Texas Hold'em: Playing Poker With Methane - Ep167: Grant Swartzwelder

Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change

Depending on who you ask, methane is either a useful transition fuel to a low-carbon future, or a super polluter. The science of methane says that for natural gas to have a lower climate footprint than other fossil fuels, particularly coal, there can be leakage of no more than 3.2% from end to end. Yet studies across the US show wildly different leakage rates. One of the most influential, by Robert Howarth of Cornell University, puts it at 4.8%, making methane worse for the environment than coal. The EPA tells a different story, and says leakage rates are just 0.93%. All of this really matters for the climate, especially since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The US has become the world's biggest producer and exporter of natural gas, and hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested globally on the premise that natural gas is a cleaner stop-gap between our fossil present and our low-carbon future. So who's right? And how can we find ways to reduce those methane emissions in either case. Grant Swartzwelder, founder of OTA Environmental Solutions and ESG Dynamics, based in Dallas, Texas, joins Cleaning Up to tease out the problem.

More links/resources:

• OTA Environmental Solutions - https://otaenvironmentalsolutions.com
• ESG Dynamics - https://esg-dynamics.com
• Robert Howarth study into US methane leakage rates - https://www.research.howarthlab.org/documents/Howarth2022_EM_Magazine_methane.pdf
• International Energy Agency methane tracker 2024 - https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2024
• Cleaning Up Episode 157 - Leaking Methane Needs an Urgent Fix - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIK8Z7oZMps
• Cleaning Up Episode 146 - Jason Anderson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWUzOZmJSlI