How Leaky is the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry?, with Eric Kort

Notable Quotes

• Oil and gas producers emit carbon to extract carbon: “When we’re doing the calculations, we’re actually using measurements to try to calculate what the carbon intensity is of the production—so, considering the emissions of [carbon dioxide] from the energy used to extract the oil or gas, as well as the methane lost in that process.” (5:20)
• Production can account for large proportions of total emissions from offshore natural gas: “Rather than the intensity of production being 10 percent of the end-use consumption, we’re talking about it being 50 percent of the total climate impact, which is a huge, huge difference and really could guide how we decide to produce these things moving forward and shows variance in climate impact that can be very large, depending on how we produce these fuels—not just if we use them.” (13:23)
• Observing production facilities can help reduce methane leaks: “There needs to be support for measurements to be made to identify what’s happening with emissions. If [federal and state governments] continue to rely on reported emissions from a bottom-up accounting estimate from the industry, there will always be a gap that we continually see now, and we’re not going to get at the big emitters and reduce them the way we want.” (21:44)

Top of the Stack

• “Excess Methane Emissions from Shallow Water Platforms Elevate the Carbon Intensity of US Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Production” by Alan M. Gorchov Negron, Eric A. Kort, Yuanlei Chen, Adam R. Brandt, Mackenzie L. Smith, Genevieve Plant, Alana K. Ayasse, Stefan Schwietzke, Daniel Zavala-Araiza, Catherine Hausman, and Ángel F. Adames-Corraliza
• Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth by Oliver Jeffers

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Eric Kort, associate professor in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan. Eric is one of the leading experts on methane emissions from the oil and gas industry and recently published a fascinating study looking at leaks coming from facilities in the Gulf of Mexico.

We'll talk about what he found and how it squares with other research on methane emissions from the onshore oil and gas industry. We'll also take a step back and talk about the broader trends in global methane concentrations and try to understand the causes for some unusual recent movements in those trends. This is a pretty technical topic, but Eric's explanations are clear enough that everyone will be able to understand what's going on with this crucial subject. Stay with us.

Okay. Eric Kort from the University of Michigan, welcome to Resources Radio.

Eric Kort: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Daniel Raimi: So, Eric, we're here in my basement in Ann Arbor, and you and I have talked many times about methane and oil and gas, but it's great to do it on the podcast here today. One of the things we always ask our guests is how they got interested in working on environmental topics—whether that interest developed as a kid or later in life. How did you kind of get interested in all this stuff?

Eric Kort: Sure. This is definitely a later-in-life thing for me. As a kid, I mostly was interested in sports. Academically, I got interested in physics, mostly because I liked solving problems. I ended up going to graduate school working in physics, doing laser physics and nanophotonics. The application at that point was trying to make a terabyte DVD-type technology. It was very tech, and I wasn't that motivated by that. That was when I started to think, Well, could I do something more applied or more useful?

That's when I discovered atmospheric science and was shocked coming from physics at how little we still knew about the atmosphere and climate and how much there still was to learn. That really motivated me and was exciting for me, and energy science I really only got into more recently through the atmosphere, when we made methane observations, and we were trying to understand why they looked the way they did, and it turned out the energy industry contributed, and so that's even more recent.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. Yeah, I was also into sports as a kid and didn't get interested in anything else until later in life.

We've done a couple shows over the years on methane emissions, so our listeners have a pretty good understanding on what methane is and how it contributes to climate change, but we haven't in a while talked about, specifically, methane from the oil and gas sector.

Can you give us a crash course on what we know about the extent of the problem of methane emissions from the US oil and gas sector? And also how much variation is there across different parts of the country?

Eric Kort: There's really been a tremendous amount of work done in the last about 15 years, trying to improve our understanding of what is going on with methane emissions. Specifically from oil and gas, the real focus has primarily been on onshore oil and gas and production in the United States. The emissions from end-use distribution—that still needs a lot more characterization.

For onshore production, the latest estimates put the loss rate—or the methane intensity, which is really the measure of how much methane is lost relative to the amount produced—right at about 2.5 percent for production. That's across the United States. Recent estimates suggest that that intensity has been declining a little bit over the years, but there is tremendous variation across the production fields in the United States. Estimates in basins like the Permian Basin had estimates of methane intensities over 8 percent earlier in the 2010s, whereas other basins like the Marcellus might be more like 1 percent.

There're a number of reasons for that. Somewhere like the Marcellus is a dedicated field primarily focused on natural gas. So, methane is the product; it's the commodity. A place like the Permian is focused a lot on oil, and the natural gas is kind of sometimes in the way, and so it makes sense that the loss rate would vary a lot. Actually, it's part of why I often say the loss rate is this simple metric and people use it or methane intensity, but it doesn't capture the full story. We're often trying to use, actually, carbon intensity now as a way to capture what we think is more relevant for the broader climate discussion, which is, what's the climate impact per unit of energy produced, whether that's natural gas or oil.

Daniel Raimi: That intensity you're talking about—does that take into account sort of the full life cycle of the fuel? So, methane emissions upstream, and then CO2 emissions when you burn the fuel? Or are you just thinking about process emissions and emissions associated with things other than combustion?

Eric Kort: That can be done all along the life-cycle chain. When we're doing the calculations, we're actually using measurements to try to actually calculate what the carbon intensity is of the production—so, considering the emissions of CO2 from the energy used to extract the oil or gas, as well as the methane lost in that process, and then that could be combined. You could then follow it along and say, Well, what's the end-use emission if you burn natural gas or if you burn gasoline in your car? You can combine the whole thing. You can also then say, "Oh, the carbon intensity of production of this fuel in this place, it might be five or 10 percent of the total climate impact." Or, in some cases where things might not be going well, it might be 50 percent.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. And that reminds me actually of an episode we did about a year ago with Debbie Gordon who wrote a book called No Standard Oil, which really helps us understand the different carbon intensities of different types of oils around the world.

So, one thing I think our listeners would be really interested in hearing about, because many of us are economists and policy folks, and we're not necessarily out in the field measuring stuff the way that you are—so, I'd love it if you could give us a sense on just nuts and bolts: How does this work? How do people go out into the field to measure methane emissions?

And then, how do you work? What are the types of things that you and your group do that might be different from what other groups do?

Eric Kort: There are a large number of ways people measure methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. I won't go through and detail all of them, but just to briefly touch, I'd say it's ground, air, and space.

There are ground-based measurements, which can be stationary sensors. You can think of them as a little bit like your carbon monoxide detector in your house. They might put a number of them around a site and try to keep track of winds to quantify emissions. People can drive, like, a van, essentially, around to try to quantify.

There's a lot of airborne work done. That can be done really with two very distinct measurement types. One is, you have a sensor that measures methane with great precision in the aircraft, and you draw air into the aircraft and measure it there, in which case you then have to fly that airplane near the facilities. You can either circle a facility or fly downwind. Or you can use remote sensing, where you have an instrument that actually looks downward from the aircraft at the field below it. Looking at different wavelengths can actually detect if there's more or less methane and use that to calculate it.

Actually, that method is how things are done from space. That aircraft remote sensing—you can imagine you can basically just get farther away and do that same thing from space. The vast majority of the results of US oil and gas–methane studies in the last 12 or 15 years really focused on airborne measurements. A real mixture of measurements made from the remote-sensing approach and the in-situ approach. In more recent years, there's really been a growth in the satellite-based space, and more and more studies are using satellite measurements, and more and more satellites are coming online.

My group tends to use mostly airborne and satellite measurements. We work with both of those, and in a number of the studies we've done recently we've done a lot of work with small aircraft and in-situ measurements, where we actually can take the aircraft and fly specifically around specific facilities, onshore or offshore, to be able to quantify emissions or performance of those facilities.

Daniel Raimi: Is it safe to say that you spend a lot of time in small airplanes flying around oil and gas fields?

Eric Kort: I'm chuckling partly because, as your listeners can't see, I'm rather tall, and the aircraft can be quite small. Yes, some of these aircraft, when I get folded in, I don't need a seatbelt, because I am wedged in.

I spend some time, and on these campaigns I often will fly on the airplane in the early flights. Nowadays, a lot of the members of my research group really spend a lot of time on the aircraft, and they really do the bulk of the work there. It can be quite fun and exciting. You need to have a solid stomach, because the airplane is quite bouncy when you fly around there. But it's part of what was the appeal for me, actually, going into the field, because I always liked airplanes, and so it can be fun. Then, scientifically, it's interesting, too, because, when you're in the airplane, you see the data in real time, and so you can see things happening, which can be exciting.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that does sound super fun. I would love to do that someday, although I wouldn't be a good candidate, because I have a weak stomach. That would not end well for me.

Let's talk now a little bit about the paper that you recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which of course we'll have a link to in the show notes. As you noted earlier, most of the research that's been done to date on oil and gas–related methane emissions has been from onshore sites—onshore fields, like the Permian and the Marcellus. But your paper is one of the first that gets out into the Gulf of Mexico and starts to really measure things offshore. So, what are some of the most important things that you found in that work? And how do they differ, if at all, from the types of results that we're seeing from onshore places?

Eric Kort: Yes, so this work is part of a larger study that's supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We call it “F3UEL” for short, where the “F” is cubed, so it's “Flaring and Fossil Fuels: Uncovering Emissions and Losses.” And it has two components. It was really designed—we thought there were two focus points that were largely understudied. One was natural gas flares and how effective their combustion is. That's a different conversation. And the other is offshore oil and gas, which really was out of sight, out of mind; and, globally, about a third of the oil and gas in the world is produced offshore. So, we really thought it was important to go and make these direct measurements.

As part of this study, we went to the Gulf of Mexico. We've actually done repeat visits now, where we sampled with the small aircraft facilities, and we actually sampled across the range of types of facilities. And one of the best ways to characterize that in the Gulf is across depth—so, from very shallow-water state facilities in the state jurisdiction to shallow-water federal, to mid-depth, to very deep and ultra-deep facilities.

What we found was really fascinating. We measured the emissions of methane, which is primarily a loss—unless it's intentionally vented, it's still a loss, but it's intentional. We also measured carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide—so, the combustion emissions from the facilities. For the most part, the combustion emissions reported by inventories tended to match quite well with what we saw in the observations. That was not the case with methane, which is perhaps not a surprise and aligns with onshore.

But there was a really stark feature to this, which is it was really in the shallow waters that there was this gross discrepancy in where the very high methane emissions came from. Specifically, these facilities we kind of call “central hubs,” where there's a facility that has a lot of other activities besides just the production. So, there's a little bit of processing, a little bit of storage. In shallow waters, these tend to be very horizontally built out and then they have wells that are kind of drilled around it. It looks pretty different from the infrastructure you think of—when you think of an offshore platform, you think of those big, modern, vertically built-up facilities. These shallow-water central hubs are where we saw very high methane emissions.

When we put all this together, what did that mean? Well, it meant, as a whole, in the Gulf of Mexico, the carbon intensity—so, the amount of CO2 equivalent that's emitted per megajoule of energy produced—is about twice what the inventory reports. It's still not a terribly high number for the Gulf. It's about five in these units, but it varied drastically.

If you actually get into the state shallow-water facilities, that number was something like 50, which is starting to approach what the end-use impact is of burning natural gas to heat your home or something like that. We're talking about, rather than the intensity of production being 10 percent of the end-use consumption, we're talking about it being 50 percent of the total climate impact, which is a huge, huge difference and really could guide how we decide to produce these things moving forward, and shows variance in climate impact that can be very large, depending on how we produce these fuels—not just if we use them.

Daniel Raimi: I'm wondering also if it tells us anything about the types of operators who operate these facilities—the ultra-deepwater production. These are extremely, extremely sophisticated operations. We're talking about the biggest oil and gas companies in the world and the service providers—obviously, things do go wrong sometimes with them. I'm not trying to say they don't, but in other studies that I've read (and anecdotally, I've heard), the larger operators in some cases may be better at controlling their methane emissions than some of the smaller operators. Is there anything going on there? These onshore or close-to-onshore hub facilities—do they tend to be operated by smaller operators? And are there any trends that we can discern from what you found about performance from larger versus smaller companies?

Eric Kort: That's a great question. We did not specifically break this down by company, but there are a number of correlated features that go along with depth, right? The deeper waters tend to be these big companies. They're newer platforms, too. The shallow-water facilities tend to be much older. They tend to have changed hands and ownership many times, and they're just physically different infrastructure. And, much like what we see onshore, actually, the older facilities that maybe have changed hands a lot might be places where you tend to see higher emissions. They also tend to produce a lot less oil and gas per facility. The production volumes are massive in these deepwater sites, and they tend to be much lower in these sites, as well. On the aircraft, we actually also had infrared-camera imagery we would use to try to help identify, if we could, where the methane was coming from from these facilities.

