Russia and leaking methane: the anecdote

By popular request … (BTL here)

One of the few noteworthy outcomes from Cop26 in Glasgow was an international agreement to reduce methane leakage, CH4 being a far worse GHG than CO2, albeit much less persistent in the atmosphere.  Until then the gas had never received the attention it deserved, though if we get to the point where trapped methane from the Siberian permafrost starts escaping big-time, it certainly will.

There are many places in the western world – OK, in some states of the USA, to be precise – where regulatory standards for methane leakage and/or their enforcement, are essentially non-existent.  But the technology for tightening up on this is very straightforward, so it should be low-hanging fruit.  It’s important for every reason under the sun, but not least that methane leakage from the natural gas system as a whole gives shale fracking a bad name:  if you’ve ever paid close attention to the notorious anti-fracking film GasLand, the genuine problems it highlights are not really to do with fracking per se, but rather the leaky infrastructure downstream of the drilling.   

Needless to say, (a) the COP26 agreement is being resisted by the oil & gas lobby in America; (b) Russia, China, India et al didn’t sign up to it anyway; and (c) by far the greatest culprit is of course Gazprom and the entire Russian gas system, which is as leaky as all Hell (and there’s a lot of leaking methane in Hell), on a scale hard to comprehend.  The World Bank has for 30 years been promoting schemes for doing something about it in Russia, whose own technology is not up to the job.

So to the story.  When I was in Moscow some years ago, one of the Russians I was on after-work-beer terms with told me this.  He was a mathematician working in the gas sector, and one day he was assigned to a small team that had been set the following challenge.  There were no gas meters to speak of in the entire Russian gas system, from one end to the other (domestic heat control was famously achieved by opening the windows in winter), but in order to satisfy certain World Bank requirements they needed to quantify gas leakage across the network.  They had some basic pressure readings etc at various points on the system, but they would need to develop some kind of modelling technique to derive an estimate of the methane lost.

Diligently, they worked on the task, and after some months came up with a complex formula for making the required estimate, in classic Russian fashion.  This they presented to the relevant Board member of Gazprom, who received their conclusions with interest.  He thanked them for their hard work, but told them that they’d overlooked something, namely the “environmental factor”.  What is that? they queried.  Well, he said, you take the formula you’ve come up with, and multiply the whole thing by 0.1.  Why? they asked.

He leaned forward, and quietly but pointedly said: Because we couldn’t be losing that much gas – could we, hmm?

ND