Why we should care about methane

Kara Miller: I’m Kara Miller.

Rob Stoner: And I’m Rob Stoner.

KM: And this is What if it works?, coming to you from the MIT Energy Initiative and looking at the energy solutions to climate change.

And today we’re joined by a researcher and entrepreneur who’s not afraid to swim against the tide.

Desirée Plata: There’s a lot of fantasy around climate change and the sense that if we can just really focus on developing renewables, that will solve all of our problems.

KM: Desiree Plata argues, yes, absolutely, develop renewables. But that’s not where the conversation should end.

DP: We need to have a plan that kind of gets us to that renewable future and does it in a way that minimizes emissions from our current practices. We can’t escape our current practices. So, I come from the great state of Maine, and there’s a phrase “we can’t get there from here.” When you ask someone directions, you can’t get to that renewable future from the state that we’re at right now without going through a transition.

KM: A transition that, as we’ll discuss, may involve making carbon dioxide. Today, a conversation with Desiéee Plata, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT and the co-director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. Desirée, welcome. Good to see you.

DP: And good to see you, too.

RS: Nice to see you, Desiree.

KM: So I’m just going to start with kind of a big, provocative statement that you made not long ago. This is a quote. “We can sit here today and entertain the fantasy that coal-based energy is going away, but I can tell you that is not the reality.” So, I heard you say that in a talk, and I think a lot of people would think like, wait, what? Aren’t we phasing out coal? Aren’t we sort of almost done with that? What is the reality and what’s the fantasy?

DP: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the reality is that coal is not going away at the rate that people imagine. And really, one of the big drivers for that is the fact that China and India are experiencing enormous economic growth. And that growth is underpinned by the extraction of coal in those nations. We have a perception here in the United States that coal is going away because of the natural gas boom actually, which displaced a lot of coal use. But even here in the U.S., coal is even undergoing a boom actually since the Russia/Ukraine conflict. The prices of coal have gone up. The reliance on coal is here and that’s necessary to meet our energy needs. So while we’d like to be going in the other direction, we’re actually not.

KM: So then when you look at that landscape, people assume coal’s sort of on its way out. But you’re saying really not as far as you can tell. Not the story the numbers tell, right?

DP: Yeah, that’s not the story the numbers tell. Now, I’ll say that lots of listeners are going to go Google this right now and you can find charts that will forecast the disappearance of coal through time. And you can look at coal for energy production decreasing and it looks like it’s decreasing all over the world. That’s just not the reality in a couple of very large holdings. And again, China, India, Indonesia, all extracting coal at fairly high rates because it’s necessary for their economy. It’s also talked about as socially just, right? So why should we tell other nations that they cannot use their domestic energy? Why should we tell them that they can’t experience economic growth? And so, there’s a bit of a social element tied into it that it’s not just about access to energy, but access to domestic energy and enabling their populations to experience the same prosperity that we’ve benefited from in the United States and in the European Union.

KM: So as somebody who wants to mitigate climate change, when you see that story with coal and you see the numbers and you understand the trajectory, but what does that say to you about what you should be doing? Or what we all should be doing?

DP: Yeah, what we all should be doing. I mean, what it says to me is that we’re going to have to be pursuing carbon removal strategies, carbon emissions reduction strategies—both for carbon dioxide that’s released during energy generation at large point sources like power plants, but also geologic sources of methane that are emitted anytime you open up a coal mine. So, thinking about those emissions terms in a very serious way and trying to develop novel strategies there. I also just want to say for a minute to give credit where it’s due that, you know, China and India have installed enormous amounts of renewable power as well and they should be celebrated for that. So, it’s just that the pace of growth in these very large populations is enormous and requires the utilization of that coal as well as the renewable energy sources. So, while global growth in renewables is faster than the global growth in fossil, our hunger for that energy outpaces our ability to install renewables. And that’s what keeps us pinned to coal, or one of the things.