We're still working on classification, but it does seem to be the case that oftentimes, these shallow-water facilities are cold venting a lot. What is cold venting? Cold venting is a release of methane off of the facility. Why it’s called cold venting is simply because, actually, historically, in the offshore business, flares where you burn the gas at the end of the pipe and vents, the terms were used interchangeably to the extent that it went down a pipe and left. Whether there was a flame at the end or not wasn't really a detail that was paid a lot of attention to. Then, venting was renamed “cold venting” to specify that it's not a lit flare.

Daniel Raimi: That's really interesting. I've been around this stuff a long time, but I'd never heard the term cold venting.

One of the things that is an obvious next question is, Once these leaks are identified, how are they fixed? And with onshore oil and gas infrastructure, this process is relatively straightforward. There are often tanks with valves that need to be replaced or other infrastructure that can be replaced relatively simply. I'm wondering if that process is more complicated offshore.

Obviously, you're operating in a marine environment; the weather patterns are going to be different. There might be corrosion associated with the saltwater. Can you talk a little bit about the differences between fixing these problems onshore versus offshore?

Eric Kort: Yes, and I would say the first challenge onshore and offshore is you need to know you're emitting it and that you're emitting it at significant volumes. And that's often a gap or a problem, and that's part of where observations and observation systems can really play an important role in identifying opportunities—which is what I view them as—to reduce emissions, and, then, ensuring that mitigation measures actually are effective. Based off what I just said, in some ways a lot of the emissions we see that are coming from these cold vents—that's pretty much as easy a problem to mitigate as you could have, because you actually could, in many cases with really minimal costs, turn that into a flare.

Now, you want to make sure your flare is burning efficiently, but, frankly, even if it's burning pretty inefficiently, it's still a lot better than just directly venting it. Reducing how much gas is being put out that cold vent—how technically feasible it is really depends on the circumstance at hand, but reducing that would also help a lot. We don't know if the companies know that they're venting the magnitudes that they are. It's actually not always easy to meter these things very accurately. Depending on how much oil you produce, you may or may not be required to meter it, and so it's not necessarily malicious. It could also be ignorance.

Offshore sounds more daunting in a lot of these regards, but the deep facilities we measured also tended to emit very low amounts of methane compared to how much oil and gas are produced in those facilities. In some ways, that's also an illustration that, in a facility that's well-maintained and well-supervised, low emissions rates can be achieved. So, that's what I would point to there. I would finally say offshore in some ways is easier than onshore, because it is, even in these shallow waters, far more concentrated than it is onshore. There can still be thousands of platforms, but it's still more concentrated onto the platforms, whereas onshore, it can really become very messy in these oil and gas fields in the United States.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that's a great point. If listeners have ever driven around oil and gas fields in the Bakken or the Permian or elsewhere, I mean, you can just be surrounded as far as the eye can see by oil and gas infrastructure. So, that's a really good point.

Let's talk now about policy for a second. I know policy's not your main focus area, but can you give us just a general sense of what policies are in place, either at the state or federal level, to address these offshore methane emissions? You mentioned earlier some of the wells are in state jurisdictions; some are in federal jurisdictions. The US Environmental Protection Agency has methane regulations that it enacts, and there's also a methane fee that was passed as part of the—I want to say Inflation Reduction Act, but maybe it was one of the other ones. Can you just talk about that policy environment, how it differs between state and federal jurisdiction, and then any other policy thoughts you might want to share?

Eric Kort: Yes, and this is a very dynamic and complicated space right now. There's a lot of action at the federal level in terms of what might happen with methane, and a lot of that is still to be determined. For the offshore, I think the first thing I would say is “out of sight, out of mind” is powerful. The offshore really is out of sight; it's out of mind. So, for the most part, it has less scrutiny and less tight regulation than onshore. It can be very hard to parse and figure that out, actually, because there's this complication. Is it federal water? Is it state water?

One example of out of sight, out of mind: Early on, when we were doing this work, we actually realized that the state water facilities—the methane emissions from those facilities were not reported in any inventory anywhere. They weren't in the federal inventory; they weren't in the state inventory. They were just missing. We also realized that the federal estimates of platform counts hadn't been updated in 10 years. So, there's a lot of out of sight, out of mind here.

