In this episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, cohosts Ross Kenyon and Siobhan Montoya Lavender are joined by Erika Reinhardt, Co-founder and Executive Director of Spark Climate Solutions. Together, they delve into the pressing issue of methane and its increasing significance in the climate zeitgeist, and when can we expect methane removal to appear?
The conversation kicks off with a discussion on why methane deserves our attention. Erika explains that methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with initial emissions being 120 times more potent than carbon dioxide when it is first released into the atmosphere. Despite its relatively short atmospheric lifespan of approximately twelve years, methane is responsible for a whopping 0.5℃ warming impact on our climate.
Is methane “destroyed”? Is it “converted”? How should we think about methane in the context of the dreaded carbon dioxide questions: should we focus on reductions or removal? (hint, most answers start with ‘yes, and’).
The episode also highlights the concerning rise of both natural and anthropogenic sources of methane. Erika underlines the importance of taking comprehensive action to curb methane emissions from various sectors—it’s not just oil and gas, it’s not just cow belching, it’s a big and complex picture that needs lots of different solutions and mitigation measures.
Drawing parallels between methane removal and carbon removal, the conversation explores the similarities and notable differences between the two. Listeners gain insights into the unique challenges and opportunities associated with methane removal strategies.
Erika shares the motivations behind founding Spark Climate Solutions and provides an overview of the organization's current objectives.
Throughout the episode, the hosts and guest emphasize the urgency of addressing methane emissions and highlight the potential impact of targeted strategies and where the gaps lie. If you're curious about greenhouse gasses beyond carbon dioxide, this is the episode for you!
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to Reversing Climate Change, a podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m one of the co-founders of Nori and the creative editor here. Today I have with me Siobhan Montoya Lavender of [unclear], and also a meme writer, author — I don’t know. There’s memes; I should have said “meme author.”
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Hey, Ross! How’s it going?
Ross Kenyon: I feel like I messed up the taxonomy of what exactly that job should be called literally every single time I’ve introduced you, but glad, glad you’re here.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: That’s okay. I like that. We haven’t settled on it. I like that it exists in the nebulous space here.
Ross Kenyon: Also with us today is someone with a proper title. We have with us Erika Reinhardt, who is the co-founder and executive director of Spark Climate Solutions. Thanks for coming, Erika.
Erika Reinhardt: Yeah, you’re welcome. Thanks so much. So fun.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we are going to be talking with Erika today about methane, which is a topic I think we have not discussed enough on the pod and is growing in the cultural base of interest, I believe. We shall see what the receptions are once we air this. But I believe that people really want to know what’s happening with methane, and so today we’re going to dive in. We’re going to hear what the problem is with methane, what the solutions are, and then what Spark Climate is doing to address it.
I think the only other time that we’ve really spoken in detail about methane was near the beginning of the show’s start, with Julio Friedmann. I remember we talked about dairy lagoons. And I think for a long time I don’t think I’ve heard anything about methane forever, because I know it’s much more dilute in the atmosphere. People have got their hands full just trying to get carbon dioxide down, or maybe there’s methane destruction in landfills and that sort of thing, but it’s always come up tangentially. I think I hear about it a lot now where I didn’t before, or I’ll say something about carbon dioxide removal and somebody will jump up and go, “What about methane?” — which I think is an important inject to have. So, okay, Erika, tell us why we should care about methane. I thought it was just about carbon dioxide. Why should we care about this greenhouse gas?
Erika Reinhardt: Methane has a surprisingly large impact on our warming. I think it’s often underestimated. So currently we have about 1.1 degrees C of global temperature rise, and half a degree — 0.5 degrees — of that is from methane. So it’s playing a really big role, kind of right after CO2. And so when we think about what does it take in order to bring our temperatures down after we minimize peak temperatures, methane has a really important role to play in parallel with carbon dioxide as well as all other greenhouse gases. Just want to make sure, you know, they don’t get completely ignored here.
