a very serious subject matter. But for some reason, as I’m sitting at the computer trying to figure out how to start this episode, all that comes to mind is … cows and their digestive problems.

It could be that working from home in isolation for so long is finally getting to me: maybe, no matter how old you are or how professional you try to be, cow farts never stop being funny. So I’m just going to throw caution to the wind and own up to it. Because this is where I’m at in year two of a global pandemic. Maybe trying to tackle a serious problem with a little bit of humour might be good for the soul.

So, with that said, on this episode, we’re talking about methane! What it is, how we use it and how we can reduce the amount we release in the atmosphere. And also maybe cows .…

Joel Houle

Welcome to a new episode of Simply Science — the podcast that talks about the amazing scientific work that our experts at Natural Resources Canada are doing. My name is Joel Houle. And joining me is my cohost Barb Ustina. Barb, how are you?

Barb Ustina

I’m doing really well today, Joel. I hope you’re doing well. I love your setup to today’s podcast.

Joel Houle

Yeah, well, you know what? I just I had writer’s block, and I just leaned into it. You know what? Sometimes that’s all you can do, right?

Barb Ustina

Yeah, you have to go with what’s top of mind for you. Right; and that was it. But before we get going, do you mind if I ask you a quick question?

Joel Houle

Sure, go ahead.

Barb Ustina

Did you really put a lot of research into cows and farts and burps for this episode? Did you enlist the help of your kids to make it part of their pandemic curriculum?

Joel Houle

I did bring up the subject with my kids. So, basically, their way of doing research is to look up on Minecraft what cows do. But no, I did actually ask a few people, including our spokesperson today about this, because I was trying to see is there maybe an angle I can take? And what I found out — actually, there’s two things I found out. It’s really interesting. The first one is, it’s not just cows that emit methane — it’s all animals that are ruminant animals. So animals with four stomachs. That includes deer, moose, elk, muskox, sheep, goats and cows. So it’s not just them. I found that very interesting.

Barb Ustina

Yeah!

Joel Houle

But actually the second thing is even more interesting. It turns out it’s not their farts, it’s their burps. But you know what, to me that’s equally funny. Yeah. So you know what, it was a fun thing to research on a very serious topic.

Barb Ustina

Definitely. And your kids must have loved learning about it as well. And you know what? That is a lot of burping, a lot of volume of burping to put that much methane into the atmosphere, right? And I was so sure that farts were the source of methane. One hundred percent sure that it was farts. So I’ve learned something already, and I’m thinking that beef and dairy farmers the world over would probably be pleased to hear you point out that deer, moose and other ruminant animals also contribute to methane emissions. Because as far as farmers are probably concerned, these other creatures have been hanging out in their fields, eating crops with immunity and then hanging out on our highways at night, burping methane and creating road hazards.

But it’s serious. And in all seriousness, this is a learning moment. And it’s not often we have a chance to do some real myth busting on Simply Science. So this is pretty exciting!

Joel Houle

Yeah, exactly. I feel really good about it. You know what? Let’s bring in our expert and see if there’s other things that he could, you know, apply his myth busting capabilities to.

Joel Houle

So joining us today is Michael Layer. Michael, how are you?

Michael Layer

I’m really good, Joel.

Joel Houle

Perfect. Before we dive in, can you give us a little bit of an introduction, letting us know who you are and why you’re a spokesperson for methane at Natural Resources Canada?

Michael Layer

Sure. I’m a research engineer, environmental engineering is my background, and I lead a research program from within Natural Resources Canada that focuses on upstream and midstream and downstream oil and gas emissions. And methane is one of the primary emissions from that sector. And I work with not only federal researchers but also with universities and provincial research labs and companies and innovators all over Canada and all over the world to address this subject.

Joel Houle

Thank you, Michael. Okay, let’s start at the very basics here. What is methane, and where does it come from?

Michael Layer

So methane, it’s a really, really potent greenhouse gas, and it’s formed from natural processes when living things like plants and animals decompose in an environment where there isn’t any oxygen. And those are natural processes that happen all around us every day, and we see them taking place.