RS: China also has different problems from countries in the sense of having not very many other resources to rely on. They don’t have natural gas, but they’ve also got this very industrialized economy and a concentration of people in big cities and terrible pollution problems. I mean, a lot of the really bad pollution days you see in the world are either in northern India or in China. The Chinese have transitioned rapidly toward electric vehicles over the last couple of years, and they’re still racing ahead.

KM: Yes. And you hear about, like BYD and these vehicles that we don’t have in America because of tariffs but like that are competing in many places with the Teslas of the world. So, it does seem like they’re the leader in solar…

RS: Well they’re coal powered cars….

KM: But it seems like there’s all of the above. Like, yeah, there’s coal. But yeah, they are. It doesn’t negate the fact that they are doing a lot with solar. They are doing a lot with electric cars.

DP: Yes, that’s right. Yeah. And so I just want to acknowledge that it’s not some ignorance of climate change that is driving these decisions. It’s really that drive towards more prosperity for all of their citizens and domestic availability of coal resources. And in India in particular, coal really underpins many facets of the economy. So the coal that’s moved on the trains, that subsidizes the movement of the people who move by train in order to get to work. And so it’s all kind of really embedded in how the base of the economy is structured.

KM: Rob, I know you’ve spent a lot of time in India. I feel like people sometimes in the U.S. will think, well, can’t people in countries that are developing now skip some technologies like skip the kind of dirty technologies that we went through and get right to the clean ones?

RS: In some measure, yes. But one of the challenges with transitioning away from coal is that you’re transitioning from a very, very energy dense medium to if renewables in the form of solar and wind, one that isn’t very energy dense, one that takes up a lot of real estate both in India and in China. I think there’s a certain amount of growing public pushback toward building these very, very large solar arrays and windmills in places where people can see them, along with the transmission lines that bring that power to market. So they’re making great strides in other areas as well, particularly the Chinese, with the development of nuclear technologies. And they just announced very recently that they’ve built and operated the world’s first so-called pebble bed reactor, which lends itself to very efficient use of uranium and very high temperature nuclear reactors. They’re building a lot of advanced reactors as well, far more than we are. So, they’re trying these other directions that work for them with their large populations and lack of land and more contention for land than we have. But it’s a really hard battle. They’re not cheaper and they take a lot of capital.

KM: So you talked about how when I think when we mined for coal, a whole bunch of methane comes out of the ground. Explain that. And people think, you know, heard of methane, but like, how does it compare to carbon dioxide as problematic in terms of global warming?

DP: Great question. I’ll give you a long answer to it. There’s a wonderful scientist here at MIT whose name is Penny Chisholm, and Penny wrote a great series of books called the Sunlight Series. And she’s got one of these books in particular that’s a children’s book, actually, and it’s called Buried Sunlight. And I think it’s important for people to recognize that all of our fossil fuels are buried sunlight energy, right? There was a microscopic plant at some point in history floating on the surface ocean that died and was buried and subducted under the continental shelves. There it experienced high pressures and temperatures and was essentially cooked into things like oil and coal and methane. So that methane is actually what’s called a thermogenic byproduct of that cooking process where you get coal, rocks, and oil, the liquids and gas, the lighter hydrocarbons. And so it’s there in the coal bed formation. It’s there when you extract oil. It’s a naturally occurring geologic thing. And when you open up a coal mine, there is going to be methane there. Now…

KM: And it just escapes into the air. You just like open up the ground. You know, people think like strip mining or something. You just open up the ground and it just goes up into the air.