I think part of the reason that methane recently has gotten a lot more attention is as we grapple with what it would take to stay under the 1.5 or the 2 degrees C guardrails given where we’re at. Methane has to play a really important role in limiting temperature increase and bringing temperatures down. And one of the reasons behind that is that methane has a somewhat unique role as a greenhouse gas in that it is short-lived. So when we emit carbon dioxide, it stays in the atmosphere for centuries. And this is where you get that, you know, bathtub analogy, right? We keep adding more CO2 into the bathtub — that’s the spigot. And it’s only with opening the drain, or scaling carbon dioxide removal, that we can start bringing that level down.
That is a really good analogy for carbon dioxide. It doesn’t quite work that way for methane, in that methane does naturally degrade in the atmosphere over a few decades and kind of, you know, quote-unquote go away by itself. And given where we’re already at, given how much carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, given how many other greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, our climate models are fundamentally depending upon us dramatically reducing our methane emissions, so that our atmospheric methane levels come down over the next few decades and basically free up some temperature buffer for that CO2 transition.
And so at this point there really is no way of hitting these targets without methane playing a really important contribution to bringing down our overall emissions and helping to decrease the methane portion of our warming.
Ross Kenyon: So if we are to ignore methane and just focus on other greenhouse gases, we would be ignoring roughly 25% of today’s global warming. Is that true, that it accounts for roughly a quarter of temperature warming?
Erika Reinhardt: Even more than that, actually. And so currently it’s half a degree out of 1.1 degrees. So whatever that, you know, 40th percentile that works out to be. Wow. So super significant. If you also look at today’s emissions and you look at what impact those emissions have in the near term, methane similarly has a really, really large role, and that is really because of how potent it is. So the global warming potential, which is kind of a measure of how potent a greenhouse gas is compared to CO2, is about 120 for methane right when it’s released, and then it decreases over time. And so by the time you’re looking at a 20-year average, you’re looking at a number like 86 or something. You’re looking at a 100-year average, you’re looking at something closer to 30 to 35. But it’s incredibly potent.
And so when we think about what impact our emissions today have in the next few decades, the impact of methane is quite large. And of course this is the same time frame on which we’re talking about how do we slow temperature increase as these impacts are becoming more evident. How do we minimize our peak temperatures? If we are to hopefully succeed at achieving peak temperatures, methane can play a really important role, in addition to dramatic carbon dioxide emissions reductions as well as the scaling up of carbon dioxide removal, to really enable us to peak our temperatures and bring those peak temperatures down, which will have many positive impacts directly on human society as well as helping to reduce some of the natural feedbacks and tipping point risks that we otherwise face.
Ross Kenyon: The explanation that I’ve heard — this is the PE teacher who has to fill in for the science teacher version — but that methane turns into CO2 at some point, it just becomes CO2, or degrades through UV or something like that. Or if you’re burning methane, which as far as I understand it is the same as natural gas, it just turns into — one of the byproducts is CO2.
Erika Reinhardt: That’s all correct. Yeah, so there’s a number of different oxidation processes, but the primary output of those oxidation processes is carbon dioxide. So that is correct, that that is kind of what the carbon in methane gets converted to. When you look at what happens when you emit methane into the atmosphere, what happens is that you have methane for some period of time, and then it goes through one of these sink processes, one of these oxidation processes, where it is converted to carbon dioxide and water usually, and a few other byproducts. And so while it is absolutely true that emitted methane does result long-term also in CO2, that long-term CO2 impact ends up being kind of a minor overall factor in comparison to that short-term warming. But it does lead to long-term warming as well.
Ross Kenyon: It’s pretty amazing that the radiative forcing potential of this gas would be improved by converting it into CO2. I think people think of carbon dioxide as the main villain here, and maybe in general it is, but it’s pretty interesting to think that in some ways CO2 would be preferable to methane.
Erika Reinhardt: Absolutely. This is actually the potency point, right? This little molecule is a strong little guy. And so as much as we can, you know, first prevent them going into the atmosphere and then get them out of the atmosphere via that conversion process, makes a big difference. From some very rough calculations, it looks like on a molecule-by-molecule basis, as opposed to a tonnage basis, that you can basically think about the warming impact of a molecule of methane being about 40 times as strong as a molecule of CO2, which just shows you how—
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I listened to Ryan Orbuch back on Catalyst with Shayle Kann, like six months or a year ago, talking about how he wishes that offsetting and crediting were denominated in terms of radiative forcing rather than tonnage. It is [unclear]. I don’t know if you saw the blended time white paper that we published last week.