And one of the most common areas that you will probably be familiar with is in wetlands. So any time you’ve gone to a swamp and you see little bubbles coming up, that’s largely methane being formed. And it’s when plants and marine animals die and decompose underwater in in the muck where there’s no oxygen around. And sometimes we see that methane bubble to the surface quite naturally. But a lot of it gets stored down there. And those processes continue for years and years and years. And they’ve been going on for millions of years.

And that’s where our fossil fuel resources come from. Over millions of years, you’ve been storing that organic matter. And now we’re tapping into those resources to produce fossil fuels such as natural gas, which is largely methane. And we use that methane every day in our lives to heat our homes, to grow our food, to create fertilizers and even things like printer cartridges and hydrogen that we use in clean fuel cells. And so the human activity that we engage in really increases the number of natural sources of methane over and above what’s going on in nature. And that can get released into the atmosphere right away. And some of that human activity is what’s exacerbating the methane emissions around the world right now.

Barb Ustina

Now, I see methane is being mentioned a lot in news reports these days, and I’m wondering if you can tell me why is methane something that the scientific community is interested in as well?

Michael Layer

Because methane is such a potent greenhouse gas and because our human activity is really contributing to the rate at which methane is being released into the environment, scientists are really interested in studying how it is that methane could be mitigated going forward.

So scientists are currently estimating that methane is responsible for about 40 percent of global warming that started since the Industrial Revolution, for example. And we know that methane affects our climate, but it also contributes to air pollution, things like smog that really cause serious health effects as well. And methane is something that scientists have coined as a short-lived climate pollutant, and that means that it stays in the environment for a whole lot less time than carbon dioxide does, which is the greenhouse gas that most people know about. So in comparison, methane’s lifetime in the atmosphere is about 12 years. But in that short period of time, it can have about 84 times more impact as a greenhouse gas. And so scientists are focusing on addressing things like methane — that if we mitigate methane right away, to what degree could that have a health benefit as well as a climate benefit for us right away?

Because methane is so much more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere and because it contributes to health impacts as well, if we get rid of methane emissions immediately, we can have a real immediate impact upon not only climate change but also upon health issues that are facing Canadians and people around the world.

Joel Houle

Speaking of those health issues that you mentioned earlier there, can you expand a little bit and tell us what are those important health issues?

Michael Layer

Yeah, sure. When methane in the atmosphere responds to sunlight and to heat, that leads to some chemical reactions that take place in the atmosphere that result in pollutants such as ozone or smog that we’ve heard about. And smog, as we are aware, can really irritate our eyes and our lungs. And doctors are linking smog and ozone to real serious health impacts like heart disease and lung disease. And there are studies around right now that estimates about a million people a year die prematurely because of smog and ozone related illnesses.

In preparation for this discussion today, I actually went to Environment and Climate Change Canada’s webpage. And there’s a statement there that says that about 120 billion dollars a year in health impacts are caused in Canada just from air pollution. So it’s really important for us — not only from a health and environment standpoint but economics as well. It costs us a lot of money.

So even though methane might not directly cause a human health impact, it’s linked to health effects. So addressing it, as I said earlier, has the opportunity to instantaneously improve our environmental, our health and our economic benefits.

Barb Ustina

Those are some pretty interesting numbers and statistics there. And I’m especially interested in the 40 percent of global warming approximately said to be due to methane emissions. If we can get in at the methane emissions, that would be great. So how can we minimize methane emissions and mitigate the risks?

Michael Layer

Yeah, that’s a really good question, Barb. And there’s actually a lot that we can do, and there’s a lot that we’re already doing.

As individuals, we can start by reducing methane from the activities that we’re currently engaged in. So, for example, landfill sites are a really big source of methane emissions. And those methane emissions come from the food waste and the organic waste that we throw out every day and send to landfills. So if we implement recycling plants in our homes and in our workplaces, that can have a huge impact on reducing methane because we can divert those materials away from our landfills. Or if we compost our food waste and then we can use that composted material as organic fertilizer. And that can offset some of the commercial fertilizers that we produce from gases like methane.