DP: And that’s right. Or even if you dig a hole into the earth. And some of these mines can be miles below the earth’s surface. You can functionally think of them as networks of cities, almost like connected subway systems that are that are deep within the earth. They might be a minutes long elevator ride to get to some of these coal mines. So right away, you’re hearing energy intensity. You’ve got to get fresh air down there for the miners to breathe. You’ve got to make sure that that methane doesn’t accumulate to levels where it’s going to be explosive and present a big safety risk to the miners themselves. And so in order to mitigate that risk, they pulled air out of the mine to create a negative pressure that pulls fresh air in from outside. And that is called ventilation air. And that ventilation air is laden with methane. Now, those ventilation air shafts are moving air at astronomically high rates. So it can be on the order of 1,000,000 cubic feet a minute. That’s something like ten tractor trailers going past you in six seconds. It’s an enormous volume of air. And again, that is done in order to make sure the miners can breathe and to make sure methane doesn’t accumulate to explosive levels. It’s a safety measure. That ventilation air methane is responsible for a large amount of atmospheric methane emissions. And while not all mines are ventilated, some are surface strip mines. So I can’t give you a good breakdown of which is coming from that ventilation air and which is coming from the strip mines. But we know it accounts for somewhere around 50 million metric tons of methane annually. The atmospheric growth term for methane is around 20 million metric tons annually. And so if you could get just less than half of global coal mines to adopt a technology that destroyed that methane, you would stop the accumulation of methane in an instant, you know, with one technology. And then the atmosphere can start to clean itself through natural processes.

RS: So you’re saying you get back to the natural rate of evolution of methane at that point because you’re removing the anthropogenic source.

DP: Almost, at least for coal mining. Yes, there are many other anthropogenic sources of methane. Methane is really short lived in the atmosphere. It’s half life is on the order of about 12 years. And so what that means is if you could at least stop dumping so much methane into the atmosphere, you’d see a really fast cleaning process occurring. Where that methane is being destroyed by natural processes.

KM: Now, tell us why we should care about methane. I mean, carbon dioxide is what you hear about.

DP: You hear about carbon dioxide a lot. So in carbon dioxide equivalents, which is kind of the term that you hear about, methane is about 120 times as warming as CO2 instantaneously.

KM: Wow, so why don’t we talk about methane more? Well, that’s why you’re here.

DP: Yeah, that’s why I’m here. So the reason that we don’t talk about methane more is really because when we think about our global climate models, we’re thinking over very long timescales. What’s going to happen to us 100 years from now? And if you think about 100-year timescales, methane’s fate in the atmosphere is to naturally turn into CO2 anyway. And so most of the methane that’s emitted today will become CO2 over time. About 90% of it becomes CO2 over time and relatively short timescales. And so because we’re looking on that long time horizon, we say, well, it’s going to be CO2 anyway. And so our conversation hasn’t really emphasized methane. So when we look on that 100 year timescale, we say that our methane emissions might be equivalent to about 16% of our total greenhouse gas emissions. When you look on the 20-year time scale, our methane emissions are equivalent in total warming to CO2. So within the next 10 years, methane will warm the atmosphere as much as CO2, even though methane is more than 200 times less concentrated.

KM: Okay. So, but, if methane is going to become CO2, why is it so? I mean, why don’t we just sit around and wait for that to happen? What would be your argument for like, no, no, let’s get on this now. And why is it so much more warming than CO2 if it’s just going to become CO2?

DP: Yeah, really, really important question. So actually CO2 is a low and slow warmer. So we could drop CO2 emissions to zero today, which would be great. But the atmosphere wouldn’t feel it for 50 to 100 years because it’s accumulating over time. Methane does its damage right away. It’s a really potent, warmer, and then it slowly turns into CO2 in the atmosphere. If we could accelerate that process that’s going to happen anyway and get methane to become CO2 really quickly it wouldn’t get a chance to warm up the atmosphere the way that it does. That would allow us to change the rate of climate forcing that we’re going to experience in the next two decades that could potentially save us from passing so-called climate tipping points which people might have heard about.

So as we warm the planet, the rate of release of natural sources of methane actually increases. And so if we can pump the brakes on climate change, we could potentially reduce the amount of natural methane emissions that are going to occur in the next several decades. Now, some estimates say that if we drop anthropogenic emissions (manmade emissions) by 50% by 2030, we could save a half a degree warming by 2100. It’s actually the only gas that does that. Again, modulating CO2 today doesn’t change the rate of warming. It changes the absolute amount of warming that we’re going to experience. Methane is the only thing, the only greenhouse gas, that will change the rate of warming in our lifetimes.