Erika Reinhardt: I did.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. One of the possible blends for the future I was thinking is: what if you had — and you could do something like methane destruction, maybe you did like one fortieth of a molecule of methane was destroyed, and then you stored the carbon dioxide that resulted in a sink, a land-based carbon sink like soil, for 10 years until you had a permanent removal come and stop it? Is that not like the perfect end-to-end solution for, like, a full cycle carbon asset that’s blended together? That’s the combo.
Erika Reinhardt: I love that. We’re going straight to radiative forcing credits here. So I mean, in any event, we have to go back to what our core goals are, right, which is making sure that we’re mitigating overall warming as much as we safely can at every point in time. And so all these different approaches — permanent carbon dioxide removals, temporary carbon dioxide removals, potentially in the future methane removals — all are going to have a different shape of impact, right, of how much warming mitigation potential do they have and on what time frame. And so I think our collective job is to figure out how we can accelerate all these different categories of solutions, and then, you know, deploy them in appropriate and responsible ways to help to bring warming down at every point in time, independent sometimes of which specific gas it is, and instead make sure that we’re pulling all of these tools together in the most comprehensive ways.
We do need to be careful when we talk about any sort of crediting, that in those situations in particular where you’re sort of setting up for there to be trade-offs between different activities, that those activities do fully cancel each other out. And so that sort of look at impact over time is particularly important. Of course, there are many ways of deploying solutions that don’t create those trade-offs, and we should be pursuing those as aggressively.
Ross Kenyon: How are you thinking about the time value of carbon? Should we be thinking about the radiative forcing over decades? Or — I know a lot of the drive towards permanent carbon removal, my guess is a lot of it remains a political economy question, where we’re in a carbon accounting world, we don’t want corporations to be greenwashing by burning fossil fuel and then negating it with temporary storage. But if you thought about it from a more radiative forcing angle, should we be looking at the decade scale? Is it more important to stop climate change in the [unclear], and the permanence is a nice thing to think about later? How much of this is impacted by carbon accounting? Enormous question. Good luck, Erika.
Erika Reinhardt: Thanks for sending me all the easy ones today. I think about it differently, I think, which is that we need to be very aware of and prioritizing both near-term and long-term warming, and wherever we can, really pursuing both to the maximal degree, because these things shouldn’t be traded off from each other. And we don’t want to be making the problem worse for future generations to try to solve. And I think our current carbon accounting metrics, for example, really are anchored around long-term warming, right? We talk about GWP 100 — that is the average global warming potential impact of an emission averaged over a hundred years. When we look at something like methane, methane starts incredibly potent, right, about 120 times the impact of CO2 on a percentage basis, and goes down significantly over time.
And what we see is that when we start just averaging to 100 years, you actually lose those dynamics. We don’t take those into account. And so rather than thinking about kind of at what point in time do you want to optimize, I’m really much more interested in how do we pursue actions that help us optimize at all, and just generally understand the system better. Because, for example, if we have really high overshoot on the way to coming back down, and still by 2100 reaching 1.5, but say, you know, peaking at 2 degrees Celsius along the way, that has a lot of impacts. There’s a lot of impacts on human systems — we were just talking before about the heat wave going on — and that also has impacts on natural systems and how those impact humans, and some of those are going to be irreversible changes. And so we need to be very cautious about what warming we have at every point in time to help us avoid those risks.
When we talk right now about, like, 1.5 degrees scenarios, I think it’s important to talk about what those Celsius numbers actually kind of mean in those models, which is talking about our temperature in 2100. It’s not the curvature of our temperature from here to there, and depending on what model we’re looking at, they can vary, right? You can have 1.5 with high overshoot, which means we go a lot higher than 1.5, then we slowly come back to 1.5, and maybe at 2100, right, we are on a downward, stable trajectory at 1.5. If you look at some of the three or four degrees C models at 2100, those usually still have upward slopes at 2100, right? It’s not actually saying that those models would have us, you know, quote-unquote stabilize — that would also be a very unstable state — but, you know, stabilize at three or four degrees, whatever those models are. It’s actually saying that at this point of time, at 2100, that’s where we’d roughly be expected to be, but in those cases we’re usually still on an upward trajectory.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I’m kind of curious, for those of our listeners who are new to methane, could you tell us a little bit about, where does methane come from? Why, how much of it is anthropogenic? How much is natural? Why is this becoming such a big problem?