A lot of these facilities could or should fall under what might come out of the various methane rules in the Inflation Reduction Act bill. We need to really see how those get implemented. For example, there's this super-emitter response program that says if a facility emits over 100 kilograms an hour, and there's an observation of that, it needs to be addressed. It's still being determined how that would be implemented and how that would be used. A lot of facilities we observed were emitting over that threshold.

The big thing I say on this front is it's critical for the implementation of these things to succeed for observations to be foundational in this. There needs to be support for measurements to be made to identify what's happening with emissions. If they continue to rely on reported emissions from a bottom-up accounting estimate from the industry, there will always be a gap that we continually see now, and we're not going to get at the big emitters and reduce them the way we want. The way some of the early draft language is written indicates there might be a pathway for observations to be there. As far as I know, there's no funded support for that. So, I think that's still the critical gap, and really, the implementation challenge here is, How can there be a fund to support ongoing observations? And then, how can those observations be used to ensure emissions are as low as everybody would like them to be?

Daniel Raimi: That's such a good point. It just reminds me of the adage that I've heard Mark Brownstein from the Environmental Defense Fund say a million times, which is, "What gets measured, gets managed." That seems like a crucial part of the policy response here.

So, we've been talking about oil and gas related methane emissions for the last 20 minutes or so, but I'd love for us to zoom out and think about methane emissions writ large. Methane emissions come from all sorts of other activities—landfills; cows, as everybody famously knows; and plenty of other sources, like rice cultivation. The trend in atmospheric methane concentrations has generally been going up for the last several decades, at least in the data that I've seen.

But there was this kind of interesting period between about 2000 and 2008 when methane concentrations were basically flat at a global level, and then they started resuming upward again after 2008. Can you help us understand the big-picture trends in atmosphere, concentrations of methane emissions, and the contributors of those trends? It's not just emissions that matter here, but it's also methane sinks. I know this is a huge topic and really hard to summarize in just a few minutes, but I'd love for you to just try to give us a big-picture sense of what's going on with concentrations.

Eric Kort: I'll do my best to be succinct. Atmospheric methane, to me, is just fascinating. I mean, much like the other greenhouse gases in the last 150 years or so, we've seen this really accelerated growth and increase due to human activities. As you said for methane, those sources from human activities tend to be oil and gas; ruminants, which is really cows; agriculture, which is larger rice paddies; waste (so, landfills); natural sources—the biggest one is really wetlands, which is the largest single source. So, preindustrial methane levels in the atmosphere were about 750 parts per billion or so. Right now, we're at about 1,900, and we know that that increase is because of the anthropogenic, or the human, emissions. But methane got really kind of funky and interesting in the eighties; it was growing rapidly in the atmosphere.

That growth rate slowed in the nineties, and there was a lot of discussion about why that was: geopolitical impacts on oil and gas infrastructure with the Soviet Union being one speculated cause; changes in precipitation in wetlands; and a lot of different theories and discussions about the different components. Then, from about 2000 to 2007, atmospheric methane leveled off and there was a lot of discussion of, “Have we reached a new steady state?” and then in 2007 it started to grow again. So, that 2007 is the kind of renewed growth, and now, there's been kind of an accelerated growth, which is in the last five years or so; it's grown even more rapidly in the atmosphere.

It's hard to pinpoint one single explanation or cause for any of this. You invoked that stability period in 2000, 2007. There still isn't kind of a single cause, and it probably isn't a single cause. There's a number of factors that point to maybe some decreased wetland emissions and a little bit of a decrease in fossil emissions combined with a slight increase in atmospheric hydroxyl radical, which is the sink that removes methane. It’s not very well-understood why it would've been a little bit elevated in that period, but some indirect proxies for that suggest it was. The renewed growth then happened, and we got back to growing, and now the accelerated growth is the cause of where a lot of the studies, and dynamic discussion is now, Why has it been accelerating? And what is the cause?

With, I would say, the fear being that we're seeing carbon climate feedbacks, where tropical wetlands are accelerating their emissions in response to a climate response. At this point, kind of the most common estimates for the renewed growth and accelerated growth in recent years is more based in the tropics and more biogenic, but whether that relative contribution is of wetlands, or ruminants and cows, or waste is hard to disentangle at this point. Fossil emissions are definitely a part of all of this growth, as well.