RS: I think it’s important to also get your head around the fact that it’s not equivalent to the same amount of CO2. I mean, so you’d only have to remove or reduce CO2 emissions to correct CO2 emissions by a relatively small amount to compensate for the additional CO2 that’s entering the atmosphere from the degradation of the methane.

DP: Yeah, you got it. So methane emissions are measured in millions of metric tons. CO2 emissions are measured in billions of metric tons. And so you can convert a lot of methane into CO2 and it doesn’t end up being a big input term. It’s like a minuscule contribution to global CO2 emissions. And again, that’s what was going to happen to it anyway. Methane was going to become CO2. All we’re doing is trying to accelerate that process so that methane doesn’t get a chance to warm the atmosphere.

KM: But turning it into CO2—I think it’s worth underlining this—helps to mitigate global warming.

DP: That’s right.

KM: Not what you think necessarily.

DP: Not what you think. Right. Because you hear about CO2 being so bad. And just to put some numbers on it, you could take half of the atmosphere’s methane and convert it to CO2. And the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would go from around 423 parts per million to 424 parts per million. All right. It’s a little blip in the CO2 contribution, but it saves you 16% of climate forcing over the next 100 years. It’s a huge, big deal.

KM: So I think we should talk about how you would do this. But, Rob, I wonder I mean, you’ve seen so many people developing so many technologies around climate change. Is Desiree unusual in A, talking about methane and B, creating carbon dioxide?

RS: Well, she is, but in a good way.

KM: Does she stand out?

RS: This is a very pragmatic perspective. I mean, there’s no question about it. And it’s a very healthy one. And I have to say, it’s not an unusual perspective at MIT. But this is looking coldly at the numbers and saying we could do this and have this very large impact relatively quickly and we should do that. But we also have to get on the CO2, and I think people appreciate that as well. And I don’t think you’re in any sense arguing that we don’t.

DP: That’s right. And I think people get really confused about that. They say, why coal? Why CO2? And I would love to see renewables expanded as quickly as possible. I would love to see us get away from fossil energy sources when and where we can. And we definitely need to get control of our CO2 emissions. That’s absolutely important. But the reality is that we’re going to have these emissions. And if I can do something to stop that accumulation, I’m not too proud to engage in that activity.

RS: So you’re not just telling an interesting story, though. I mean, you are an environmental engineer. You’re doing stuff. You’re researching it, but you’re also getting involved as an entrepreneur. Right? Tell us about that.

DP: Yeah, sure. So on the methane front, we’re standing up a company that’s called Moxair. So we’re trying to oxidize methane in the atmosphere or at very low concentrations. And we’re just founding this company. And it’s really the product of, you know, several years of research that we’ve been doing at MIT. And we’d like to get this into the hands of coal miners and others who have low-level methane emissions all over the globe, really as fast as we can. And this 2030 target is aggressive and on purpose because we really need to stand up these technologies in order to see that warming benefit to change the rate of climate.

RS: So we can get the Indians and Chinese to use this technology far less expensively then to pay them to switch away from coal, for example. I mean, it’s again, we’re all going to get in trouble for this.

DP: We’re all going to get into trouble for this. Yeah, no, that’s right. I mean, it would be it would be really lovely if we could get the technology adopted in China and India. There are a lot of hurdles to that. I will say that, you know, there’s really great people working in the governments on both sides who are trying to make this happen and to make it happen in a way that’s economically incentivized, if not politically mandated. And there are lots of barriers. And so we continue to try to be part of that conversation. I’m very tired most of the time. I take every phone call. You know, I hope to get a lot of phone calls because of that. But, yeah, I mean, if somebody calls and says, how can we think through how to remove barriers here, we try to engage on all fronts. And having a commercial entity is part of being able to do that successfully.