Erika Reinhardt: Most of the elevated methane emissions are anthropogenic. There have always been natural emissions from systems like wetlands, and there’s also from termites, which is a fun fact. Most of the emissions today are anthropogenic, and those come from a few different sectors. Agriculture is a very big sector, primarily driven by livestock as well as rice. Oil and gas is about the next kind of third, largely coming from leaks and different operational practices and different sorts of industrial processes. Actually, just industrial [unclear] do have some methane emissions related to them today. And there’s also a number of waste sectors — so landfills are a big generator of methane, as are wastewater systems.
So these categories are fairly different than the CO2 categories — obviously high overlap in oil and gas, but, you know, when we talk about CO2 we’re not as focused on agriculture and waste usually. And I think this is part of the shift that has to happen there, in really recognizing all of the different sectors that are contributing to climate change right now and emissions, and making sure that we have plans on engaging with all of them.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: Yeah, I’m curious because, you know, you’re talking to two carbon dioxide removal nerds. I certainly got — I got introduced to carbon dioxide through my master’s degree, where I spent [unclear] measuring carbon fluxes using the eddy covariance technique over mixed urban ecosystems. And then I was like, whoa, CO2, CO2, CO2, this is fascinating. You took a different trajectory and you ended up at methane, and I’m really curious how you decided to care about methane and engage with methane, and then why you decided to found — to co-found Spark, and then what you guys are doing at Spark to address methane.
Erika Reinhardt: Yeah, so the way I got to methane was really trying to understand all the different pieces of what needed to happen and what was happening, and methane coming up as needing to be a very large priority given its large role in overall warming, and particularly having this really important role in helping us to mitigate near-term temperatures and peak temperatures that need to happen quickly in order to achieve that role — and seeing that we are really behind on being able to achieve those goals for a wide number of reasons. But, you know, we were only now having this so-called methane moment, which is wonderful. I’m so glad we’re here and that it is getting more attention, but the work is relatively early days, especially compared to many parts of CO2-related work.
And one of the resulting challenges in the methane space right now is that we don’t have a full suite of ready solutions to deploy. So there’s really important work going into deploying the solutions that we do have, and also there’s a lot of innovation needed in order to more fully flesh out the portfolio of things that we can do to mitigate the rest of the anthropogenic emissions for which we don’t have solutions.
The other piece of methane overall — you were asking before about anthropogenic versus natural emissions. Right now anthropogenic emissions are the vast majority of elevated methane emissions. However, due to our current kind of warming trajectory, there are increasing risks, and increasing evidence that it’s starting to happen, of natural systems emitting more methane. And that’s a risk that hasn’t been fully incorporated into our IPCC modeling, where there are really high scientific uncertainties still, and we don’t really have anything directly to do about it, which is sort of additionally scary. So tons of work needs to happen across all different flavors of work, from innovation to policy change and incentivization to actually making the changes on the ground.
And so one of the big motivators for starting Spark was to be able to focus on a few of the sectors related to unmitigated or not fully mitigated risks that we saw in the system that weren’t yet getting the level of attention that would give us comfort that those risks would be resolved by existing efforts. And that led us to methane as a really important near-term priority. And so the two areas we’ve been focused on so far to date have been enteric methane mitigation — so this is colloquially cow burps; it’s roughly a third of all methane emissions are just from cow burps — and then we’re also looking at atmospheric methane removal, which is potentially of particular interest to the carbon dioxide removal folks listening to this podcast.
Which is trying to understand if there are ways that we might be able to accelerate the atmospheric methane sink, in some ways analogous to the carbon sinks but different given how the molecule acts differently, in order to help draw down some of that warming from historical methane emissions faster than the natural systems would alone, as well as build a tool that could be deployed on top of methane emissions reductions in order to help mitigate some of the impact of elevated natural methane emissions, for which we don’t currently have any other immediate solutions.
