Ag efforts to reduce methane emissions fall short; paper advocates using zeolite minerals to trap it - Entrepreneur Generations

Capturing atmospheric methane could have an outsized impact on mitigating climate change, according to a newly published paper.

Many efforts to slow climate change hinge on reducing the carbon dioxide in the air, but methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas. Agriculture and livestock are the largest source of human-caused methane emissions, accounting for around 200 million tons annually; efforts have already been made to cut methane emissions in agriculture, but none have been completely effective, James Temple writes for the MIT Technology Review.

The paper says that "by developing systems to capture a few billion tons of methane from the atmosphere, we could reduce short-term warming much more than we would by removing far more carbon dioxide," Temple reports. "While it would likely be necessary to remove hundreds of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide to return to preindustrial levels, you’d only need to eliminate 3.2 billion tons of methane to get back to earlier levels of that gas. Doing so would reverse one-sixth of the total warming effect of all greenhouses gases in the atmosphere, the study found."

Rob Jackson, a professor of earth system science at Stanford University and the lead author of the paper, writes that "Methane removal would buy us considerable time to address the [larger] problem of carbon dioxide emissions."

The paper advocates using zeolites, a kind of mineral commonly used as as an industrial catalyst, to capture methane from the air. When zeolites are later burned they release carbon dioxide, but converting a greenhouse gas into a weaker one still helps a lot, Temple reports.

Jackson writes that it would be far easier to mitigate climate change by keeping methane and carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the first place instead of trying to remove it later. Temple notes that oil and gas companies are also a significant source of atmospheric methane through pipeline leaks and flaring, and that such companies have resisted efforts to tighten regulations.

from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2ERj5jn Ag efforts to reduce methane emissions fall short; paper advocates using zeolite minerals to trap it - Entrepreneur Generations

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