KM: So explain the technology. So let’s say I run a coal mine and I say, okay, this sounds interesting, and what is it that I’m buying or getting? And what does it look like and how does it work?

DP: So I think there’s kind of two categories of coal miners: ones that live in regulated environments that have really good pricing on carbon dioxide emissions reductions, and then ones that do not live in regulated environments and have kind of the wild west of carbon dioxide emissions credits.

KM: Where are the regulated places.

DP: In places like Australia and in the European Union. There are some pretty good financial incentives to be adopting methane emissions reductions at your coal mine. And in those cases, the miners themselves may reach out and say, “Look, I need this to be compliant. There’s going to be a tax on the amount of methane emissions that I emit to the atmosphere. So I have a quantifiable number that I can spend on your technology to stop that emission from happening.” So it puts a ceiling on what they’re going to be willing to spend for a technology, for an abatement technology.

They’re also allowed to sell that abated methane into global carbon markets. And so it’s kind of a win win. The technology can pay for itself on the order of, you know, 3 to 5 years in those cases. In Europe where they’re paying really very high dollar amounts for carbon dioxide credits, the technology could pay for itself even faster. And that’s remarkable.

In the United States, we don’t have the benefit of a really well constrained market for voluntary carbon dioxide market. And what that means is that there’s no reason a coal miner would want to buy this technology. Why would you? Right. It’s going to disrupt your infrastructure. It costs many millions of dollars to install the thing. These are… we’re talking about modulating the warming rates of the atmosphere. It is big stuff. And people need to recognize that it is going to cost a lot of money to build the thing to start with. This is a big filter that goes on the end of the fan unit that I described earlier that’s ventilating the mine. And then we warm that unit up and it starts destroying methane. And that’s great. But there’s a risk to the coal miner saying they want it because now they’ve got this big piece of infrastructure there. So in those unregulated spaces, there are actually third party developers who will come and say, hey, coal miner, I’ll cut a deal. I’ll pay for all this infrastructure and I’m going to give you a few bucks, you know, on the sale of the carbon and I’ll keep the rest to pay for the unit. And so we’re having to be creative about how we deploy these and really rely on miners saying, okay, I’ll take the risk.

KM: It’s one of those things I feel like also where expensive is a relative term, right? Like it may cost millions of dollars to, it sounds like, to install. Right? But on the other hand, it costs billions or trillions of dollars to clean up after storms that like ruin everybody’s house. And so you could argue it’s kind of cheap if you can mitigate some climate change and therefore have to save, you know, be able to save billions of dollars through like FEMA, you know, and the things you would have to do to help people.

DP: So I’m really glad you raised the point about extreme weather events. I think the number of billion-dollar storms has been steadily increasing over the past 20 years. I think it’s up over 20 annually now in the United States. So the American taxpayer is already paying for climate change. And I would love to see us pay for mitigation efforts. I don’t want to communicate false hope here. We are committed to a certain amount of climate change because of historic CO2 emissions and really contemporary methane emissions from the past 20 years or so. That amount of forcing will happen. But if we could spend just a fraction of those moneys on climate mitigation efforts, I think they would go a really long way. We have to incentivize the adoption of these emissions reduction technologies and right now we’re really not doing that very well.

KM: So there is, as you know, a lot of money companies, venture capital firms, wealthy families out there thinking about this issue, caring about it. Is it hard for you to make your case because either, A, this isn’t like something… people know what a solar panel is and people know what an electric car is… and you’re saying, well, this is this other thing you probably never heard of it, slash, is it hard to be like, here’s what I’d like some money for, to save the planet, making carbon dioxide? People are like ahhh… I mean, do you ever get that?

DP: I do get that a lot. I think people can get their head around the carbon dioxide thing because if you look at the numbers, it’s not a lot of carbon dioxide. That’s what it was going to become anyway. You know, a molecule of methane released always does more damage than a molecule of CO2 because it becomes a molecule of CO2. So if I can make that process faster and cut methane’s ability to warm the atmosphere, people are really on board with that.