Ross Kenyon: There’s a lot to ask about here, but maybe we’ll cut to the chase for our listeners and then we’ll roll the clock back here and start at the beginning. But I’ve always heard that methane is both more dilute in the atmosphere and ambient air than carbon dioxide, and it’s also a less reactive molecule than carbon dioxide, so it’s harder than carbon dioxide to actually practice active removal. Are those things true, or no?
Erika Reinhardt: It is absolutely more dilute. That is somewhat made up for by how much more potent it is on a per molecule basis. For, I know, a given volume of air — going back to your radiative forcing comment before — you do get more radiative forcing from CO2 than from methane in ambient air, but methane is a pretty significant chunk. The one thing is, methane actually is very reactive, which is why we do see that it has this short-lived dynamic in the atmosphere — is that it is undergoing these reactions. But it is a lot harder to capture. So whereas for carbon dioxide we think about capturing that molecule and then storing it, for methane we really think about how do we sort of catalytically—
Ross Kenyon: Destruction is the term I’ve always heard, right?
Erika Reinhardt: Yeah, just destroy it. Convert it — again, primarily water and CO2 are the byproducts of those reactions. That’s where that comes from, probably. Methane destruction has been a term of art for years and years. At this point it’s not necessarily a new idea, with landfills being able to, like, flare off the gas that’s collected being pretty common.
Ross Kenyon: There’ll be other things that we’ve done with methane emissions to date. I’ve heard about feeding seaweed to cows — various types of seaweed can reduce the methane burps. Are there other things like that that are either waiting to be scaled, or have already been tried but are not enough? Like, where have we started and where are we going with methane?
Erika Reinhardt: So there are lots of available solutions that we need to be deploying as quickly as we can, and basically every sector has some portion of the emissions that are able to be addressed today. Those are going to obviously vary by sector as to what they are. But you brought up landfill flaring. So when we think about existing solutions for destroying methane, those really apply to high concentrations of methane emissions. So flaring, for example — combustion works at, we have to have at least four percent methane in that airstream. And there are some other technologies that bring that concentration requirement down, but still don’t address many, many emissions sources.
There are things that we can do upstream of that, though, before we talk about flaring or combusting it in different ways, to avoid that methane being generated in the first place. There are behavioral changes that we can make to avoid emitting it in the first place. So, for example, diverting food waste from landfills helps to prevent that food from then becoming methane in the landfill and being leaked. So that’s kind of the most upstream thing we can do. And then there are ways that we can, even without that behavior change in some cases, prevent that methane from being created or being emitted to the atmosphere.
And so the seaweed example you brought up is for cows, for enteric emissions — cow burps, basically. There are some things that are being studied that we might be able to feed cows that would change their digestive systems such that they were producing less methane. Seaweed is being studied. There’s a feed additive called 3-NOP that is being deployed in Europe right now. There are other just changes in kind of overall feed ratios that can be made without any additives. And then there’s a lot of research going into other methods that may be helpful here as well.
And so across categories there’s a portion of things that we can do, but there are these really large categories where we don’t have ready solutions yet. And so one of those is grazing cows. We don’t yet have a way for a cow that isn’t constantly being fed something by a farmer, where a feed additive could be added, in order to bring those methane emissions down. And so there are these kind of really large innovation categories across sectors that will help us to add ready solutions to the portfolio that can, you know, once they’re ready, also be deployed and further enable us to bring our anthropogenic emissions down.
Ross Kenyon: I know you have more to say, but I love the idea that feedlots, just because they have feed additives that can be done in a centralized kind of way, are creating, at least on one metric, a more ecological beef product. It’s going to make everyone’s head explode. And that’s one [unclear], is it?
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: I mean, in truth, small potatoes in comparison to, like, reducing the amount of livestock on the planet, period. Like, although the runoff is all toxic, and this is too — by one metric only.
Erika Reinhardt: But, you know, all of these systems have many trade-offs that need to be looked at, you know, very holistically, so that we don’t optimize our systems around any single metric that might, you know, blind us to the full ecosystem and system impact that we’re having.
Ross Kenyon: Sorry, Erika. I heard the one little factoid that now I’m going to repeat at parties for the next three decades.