Daniel Raimi: I know that we could spend hours talking about this issue of concentrations. Just one follow-up question on it—which, again, this might be an impossible question to try to answer, but when you are doing the science trying to figure out what are the causes of the sources and sinks, what are some of the strategies that scientists use to make those distinctions? Are there different chemical formations that you're looking for—different types of methane, basically—that can give you a signature about where this stuff is coming from? And how do you measure it? How do you think about it? I know we can't go deep on this, but I'd love just some examples, maybe.

Eric Kort: I'll give a couple of frameworks. There's different ways one can try to partition, How can we tell if methane is going up? What are the sources that are contributing? Well, one way is, if we make an extensive set of spatial measurements, we can actually see, Oh, there's this much coming from this oil and gas facility there; there's this much that's coming from this farm over here; there's this much from this landfill. If we do that comprehensively, you can put the whole picture together. We haven't been able to do that comprehensively. We're getting better and closer with the satellite measurements, but there's still a lot of challenges with it. There's cows wandering around, the oil and gas fields with a landfill in there, and so it's not perfect. But one way is extensive spatial coverage and measurements to be able to actually quantify the different sources in that emission. That's one approach to get at this problem. That's one way people try to tackle the problem.

Another approach is to try to look at the slightly different forms of methane that exist in the atmosphere. The predominant form of methane is with carbon weight 12. There's also a stable isotope weight 13—much less common. And there's also radioactive carbon-14, which decays away. A lot of work gets done with the stable isotopes, and there's also stable isotopes of hydrogen in there. Essentially, what happens is, if the molecule weighs a little bit more or less, it can have preference in different processes. So, you can kind of imagine that if you're in a wetland, that the heavier and lighter molecules might have slightly different preference. That means, when you look at the emissions of methane from a wetland compared to emissions that come from a thermogenic source, like oil and gas, the relative amount of carbon-12 and carbon-13 is different. By measuring the isotopes of methane, you can then try to say, Oh, if we see a drift in the isotopic composition, that's driven by an increase of sources that fall on one side or the other. It's tricky, because it means you need to know what the isotopic composition is of all of these different sources. There's the sink, and there's what happens with that. It's not clean, but it's another element and bit of information.

The radiocarbon I mentioned is actually the cleanest way to distinguish it, because fossil sources are old and have no radiocarbon. All of the biogenic sources are new and have some radiocarbon. So, it's actually a pretty clean distinguisher between thermogenic and biogenic. The problem there is one measurement of radiocarbon methane requires you to fill, like, a scuba tank with air, and it's extremely expensive. So, those measurements are limited, though there's a big effort underway now, actually, to try to expand those measurements to really help tighten our constraint on what is going on with future trends in that global growth rate.

Daniel Raimi: That's so interesting. I'm impressed that you can explain it as well as you can, because I understood that, and I don't understand a lot about science.

So, Eric, let's go now to our last question that we ask all of our guests, which is to recommend something that's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack. I see that you've brought something that is big and blue and looks like a lot of fun. Tell us about your recommendation.

Eric Kort: Sure. Yeah, I brought it here to show your listeners. I was excited to actually bring this, because I have two young children. I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old, and a lot of my reading time is reading with my kids, and I like to introduce different concepts to them that are really at their level, and I've really enjoyed this book. So, this is a children's book that I brought.

It's called Here We Are: Notes For Living On Planet Earth, by Oliver Jeffers, and I found this to be a really nice introduction that's really appropriate for quite young children to the concept of, We're living on a planet in a solar system. It's a shared planet. We use all these resources, we've learned a lot of things and developed a lot, but there's still a lot to be done to moving forward, and it kind of presents a lot of these concepts that touch upon living in a community, sustainability, working with the planet. A lot of that is touched upon very indirectly in a way that I think translates to young children. I've really enjoyed this book—so anyone with young children, I would recommend it.

Daniel Raimi: That's fascinating. I think I'm going to pick one up for my four-year-old, who I think will absolutely love it.

Well, one more time, Eric Kort from the University of Michigan. Thank you so much for coming on the show and helping us understand so much about methane in such a small amount of time. We really appreciate it.

Eric Kort: It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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