What people don’t like investing in is coal, anything. Right? They don’t want to touch coal with a 20-foot pole. But the reality is that coal is here, natural gas is here. It is not going away. And we actually need it to get us to those renewable energy systems and all of the infrastructure that we’re imagining for the future. And so if we’re in that catch 22, we had better damn be sure that we are minimizing the emissions associated with those fossil energy sources. And that’s what I think people really, really struggle with. We want to be in that future, but we can’t quite leapfrog to that future yet. There’s a transition and somebody has got to support that transition in a real and meaningful way or else it’s going to get a lot worse.

RS: And we’ve got to get on this methane thing right away. So this is an appeal to all our listeners to invest in this race carefully. So this is not easy to raise venture capital funding for.

DP: Yeah, it’s really not very easy. And you know I give a lot of credit to my partners at Moxair who’ve been working very hard to raise capital for this and to, you know, the earnest folks who are willing to go into coal mines and say, look, this is how we can help reduce the carbon footprint of this process today. And that’s a really important part. I think, Rob, you mentioned, you know, we at MIT have classically tried to work with people to make more sustainable technologies and work with the technologies that are here today, including the fossil energy industry. And so that’s what we’ve really been trying to do. Like help us understand your problems, help us come up with creative solutions during this transition period to the future we want to see, that all of us want to see really.

RS: What about the other part of the fossil industry, the natural gas part of the fossil industry? Basically the methane part of the fossil industry.

DP: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, so natural gas, of course, its primary component is methane. There are a lot of what are called fugitive emissions across the entire natural gas production system from the time that you drop that well to the processing and refining of that methane, to the distribution into our homes. There are leaks all along the way, including that your natural gas stove that you might have in your home. And so how do we deal with that? Those actually you know, people know about flares or you can light a match and convert methane to CO2. That’s pretty easy. That only works…

RS: It’s got a downside.

DP: Yeah, it can be a downside. But that only works at really high concentrations of methane and most of the world’s methane emissions, at least 80% and probably closer to 90% are in this dilute and diffuse concentration range. And so the technology that we’ve tried to develop is actually doing that same combustion chemistry, methane to CO2, but it’s doing it catalytically inside of this porous clay that we’ve developed.

KM: So we’ve talked about a couple of things that you open up the ground for, right Natural gas and mining coal. Another thing that you open up the ground for is to get metals and we need those increasingly for these cleaner technologies that are part of a transition. But does methane also come out of the ground when you are like, well, we need a bunch of metals?

DP: Yeah, Yeah. There are certain there are certain mines in the world, in certain minerals, that do have enriched methane. Not all of them, but certainly some of them. And so it’s a concern there. I think that, you know, you bring up a really good point. In order to meet our modest 2040 sustainable development energy goals, I think we need something like four times the metals that we’ve ever extracted on planet Earth. And in order to get those metals, we dig really big holes in the ground. They can be 5,000 meters across and 500 meters deep and you can’t get to the bottom of those mines and back out with a battery. There’s no battery in the world that does that for you. And that very specific problem, beholdens you to diesel fuel and to fossil-based carbon sources, at least right now. You know, and so there’s a lot of innovation that needs to happen in mining so that we can get those minerals to the surface of the earth, enable that renewable energy transition, but do it in a way that doesn’t come with the really burdensome carbon footprint associated both with extraction as well as processing and refining those materials.

KM: I wonder, Rob, you know, when I hear what’s involved in mining metals that we use for, let’s say, electric cars, I don’t know, I wonder if you feel like that’s a blindspot that people tend to have where they think, well, I bought an electric car and now I’m good because like, you know, I’m sort of absolved. Whatever my neighbor with this gas-guzzling SUV is doing, I am doing none of that.

RS: Yeah.

KM: But it’s more complicated really.