Erika Reinhardt: Please. [unclear]
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. So where are we headed? Oh, sorry — Siobhan, you know, I know. God. Where are we? Where are we headed, and kind of what’s Spark’s role here? Because it seems like there’s a lot of research needed. You’ve sufficiently alarmed us, in a good way. There’s a high risk here. Doesn’t seem like a whole lot’s being done. What’s Spark’s role likely? Where are you going with Spark, and what’s your kind of immediate-term mission there?
Erika Reinhardt: So, fortunately, there is more and more being done on methane across the ecosystem, and so I want to make sure that that is clear. There are many players here who are doing really important work on all different sides of this equation, right, from innovation, new solutions, to policy change, to communication, etc. And so that’s been really heartening to see scale up a lot more in the last few years, building on really important work that was started a few decades ago.
So we’re specifically focused on a few of these sectors to start, and we hope to add more over time as we have bandwidth to do so, where we see many more additional efforts needed to be added and a role that we can sort of play, with a particular focus right now on major innovation areas. And so our long-term goal is to help accelerate the pathway to being able to repair the climate by supporting the development of new solutions and solution ecosystems, to provide more options for deployment down the road, particularly around where we have these two types of risks.
So we’ve been really focused recently on helping to build this field of atmospheric methane removal, which is really looking at this question of, are there ways of accelerating methane sinks from the atmosphere, which could play an important role in addressing historical methane emissions as well as these other risks of rising natural emissions? And just in general, given where we’re at, any new tools that we can have that will bring down radiative forcing over time and help to manage temperatures will be incredibly valuable.
It’s a very early field, and so we’re really focused right now on helping to support and scale up research around a number of ideas that scientists have had that haven’t yet been fully explored, to see what might be possible here, what we want to add to the portfolio, while also starting to look at how do we ensure that as those solutions potentially get proven out scientifically, that we’re able to pave a way towards good governance and sort of supportive and appropriate policy, to ensure that these solutions are as additive as possible.
We’re also starting to scale up our work in enteric methane. So about a year ago we started doing some road mapping, and the need for solution development and research funding came up. And so we’ve been doing some work there, but we’re finally building a much larger team around this and have more dedicated time on it. And so we’re working on building right now what that strategy is and where to focus, given the different state of that field. A lot more is already happening there, which is really exciting to see. And we’re also convinced that a lot more needs to happen.
And any role that we can play in helping to identify what those remaining gaps are in field development and helping to fill them — be that through additional philanthropic funding or spinning up new projects — we think will be really additive to ensuring that all of our bases are covered in these fields, to give them their best shot at fulfilling the need we kind of need them to fill in order to mitigate our overall climate risk.
Ross Kenyon: What is the state of methane removal right now? Are there direct air capture prototypes being built right now that actually capture methane from ambient air? Is it something that parallels carbon removal, or is it very different from — someone familiar with carbon removal, such that they would even recognize it today?
Erika Reinhardt: There’s a number of different approaches that are being discussed. Different levels of research have gone into different ones of them, and they really widely vary. And so some of them actually may be some of the same solutions as carbon dioxide removal, and some of them are going to look very, very different. But overall, just given how recently focus on this field started on the research side, we’re in very, very early days, and so we don’t yet know what that portfolio of solutions will be and which ones are going to pan out.
The ones that may end up overlapping heavily with carbon dioxide removal are some of the soil-based approaches. So one of our current methane sinks is soils — relatively small, about 5% of methane that enters into the atmosphere is soaked up by [unclear] in soil. But some of the changes that we might look at for carbon sequestration, like biochar, enhanced rock weathering, may also impact the soil bacteria that are generating or consuming methane.
And so one really important thing that we should all be aware of whenever you make any of these changes is that these systems are all complex and can change lots of different things, including different greenhouse gases. And, fortunately, sometimes these things come as co-benefits. But no matter what approach, we need to sort of make sure we understand the whole suite of impacts, to make sure we’re not, you know, producing methane while drawing down CO2, or vice versa, and instead looking for those opportunities where we can draw down both.
