SinoSiberian pipeline natural gas deal will provide 1/10 China's power

[Pete at Home]

Meanwhile, Russia meets China

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-china-gas-pipeline-gazprom-switches-on-power-of-siberia-link/ar-BBXG8nQ?ocid=spartanntp

That's a pretty dazzling conversion away from coal.  Is anyone other than G6 going to mourn this?

[DonaldD]

I don't know about the G6 having issues with this - most G6 countries, with the possible exception of the US, will probably applaud at least the reduction in carbon emissions entailed by replacing even planned coal fired power with less CO2-heavy options.

Now, natural gas is still nowhere near perfect, but reducing China's dependency on coal is hugely important and necessary globally - and not just from the perspective of emissions, but politically; too often we hear the self-serving argument "why should we do anything here about CO2?  Look at China - they pollute way more than we do!" 

[Pete at Home]

I don't know about the G6 having issues with this - most G6 countries, with the possible exception of the US, will probably applaud at least the reduction in carbon emissions entailed by replacing even planned coal fired power with less CO2-heavy options.

Now, natural gas is still nowhere near perfect, but reducing China's dependency on coal is hugely important and necessary globally - and not just from the perspective of emissions, but politically; too often we hear the self-serving argument "why should we do anything here about CO2?  Look at China - they pollute way more than we do!"

On this forum, I was astonished to see Methane attacked from the left, as in "methane produces CO2 just like coal."   Methane doesn't put heavy metals in the air and water.

Oxygen depletion is another problem.

[Fenring]

Is anyone other than G6 going to mourn this?

I don't know about the G6 having issues with this - most G6 countries, with the possible exception of the US, will probably applaud at least the reduction in carbon emissions entailed by replacing even planned coal fired power with less CO2-heavy options.

I think there may be confusion here between the G7 countries, and between G6, the person 

[Seriati]

Good news environmentally, not so good geo-politically.

...but politically; too often we hear the self-serving argument "why should we do anything here about CO2?  Look at China - they pollute way more than we do!"

Lol, nice strawman.

[TheDrake]

There's also G6 meaning the six largest European countries, says wikipedia.

[Fenring]

There's also G6 meaning the six largest European countries, says wikipedia.

Hm, now I'm not sure any more!

[Pete at Home]

Is anyone other than G6 going to mourn this?

I don't know about the G6 having issues with this - most G6 countries, with the possible exception of the US, will probably applaud at least the reduction in carbon emissions entailed by replacing even planned coal fired power with less CO2-heavy options.

I think there may be confusion here between the G7 countries, and between G6, the person 

  yup

[Pete at Home]

There's also G6 meaning the six largest European countries, says wikipedia.

I don’t think those g6 will have any problem with big Asian Methane (bam)

[Wayward Son]

Oxygen depletion is another problem.

Just to put your mind at ease, I'm pretty sure oxygen depletion is not a problem now.

I read an article on whether the burning of the rainforest would affect our oxygen supply.  The consensus was that there is more than enough oxygen in reserve in our atmosphere to provide for life for the foreseeable future.  It would go down, of course, but by such a small percentage per year that it would not be noticeable.

If burning the rainforests has negligible effect, I'm sure methane conversion to CO2 would be similarly negligible.  (There is approximately 1.1E18 kg of O2 in the atmosphere, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations.)

[Pete at Home]

Oxygen depletion is another problem.

Just to put your mind at ease, I'm pretty sure oxygen depletion is not a problem now.

I read an article on whether the burning of the rainforest would affect our oxygen supply.  The consensus was that there is more than enough oxygen in reserve in our atmosphere to provide for life for the foreseeable future.  It would go down, of course, but by such a small percentage per year that it would not be noticeable.

If burning the rainforests has negligible effect, I'm sure methane conversion to CO2 would be similarly negligible.  (There is approximately 1.1E18 kg of O2 in the atmosphere, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I had understood that today's oxygen is too low for most of the multicellular species in earth's history to survive.  For example, the gigantic ferns and enormous insects of the Jurassic could not survive in today's atmosphere.  At that rate, oxygen depletion might bother us in, say, half a billion years.

I don't think burning the rainforest creates the oxygen depletion problem.  Burning CH4 +2O2--> CO2+2H2O,  The CO2 gets reclaimed (more or less, depending on how many rain forests and such that we haven't burned down yet) but half the oxygen gets tied up in Water, which doesn't naturally get converted back to molecular oxygen.

[Wayward Son]

Well, the rain forests are one of the major converters--and therefore producers--of oxygen in our atmosphere, so if they were all burned down, there would be less oxygen created to replace that which is used in other processes.  So such a scenario would also deplete oxygen from our atmosphere.

However, at 1.1E18 kg of O2 in our atmosphere, we would need to emit about 5E16 kg of methane to deplete around 10 percent of it.  That's about 500 million billion kg by my calculations.  I'm not sure of what the estimated methane reserves are, but I suspect it falls far short of that.

[Pete at Home]

There’s a hard limit of how much h2o can float in the atmosphere but not to how much CO2. So long before deforestation depletes O2, the un-re-uptaken CO2 will cook us all

[Wayward Son]

...half the oxygen gets tied up in Water, which doesn't naturally get converted back to molecular oxygen.

That statement got me thinking that there might be some plants that convert water into oxygen.

Turns out that I was wrong.  Some plants do not turn H2O into O2; practically all plants do, as part of photosynthesis.  The CO2 used gets converted into sugars.

So I wouldn't worry about oxygen depletion.