RS: Yeah. Well, when you get that battery in your electric car, somebody is mining nickel. Probably from a soil deposit, a laterite deposit in probably Indonesia or some part of Southeast Asia. And a forest is falling and tailings are running into the ocean. I sent a student to look around in Indonesia where we have a lot of relationships and we’re working hard together just to see the scale of environmental damage and it’s horrendous. And that’s just from the extraction of Earth and exposing the material they want to dig in. But then they go into these horrific toil and trouble kind of processes that Desiree was talking about. And there are different pathways that they can follow. But but, Right. Getting electric cars here has all kinds of consequences. It has consequences for mining. It has consequences for electricity generation. We do a lot more of it. We use a lot more fossil fuels in the course of doing that. So, you know, it clearly it’s beneficial to move in the direction of electrification and we need to do it rapidly, but we really do have to pay attention to that metals production end. I like some of the stuff you’ve been talking about with recycling of batteries. As we get more and more of these batteries out there, we have the possibility of reusing that material.

DP: You got it. Yeah, so I think this is a really great example. And I would just underscore what you said, like people, you know, listening, you definitely should be, you know, moving towards electrification as kind of as fast as we can and we’re taking care of the metals problem. So I’ll say, you know, I have another prior startup company that spun out of my lab that uses a technique called electro extraction. So we don’t use the really high temperatures, we don’t use the acids and bases. We use just a fundamentally different process enabled by nanomaterials, largely developed during my PhD and afterwards. I was here at MIT. And, you know, my thing, my second PhD students is CEO of a company called N^th Cycle. And N^th Cycle just started the first domestic production of nickel and cobalt from recovered spent battery materials here in the U.S. So I got a great message from her the other day that said, you know, we just produced our first product and it’s working even better than we expected. And, you know, it just almost brings tears to your eyes because it’s so amazing. And it happens with 92% reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions.

KM: Because you’re using stuff that’s already out there. Don’t need to go back into the earth because we all have a whole bunch of stuff. Is this is coming from like old phones, old computers, old whatever?

DP: Largely old batteries today because like, you know, that first generation of hybrid electric vehicles and full electric vehicles, they’re starting to come offline and we can take those spent batteries and reuse them. There are also lots of different metals. You know, the technology really is very highly adaptable to lots of different, you know, metals in the periodic table. So you say send us your large volume e-waste and we’ll come up with a way to process it. And it’s really fun. You can go to our development plant here in Burlington, Mass. and look through, you know, just piles of old materials.

Data centers are another big one, you know. So where you have concentrated stocks of lots of metals, that’s great, because the economics starts to work. And it’s not just that we are not digging the hole, so to speak. We’re also not relying on those acids and bases and those high temperature processes. It’s really very different and it can be driven with renewable power. So it starts to decouple us and our mining supply from carbon emissions like we were talking about earlier. You don’t need the diesel truck anymore because you can use what you have already at the surface of the earth. The economy’s growing, so we still got to get more. So I don’t want to imply that it solves all your problems, but it’s a really important part of the problem. And the technology is adaptable that it might even be able to go into those tailing ponds and other spaces in mining.

RS: Yeah, so we’re not going to recycle our way out of the problem in the short term until we get so many cars out there that we’re sort of in equilibrium. We’re bringing in as many batteries and recycling them as we’re putting back into cars.

DP: You got it.

RS: So it’s decades away, but it’s still helping now. I mean, it means that some amount of environmental destruction doesn’t take place because we’re separating that.

DP: Yeah, that’s right. And if you’re a, you know, a synthetic chemist or materials scientist and I gave you a pile of used goods to use, you would look at me like I was insane. And you’d say, I want the 99.9999% purity. And what we’re, you know, engaged in some research that showing that you actually can get away with a little bit less. You can use recovered materials. We can produce a very high purity product. I should be very clear about that. But because of that, you can actually reuse it and there’s very little the product performs and performance is absolutely key. You know, we’re pursuing not just in more environmentally sustainable technologies but ones that work best in class. And so that’s, I think, an exciting outcrop and really a very new area of research that needs to be further explored.