Ross Kenyon: It seems like there may be some— Yeah, I got it. No, no, I’m just — I’m thinking, you know, is it worth talking about removal, or destruction if we’re going to call it that, or conversion, when we’re talking? And I feel like I’m becoming my own worst enemy, because I always hate it when people say, should we even talk about carbon removal, shouldn’t we just say decarbonization? And I’m going to do that to you, and I apologize. But because it’s such a short-lived gas, is it really just about avoiding as opposed to removing?
Erika Reinhardt: Oh man, I love it. You really have set yourself up perfectly.
Ross Kenyon: I’m my own villain here.
Erika Reinhardt: This is a great question, and it’s a common question. And, you know, yes, if you emit methane it will decay over the course of a few decades. And yet despite that, we are already seeing half a degree and rising of temperature increase from methane. And, unfortunately, we are not yet on a trajectory to have that go down — our atmospheric methane levels are still accelerating.
And so I think the most basic answer to that question is: if we care about the current warming that we see, and if we care about the warming that we see until that magical day when all elevated natural emissions and anthropogenic emissions go away, then we should absolutely care about any tools that we may be able to add to the portfolio that help to draw down or break down that half a degree and growing of warming as quickly as we can. We are depending on the atmospheric levels going down in order to achieve any of our targets.
And so I think this partially comes back to, you know, how much emphasis we put on near-term versus long-term warming, and what those trajectories actually mean. The unfortunate reality is, given where we’re at, our trajectory really, really does matter, and every tool that we could be deploying here that can be additive and play an important role in bringing down overshoot and our overall peak temperatures, which have numerous impacts on natural systems and feedbacks and tipping points — it’s not only our long-term trajectories here that matter. And given the degradation of natural systems, if we don’t do everything we can to keep temperatures down, we’re also at increasing risk over time of higher natural system emissions, not only of methane but also of carbon dioxide from these systems. And so we’re setting ourselves up to be sort of hiking a taller and taller mountain here on how much carbon dioxide removal, how much methane removal could be needed down the road. And so every ounce of preventative action is valuable.
Siobhan Montoya Lavender: My favorite question of this show. I feel like you’ve been carrying that around in your soul for however long you’ve been involved in CDR, and now you got to spring the trap on someone else. And there you go. That was a really good answer. I like it framed in terms of, like, if we care about this stuff. I’m going to start saying that more often. It’s like, do we care about 1.5 degrees? Do we care about 2 degrees? If so, we have to care about carbon removal, and it sounds like methane removal and all solutions, right? It definitely feels like you and Spark in general have a very “yes, and” approach. And I think that’s true of a lot of climate solutions, right? I mean, we all have to go in with this “yes, and” approach.
And so I think obviously bringing that to methane is really important. And the potency is really getting me, because I had read all these statistics around 80 — you know, 80 times. But when you point out that, you know, fresh out of the source we’re talking about 120 times, it really makes me rethink. So, for our listeners who don’t know, Erika kindly called us out on our memes channel and was like, you’re not doing any methane memes. And ask and you shall receive — we responded with a methane meme. And now I’m thinking it wasn’t, it wasn’t potent enough. Like, I didn’t do a good enough job. It wasn’t exactly right. That’s just — that’s really the potency of just, pow. Wow, we really need to get methane under control.
Erika Reinhardt: We sure do. We’re all depending on that and many other things going right. So as long as we can all continue on, you know, each of these important things in parallel, we’ve got a shot. But there are a lot of challenges that we all need to be figuring out how to tackle right now.
Ross Kenyon: What about the third greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide? What’s the status of that? Are people thinking about removing that? I’ve heard mumblings about it, but I feel like it’s the people who are really bleeding edge and trying to find something that is kind of blue sky and “any other business” turns of phrases that may apply here. What’s going on with that?
Erika Reinhardt: You know, not as much as methane removal, which is definitely not as much as carbon dioxide removal, and in the order of size of impact on the atmosphere, so also follows on removal. You know, we haven’t had a large focus on nitrous oxide removal. There’s a lot of work to do on nitrous oxide reduction.
Ross Kenyon: Or sure, my dentist’s office, right?
Erika Reinhardt: No, largely agriculture — agriculture category, but people can probably correct me on that. Our overall warming impact from nitrous oxide is important, and also unfortunately growing, and yet also much smaller than either carbon dioxide or methane.
