While Canadians have watched in disbelief as European Union members such as Ireland considers culling 200,000 cows to save the climate from farts, our Federal Liberal government upped their proposed methane emission cuts for Canada’s oil and gas sector to 75% below 2012 levels by 2030.Common sense Canadians understand that we are facing with an affordability crisis right now. Yet so many Western liberal democracies seem dead set on further restricting the supply of every day commodities like food and fuel?Equally frustrating for me as a Canadian scientist is that there is no credible frame of reference being offered to compare our national methane emissions against those from Mother Nature.Without such a relative comparison, how are we to quantify risk. Yes folks, I am talking about the need to quantify the mass of farts coming from grazing herbivores, termites and bacteria.If Canadian’s methane emissions are such an existential threat to the climate, then why not show conclusive evidence demonstrating that our methane emissions are 10 times higher than those from Mother Nature?As no such comparison has been offered for Canadians, I have attempted to do so.Last month I wrote an article titled Some people have a commercial reason to end Canadian gas exports (1), where I argued that large area source emission rates are impossible to directly measure and that estimates are best guesses with large uncertainties. An example of a large area source in nature would be a marsh or muskeg, such as commonly found across Canada’s Boreal Forests.According to Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) (2), muskeg (aka fen) covers approximately 12% (79,000 km2), swamps 2.7% (17,900 km2) and bogs 1.8% (11,900 km2) of Alberta’s land area. Figure 1 shows that most of these peatland ecosystems are located in northern Alberta..Therefore, there are over 110,000 km2 of peatlands in Alberta that are actively releasing marsh gases, comprised largely of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). Furthermore, there are over 1.1 million square kilometers of peatlands spread across Canada’s northern regions (3). Good luck getting funding to accurately estimate both the magnitude and natural variability of background emission rates from Canada’s massive peatlands. There are no taxation revenues to be derived.What is usually done in the literature is to make many small, yet inexpensive measurements on areas typically less than 1 m2 and then use this data to extrapolate over much larger areas. This extrapolation is in itself a huge source of uncertainty. These rudimentary tests are commonly done using a small flux chamber placed on the ground to capture gases moving upwards towards through the soil and into the atmosphere. These chambers are closed on the air side and open on the ground side, which allows any gases entering the chamber from the soil to be collected in air tight bags for subsequent analysis. Note that for a variety of fundamental reasons, flux chamber estimates are highly conservative and should be viewed as a minimum estimate versus reality.As I am a sucker of punishment, I conducted an extensive literature review of published flux chamber tests across the Northern Hemisphere that aimed to produce rudimentary estimates of methane emissions from boreal peatland ecosystems.One of the most useful recent studies that I came across was done by Professor Maria Strack’s University of Waterloo research group (4), which has attempted to answer this very question with respect to northern Alberta’s peatlands.Using the data-base of flux chamber values from this body of research (5), together with ABMI data on the approximate size of Alberta’s fens (aka muskeg), bogs and marshes, I was able to estimate a mean CH4 emission estimate of 615,000 tonnes per year (tpy), together with a variance of 350,000 to 1 million tpy.Note that this is an estimate of background CH4 emissions from peatlands only and does not include those of CO2. .When we compare these background CH4 emission rates to the reported CH4 emissions from Alberta’s oil and gas sector (6) from 2014 to present (Figure 2), we find that mean CH4 emission rates from Mother Nature’s Albertan peatlands are nearly equivalent. Note also the huge variability.Furthermore, Figure 2 shows that fugitive CH4 emissions from Alberta’s oil and gas industry have been steadily declining since 2014. The two vertical axes represent both absolute tonnes per year (right) and their equivalent basis to the theoretical Global Warming Potential (GWP) relative to CO2 (left). The theoretical GWP of CH4 assumes that 1 tonne of CH4 emissions has an equivalent warming effect as 28 tonnes of CO2 emissions.When we consider that Alberta’s peatlands are a mere 10% of national peatland landscapes, it is fair to suggest that Canada’s peatland ecosystem mean CH4 emissions are 10 times higher than those from Alberta alone.Finally, if more advanced methods were used instead of cheap flux chambers, actual background emission rates and their variability, would be significantly higher than 10x that of the oil and gas sectorI would be more than happy to address specific questions from our regulators or from academia as to how I arrived at these values. Referenceshttps://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/fournier-some-people-have-a-commercial-reason-to-end-canadian-gas-exports/55168https://wetland-report.abmi.ca/atlas-homehttps://globalpeatlands.org/canadas-peatlands-towards-a-national-assessmenthttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/334035743_Petroleum_exploration_increases_methane_emissions_from_northern_peatlandshttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/339595392_Methane_emissions_from_fens_in_Alberta's_boreal_region_reference_data_for_functional_evaluation_of_restoration_outcomeshttps://www.aer.ca/protecting-what-matters/holding-industry-accountable/industry-performance/methane-performance