KM: Do you… you know, we’ve talked about a lot of complexities to climate change that people don’t necessarily think about. Do you worry about our ability to address climate change or transitioning energy sources if we can’t talk about those complexities? I just wonder what you see and how you feel about that.

DP: Oh yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of fantasy around climate change and the sense that if we can just really focus on developing renewables that will solve all of our problems. We absolutely should be developing renewables and it is where we need to be going, but it doesn’t solve our near-term problems, and ignoring the transition will make it worse. We need to pay attention to the reality of the situation. We need to have a plan that kind of gets us to that renewable future and does it in a way that minimizes emissions from our current practices. We can’t escape our current practices. So I come from the great state of Maine, and there’s a phrase, “you can’t get there from here.” When you give someone directions, you can’t get to that renewable future from the state that we’re at right now without going through a transition. There’s a risk associated with that. There are strategies we can deploy and we should be deploying them. And the failure to talk about them is only going to handicap us in pursuit of those goals.

KM: How does that affect your level of optimism about what’s ahead?

DP: Yeah, I mean, I am ever the optimist. And I guess to give a specific example, when I was starting grad school in this place 21 years ago, I had to explain to people why they should care about the environment and why it should be embedded in their innovation practices. I don’t have to do that anymore.

RS: And it definitely was not the instinct at MIT 21 years ago.

DP: Oh for sure. Why would you do that, you foolish person? And now people come to me and say, we would really like to pursue this, and how can we do it systematically, quickly, cost effectively, and potentially even at a cost benefit? And I think that that’s the transition that we’re part of right now that I’m really excited to see is that, you know, caring about the environment actually shouldn’t be a filter or a patch or an economic cost. It should be an opportunity. And if we can kind of adapt our practices and value, you know, the environment and yes, take a little bit of time, but leverage all the innovation that’s going on, I think that we can get there.

RS: The methane mitigation strategy you’re talking about, you know, say if we just think about the mine example, is looking at a concentrated source but not a pure source of methane. It’s mixed with air and other gases that are coming out of the mine. And so the strategy of breaking down those methane molecules that are in that stream is a good one because you can’t really burn it. But if you can burn it, isn’t a smarter thing to do to aggregate a lot of small leaks and burn them, make electricity, and release it as CO2 into the atmosphere. What do you think about that?

DP: A lot of people love that idea. And that goes into the calculation where people say you could actually make money by stopping these diffuse leaks. A lot of these diffuse leaks happen in really remote regions where there’s no infrastructure to do that concentrating. And by the time you built it, the leak will be gone. Like these are transient in time. They’re transient in space, they’re in remote areas. So that’s another kind of bit of fantasy that I think is a little bit dangerous. We need to have alternative strategies to finding and abating those leaks, and destruction can be a very important one. We are, you know, just taking these methane molecules and breaking them apart. The cool thing about that is even when they’re at really low levels, they still release heat.

RS: There’s a lot of heat, right?

DP: Yeah, there’s a lot of heat there. And so if we’re at a coal mine and the air is moving itself, there’s actually enough methane there so that we just heat our reactor up once and then it’s self-sustaining. It’s carbon abatement for free, which doesn’t happen very often. So the cost goes way down, the energy requirement goes way down. That means a better net greenhouse gas reduction term because you’re not requiring lots of thermal energy to destroy that methane molecule. So it’s exciting for those reasons. It’s a really different type of carbon emissions reduction.

KM: Desirée Pata is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT. She’s a multifaceted entrepreneur. Thanks so much for being here.

DP: Thanks for having me.

KM: What if it works? is a production of the MIT Energy Initiative. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes and a lot more at energy.mit.edu/podcasts and you can learn more about the work of the Energy initiative and the energy transition at energy.mit.edu. Our original podcast artwork is by Zeitler Design. Special thanks to all the people at MITEI and MIT who make this show possible. I’m Kara Miller.

RS: And I’m Rob Stoner.

KM: Thanks for listening.