So we need less methane in the environment, and that creates less emissions going forward. So bio digesters, for example, are another thing that municipalities all over Canada are starting to implement in areas where they have wastewater treatment facilities. They put the organic waste from the wastewater into bio digesters, and they utilize that to produce renewable methane. So that reduces our reliance on methane from fossil fuels. And so that’s another way of contributing to reducing methane emissions by reducing our dependence upon fossil fuel–based methane.

And in agriculture, there’s another big opportunity there. We’ve heard a lot about methane emissions in livestock, especially from cows and sheep and goats and things like that. So research is identifying that new feed additives can really have an impact on reducing the methane that’s produced from those animals when they digest the plants that they eat. And recent studies, for example, have shown that if we put seaweed in feed, that can reduce methane emissions from cows and sheep and goats by as much as 80 percent.

And then if we move over to fossil fuel production, there’s a lot of ways that we can eliminate methane from there as well. First up, we can conserve the methane that’s currently being released into the atmosphere, and we can capture that and deliver it into the economy instead of letting it slip into the environment. And then we can utilize that clean methane to manufacture the products that we talked about earlier, such as fertilizers or plastics or the printer cartridges or the clean hydrogen that we might use in the future. And it’s important for us to keep improving the monitoring and repairing of unintentional leaks from our oil and gas infrastructure as well.

So those are some of the things that we can do to minimize methane.

Joel Houle

So, Michael, I’m really interested in the oil and gas aspect of it. But before we move on, just a quick question: When you mean that, like using more recycling at home, do you mean reducing our amount of plastics and paper and such? Or do you mean reusing them? What exactly do you mean by recycling at home?

Michael Layer

Yeah, so recycling at home is anything that we can do that prevents paper or plastics or food from going into landfill sites. Because you’ll remember when we started our conversation, I described how methane is a natural process. It’s the result of a natural process. And so whenever you send something organic into an environment like a landfill where it can decompose in an environment where there’s no oxygen, the result is methane emissions. So if you can starve that natural process of its food — like be it our organic wastes — you reduce the methane from sources such as landfills.

And then if the plastics or the papers are recycled, you don’t have to cut down more trees or produce more oil and gas to get the methane that you would use to produce the plastics, for example.

And if you compost food waste, you would be able to use that organic fertilizer as a soil amendment instead of, for example, buying a fertilizer that was produced from methane in the first place. Does that help a little bit, Joel?

Joel Houle

It does. Thank you for clarifying that. So we want to talk more about oil and gas. How are we at Natural Resources Canada helping to reduce the methane emissions from oil and gas production?

Michael Layer

That’s a great question, and there’s a lot of things that NRCan is currently doing, and that ranges from providing research funding to universities or to federal research labs such as the one that I work in.

And we also collaborate with Environment and Climate Change Canada and Canadian innovators from provincial organizations or from universities. And we engage in projects in Canada and around the world to showcase some of the really neat cutting-edge or leading Canadian technologies and solutions that are being developed to detect and measure methane accurately, as well as to reduce methane from oil and gas activities.

I’ll give you some examples. We currently work with Carleton University here in Ottawa to develop new emission quantification technologies and methods. And the results of that work is being used by Environment and Climate Change Canada right now to improve the accuracy of our national emissions inventory report that gets sent to the United Nations every year. And that’s how we can report out to the world the impacts that we’re having on reducing emissions is through those inventories.

We also collaborate with Canadian oil and gas producers and, as I said, Canadian universities and some really, really leading Canadian innovators, inventors that are developing new technologies and new methods to further reduce and eliminate methane and other greenhouse gases as well. And then we work together to deploy those new solutions into demonstration projects across Canada and around the world.

And in fact, through the current Emissions Reduction Fund at NRCan, we’re currently working on projects that are on track to deliver more than 3.1 megatonnes of new methane emissions reduction, so megatonnes of CO2 equivalent of methane reductions based upon some projects that are implemented or being implemented right now. To put that into perspective, that’s equal to about 950,000 cars being pulled off the road. So that’s being done over the next year or so. And there are more projects coming under that emission reduction fund.