While Canadians have watched in disbelief as European Union members such as Ireland considers culling 200,000 cows to save the climate from farts, our Federal Liberal government upped their proposed methane emission cuts for Canada’s oil and gas sector to 75% below 2012 levels by 2030.Common sense Canadians understand that we are facing with an affordability crisis right now. Yet so many Western liberal democracies seem dead set on further restricting the supply of every day commodities like food and fuel?Equally frustrating for me as a Canadian scientist is that there is no credible frame of reference being offered to compare our national methane emissions against those from Mother Nature.Without such a relative comparison, how are we to quantify risk. Yes folks, I am talking about the need to quantify the mass of farts coming from grazing herbivores, termites and bacteria.If Canadian’s methane emissions are such an existential threat to the climate, then why not show conclusive evidence demonstrating that our methane emissions are 10 times higher than those from Mother Nature?As no such comparison has been offered for Canadians, I have attempted to do so.Last month I wrote an article titled Some people have a commercial reason to end Canadian gas exports (1), where I argued that large area source emission rates are impossible to directly measure and that estimates are best guesses with large uncertainties. An example of a large area source in nature would be a marsh or muskeg, such as commonly found across Canada’s Boreal Forests.According to Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) (2), muskeg (aka fen) covers approximately 12% (79,000 km2), swamps 2.7% (17,900 km2) and bogs 1.8% (11,900 km2) of Alberta’s land area. Figure 1 shows that most of these peatland ecosystems are located in northern Alberta..Therefore, there are over 110,000 km2 of peatlands in Alberta that are actively releasing marsh gases, comprised largely of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). Furthermore, there are over 1.1 million square kilometers of peatlands spread across Canada’s northern regions (3). Good luck getting funding to accurately estimate both the magnitude and natural variability of background emission rates from Canada’s massive peatlands. There are no taxation revenues to be derived.What is usually done in the literature is to make many small, yet inexpensive measurements on areas typically less than 1 m2 and then use this data to extrapolate over much larger areas. This extrapolation is in itself a huge source of uncertainty. These rudimentary tests are commonly done using a small flux chamber placed on the ground to capture gases moving upwards towards through the soil and into the atmosphere. These chambers are closed on the air side and open on the ground side, which allows any gases entering the chamber from the soil to be collected in air tight bags for subsequent analysis. Note that for a variety of fundamental reasons, flux chamber estimates are highly conservative and should be viewed as a minimum estimate versus reality.As I am a sucker of punishment, I conducted an extensive literature review of published flux chamber tests across the Northern Hemisphere that aimed to produce rudimentary estimates of methane emissions from boreal peatland ecosystems.One of the most useful recent studies that I came across was done by Professor Maria Strack’s University of Waterloo research group (4), which has attempted to answer this very question with respect to northern Alberta’s peatlands.Using the data-base of flux chamber values from this body of research (5), together with ABMI data on the approximate size of Alberta’s fens (aka muskeg), bogs and marshes, I was able to estimate a mean CH4 emission estimate of 615,000 tonnes per year (tpy), together with a variance of 350,000 to 1 million tpy.Note that this is an estimate of background CH4 emissions from peatlands only and does not include those of CO2. .When we compare these background CH4 emission rates to the reported CH4 emissions from Alberta’s oil and gas sector (6) from 2014 to present (Figure 2), we find that mean CH4 emission rates from Mother Nature’s Albertan peatlands are nearly equivalent. Note also the huge variability.Furthermore, Figure 2 shows that fugitive CH4 emissions from Alberta’s oil and gas industry have been steadily declining since 2014. The two vertical axes represent both absolute tonnes per year (right) and their equivalent basis to the theoretical Global Warming Potential (GWP) relative to CO2 (left). The theoretical GWP of CH4 assumes that 1 tonne of CH4 emissions has an equivalent warming effect as 28 tonnes of CO2 emissions.When we consider that Alberta’s peatlands are a mere 10% of national peatland landscapes, it is fair to suggest that Canada’s peatland ecosystem mean CH4 emissions are 10 times higher than those from Alberta alone.Finally, if more advanced methods were used instead of cheap flux chambers, actual background emission rates and their variability, would be significantly higher than 10x that of the oil and gas sectorI would be more than happy to address specific questions from our regulators or from academia as to how I arrived at these values. Referenceshttps://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/fournier-some-people-have-a-commercial-reason-to-end-canadian-gas-exports/55168https://wetland-report.abmi.ca/atlas-homehttps://globalpeatlands.org/canadas-peatlands-towards-a-national-assessmenthttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/334035743_Petroleum_exploration_increases_methane_emissions_from_northern_peatlandshttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/339595392_Methane_emissions_from_fens_in_Alberta's_boreal_region_reference_data_for_functional_evaluation_of_restoration_outcomeshttps://www.aer.ca/protecting-what-matters/holding-industry-accountable/industry-performance/methane-performance