And so, if you think about any approaches that are going to require air movement and the energy costs of that, then you’ll be getting much less climate impact from just nitrous oxide than you would from just methane or just carbon dioxide. There may be ways of combining some of these systems, perhaps, if you are able to actually have a process that would capture or convert that nitrous oxide at sort of low overall climate price, like low energy cost. I have yet to see any proposals for how that might be done in a way that would be cost plausible and beneficial. There may be natural systems approaches. This hasn’t been an area that I have dug a bunch into, given just how much work we see to do on methane removal right now and the much higher overall impact that methane currently has in the atmosphere compared to nitrous oxide.
Ross Kenyon: Erika, what do you think for our listeners who want to get involved, or who want to make policy, or advocate for policy, or want to start research? What’s the most impactful area right now in methane? Is it just getting the facts down on paper? Is it still in the research phase, or is there something people can interact with?
Erika Reinhardt: So on methane overall, we need to be all hands on deck in figuring out how we cut methane emissions. And there are lots of different places to plug in there. There are many existing solutions for some of those sectors that we need to figure out how to deploy faster. And depending on the sector, that, you know, might take business model innovation, finance innovation, technical innovation, awareness building for different behavioral changes, etc. So, tons of places to get involved in methane mitigation or methane emissions avoidance. And, you know, within methane, that is absolutely the first front of the methane fight — cutting emissions.
The removal space, given the current state, really is right now focused on sort of really fundamental research to understand what these methods are and advance the science around them. And so at this stage, I think there are fewer places to get as directly involved outside of more of the sort of academia, policy type angles. And that work right now is incredibly important and still very — and it’s really early days. There’s a wide variety of activities on that methane emissions reduction side, depending on people’s backgrounds, which may offer more different ways of plugging in.
Ross Kenyon: I have one final question as we near the conclusion, which is: Erika, can methane be stored in aluminium?
Erika Reinhardt: I’ve never heard that.
Ross Kenyon: Just, like, the way the British people say both of those words — you think, amazing. [unclear] aluminium. We’re in the bad part of the show. It always goes one joke further than it really needs to, and then you’re like, cool, we’re going to cut five minutes ago and wrap it there. But [unclear]. I’m going to try and save it. Erika, if they want to stay involved with Spark and you personally?
Erika Reinhardt: Yes, you can find me on Twitter, and you can find Spark on Twitter as well. You can learn more about Spark and these fields on our website — that’s sparkclimate.org. I think our Twitter handle is @sparkclimate, super original. And we have a newsletter which we occasionally send things out to, but there’s a lot of information on our website right now, particularly on really understanding what the different approaches are that are being researched for atmospheric methane removal.
If anyone wants to jump deep down the nerd hole of what these approaches are, what some of the trade-offs might be, and what the innovation areas are that are required to help see them through to fruition — we have a lot more coming on that front as well, which we will update our newsletter about, as well as our Twitter, really looking at high priority research areas and research questions that need to be answered, and some road maps for the field. And so those are additional places for folks to engage, particularly who are on, you know, the science and R&D side. I will be helping to highlight where we see some of the highest leverage needs, to help sort of further illuminate where people can get involved in different ways.
Ross Kenyon: One other question that came up — I felt I had to catch myself, so used to saying carbon removal, and I’m talking to a methane specialist. Should I be saying carbon dioxide removal, if you think we should be pedantic and really insist that we’re talking about a specific gas? Or is it just carbon removal when it’s inclusive of all of them? Is that the taxonomy here?
Erika Reinhardt: I don’t think — [unclear]. I think carbon removal at this point is largely understood to be carbon dioxide removal. Usually when we talk about greenhouse gas agnostic removal, we say greenhouse gas removal or negative emissions technologies, to avoid that confusion. And so yeah, to do the umbrella term, you can use either of those, and then we don’t have to, you know, remind ourselves that yes, indeed, methane does have carbon in it.
Ross Kenyon: Which it sure does. Yeah. Go on, don’t be that person. Well, thanks both for coming and hanging out. It was fun. Got some laughs in there. Even snuck one by Erika there at the end. So confusing. I’m gonna make it — I’m gonna make the cut. It’s gonna be too hard to edit out; now there’s too many allusions to it. It’s in there now. I’m no longer [unclear].
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