Barb Ustina

So it sounds like it’s a really fascinating field of research right now. Mike, are you at liberty to talk in any more detail about some of the collaborations you’re working on?

Michael Layer

Yes. We’re currently working with 15 companies on 40 projects across British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan under that emission reduction fund program that I just mentioned briefly. And as I said, there’s about 3.1 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent reduction that’s going to be coming just out of that alone.

And these kinds of domestic projects are really being recognized by a lot of our international partner countries under the Paris Agreement, for example. And we’re often asked to collaborate in sharing those Canadian solutions internationally.

And we work really, really closely with Environment and Climate Change Canada on some international projects that are going on right now, for example, in the Pacific Alliance countries such as Colombia. And we’re deploying some of those made-in-Canada solutions in Colombia right now. And Colombia is utilizing that support or that collaboration from Canada to further implement and achieve their nationally determined contributions or commitments to the Paris Agreement.

And so, together with really innovative Canadian technology developers and service providers and partnerships with Environment and Climate Change Canada where,  I guess — addressing the shared objectives that our country has along with these other countries, the global community, in essence, to further address methane emissions, and we’re working together to create a lower carbon future. And then to perhaps position Canada to be among the first to hit that net-zero-emissions-by-2050 target that everybody is really aiming for right now under the Paris Agreement.

Barb Ustina

So if people want to know more about and NRCan’s work regarding methane, are there any resources available online?

Michael Layer

Yeah, indeed there are. For example, they could visit the NRCan webpage and specifically search for the Emissions Reduction Fund webpage. That’ll give them some insight into that particular program and the types of projects that we’re pulling forward right now.

And I think I would also direct people’s attention to Environment and Climate Change Canada’s webpage, and they could search out the types of collaborative projects that the Government of Canada is engaged in internationally, like the one I just mentioned in Colombia.

And then finally, Canada is a founding member of an international partnership known as the Climate and Clean Air Coalition. And that site has a really tremendous amount of information in there that’s, I think, indicative of many of the things we talked about today. It’s a really good resource. And I think it’s also a really good reflection of Canada’s leadership in the global community in regards to addressing methane and climate change in general, as well as human health that we talked about.

Joel Houle

Thank you so much, Michael, for coming by and chatting with us about methane.

Michael Layer

Oh, it’s my pleasure, Joel, and I enjoy these kinds of discussions and welcome more in the future if you’re interested.

Joel Houle

Of course, we’ll have to bring you back.

Joel Houle

That was a really interesting interview with Michael. I’m a little surprised at the importance of composting. I just assumed that it doesn’t really matter what you do with organic waste because it’s going to decompose anyway. So it looks like it does make a difference, though, if it’s in the landfill or not. Because, like Michael pointed out, if you take organic waste and have it decompose in an environment without oxygen, it creates methane. And to me, that was really eye-opening.

Barb Ustina

It’s so true. Michael really was a fantastic interview. I thought it was also really eye-opening to hear that air pollution in general leads to about $120 billion in health impacts every year in Canada. And not all of that is due to methane, of course, but every bit we can reduce our emissions will help.

Joel Houle

And that’s 120 billion with a B. That’s insane!

Barb Ustina

$120 billion.

Joel Houle

So if you, our audience, is interested in learning more about methane, we do have some links in the episode description that might be of interest to you.

Like always, if you like this episode, feel free to share with your friends. If you share it over Twitter, make sure to tag us @NRCanScience or even better, you can tweet at us directly. I’m @JoelScience ...

Barb Ustina

… and I’m @SimplyScienceB, that’s the letter B. I might remind everyone that Simply Science also has a website and a YouTube channel, which you should check out. We have in-depth articles of interest and videos that showcase the fascinating scientific work that we do at Natural Resources Canada. And you can find those links in the episode description as well. Social media channels as well.

Joel Houle

Thank you, Barb, and thank you so much, everyone, for listening! We’ll see you in the next episode.

Barb Ustina

We’ll see you next time.