Engineering360: "Study: Methane emissions from oil and gas wells higher than previous estimates"

What percentage just leaks out of the ground naturally? Or from swamps? Or from animals? Pardon me.

... or, from the ocean floor? ...

Big omission on my part. Thank you.

...juss tryin' ta hepp...

I worked on an exploration drilling rig in the early 80s in SW Western Australia and the water bores in the area had a lot of methane seeping up in them. .

Some of the water points looked like soda water with the gas in the bore water.

We had not even started to drill but when we did we found the ground was so fractured naturally that it was like a leaky sponge for the gas.

Still you could light up the top of the water fill points. Shame the farmers couldn't capture the gas and put it to good use but then the Gov wouldn't get their cut for doing nothing but paper shuffling.

''Paper shufflers'' are the same the world over. They stay place long enough to retire, by doing nothing other than what (higher authority) tells them...

Yeah, I know. I look at all the oil field flares and think of the wasted energy. But oftentimes, the costs of capturing it, transporting it, and processing it, exceeds the value of the product. Otherwise people would be making money off of it.

I don't know anybody who would walk past a $20 bill laying on the ground.

Sour gas is one of the challenges of using the raw natural gas in the field. If there were sour gas tolerant generators, we could feed some power back into the grid to help power pumps and other equipment out there in the oil field. But again, there's that pesky capital cost, maintenance costs, and that ROI thing again.

Otherwise you need a lot of pipelines to get that gas back to a processing plant to get rid of the hydrogen sulfide. And pipelines don't seem to be very popular these days. Especially if your name is Keystone. I'm sad to say our current president is a complete idiot. He is a party puppet. Nothing more than an empty suit. Funny thing is that if people truly understood how much petroleum is actually delivered by pipeline, they might take a different view of them. Pipelines are much safer, more reliable, and cheaper than truck or rail.

But, I'll quit my crazy talk lest I'll be hunted down as one of those radicalized, extremist, insurrectionist domestic terrorist.