Digestion’s End

Methane Part 1

“Solid needs void to engineer its composition, even the most despotic and survivalist solids are compositional solids, infected by the void.” This ( ) hole complex “unfolds holes as ambiguous entities — oscillating between surface and depth — within solid matrices fundamentally corrupting the latter’s consolidation and wholeness through perforations and terminal porosities.” For Lovecraft,1 “( )hole complex is the zone through which the Outside gradually but persistently emerges, creeps in (or out?) from the Inside. A complex of hole agencies and obscure surfaces unground the earth and turn it to the ultimate zone of emergence and uprising against its own passive planetdom, a time when, according to the Call of Cthulhu, ‘mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; greed and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.’” Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani

Put yourself, if you will, in the moment you’re turning on your gas stove: the confrontation with click click click click click click click click click whump. In that moment, you know everything you need to know about methane. It’s flammable, which is why you need it. The more clicks you hear, the bigger the explosion when the stove finally decides to yield its fire. Each click is a unit in an ongoing wager between your food, your subjectivity, and methane; at some point it will become too dangerous, and you’ll have to try another burner, even if it means rearranging heavy pots. The smell is the index of the wager, the cards on the table: you know you’re welcoming into your home not only methane but an unknown variety of contaminants and additives. You don’t want to be doing this; you want to be cooking. But instead you’re just standing there, clicking.

Don’t do it, by the way. Turn it off and jiggle the piece that sits on top of the burner. I learned that at thirty-seven years of age, having only ever used gas stoves.

And that’s how it is with methane. It’s the most unruly of the Fossil trinity, profoundly and by its very nature leaky. Once in a while, a building will explode. It’s a sign of decaying municipal infrastructure.

As coal lives at the beginning of the story of the dead god’s conquest of earth, so does methane live at the end. Coal never left, and gas was always here. But narratively, coal goes before oil and methane goes after. CH4 is the simplest hydrocarbon (with one carbon atom per molecule), is a gas at temperatures over -162ᵒC (your freezer hovers at around -15ᵒC).

If the function of a machine is what it does, then decomposition is a maker of methane. It’s the final product of complex trophic hierarchies, a final liberatory vaporization, and is not necessarily attained by all organic materials. Sometimes ecosystems emit methane, and sometimes they store the organic material as more complex hydrocarbons which then only break down into methane over impossibly long periods of time, or never if frozen. No wildcatter “discovered” natural gas; it’s always been around us. But the process of petrolocization, when it began, had no use for dispersed energy stores of ecosystems; it needs dense reservoirs that can be financialized. Methane is but one product of The Company.

All oil, if left in the ground long enough, will become methane gas. It is very rare deeper in the earth’s mantle, which is an oxidizing environment, like the atmosphere, and therefore breaks down methane within ten to thirty years of its emission.

Methane plays a starring role in the natural (prehuman) history of the Earth. For example, in the most dramatic mass extinction, the End Permian extinction 250 million years ago, something (perhaps an earthquake) caused the oceans to release a massive quantity of methane which then exploded in the atmosphere, literally setting the air on fire. Even scientists who don’t subscribe to the giant fireball story of the End Permian believe that enough methane was released to substantially decrease the concentration of oxygen, and organisms suffocated to death. More recently, the last 800,000 years have been punctuated by ice ages and their endings, periods of warming called Terminations, and numbered from “Termination IX, which happened about 800,000 years ago to Termination IA which initiated the modern climate less than 12,000 years ago.” In each case, something triggered the release of methane into the atmosphere — usually by expanding tropical wetlands, but also by massive wildfires, which led to a brief period of abrupt heating. In Termination IA, Greenland’s temperature rose by 10°C within a few decades . These events pushed methane from about 360 parts per billion (ppb) during the ice age to 700 ppb at the balmy peak of the interglacial period, which was, incidentally, where we were when the industrial revolution began. Today we’re at around 1,900 ppb.

Imagine a bit of algae settling in a precambrian ocean into a bed of very fine clay sediment. As that sediment is buried by the Earth’s cycles, it is compacted by the growing weight above, squeezing the clay into shale rock. As it does so, the methane leaks out, forming tiny alveoli of gas, many just microns across. In most places, this methane gets trapped in these alveoli throughout the otherwise-impenetrable shale rock. This is why it is possible to recover an even larger quantity by fracking, once that was popularized in the 2010s.

In other places, decomposing liquids pool amidst a jumble of broken chunks of rock, in which case methane is free to bubble up to the surface as the forces of time break the oil down into lighter and lighter molecules. This is fairly rare, geographically speaking, but when conditions are right, the reservoirs can be vast, almost oceanic.

When the reservoir is capped by a layer of unbroken rock, the gas pools below the ceiling, exerting upward pressure as it gets more and more compressed by the weight of time. Eventually, all the oil in the reservoir will be entirely metabolized into gas. It remains a gas even under pressure of thousands of feet of earth.

Some of the entities of methane:

• natural gas that can be commodified as fuel and sold mostly to utility compacts
• agricultural waste product, especially from the meatflesh industries (cow burps) and rice
• byproduct of nitrogen-fixing microorganisms
• product of natural decomposition in ecosystems, whether in balance or not
• thaw from previously frozen dead ecosystems.

You strike oil, you get gas, too, every time. You’ll have to make a decision about it: flare it off, or build infrastructure to be able to commodify it. The reason for the well is oil, and gas, like plastic later down the chain of production, is an inevitable side product. If you’re watching your bottom line and the numbers add up, you’ll build the pipeline. If you’re a wildcatter, you’ll flare. It was said that in East Texas in the 1930s, you could read a book at midnight in the middle of nowhere by the light of the gas flares.

I think you’re familiar with the atmospheric physics of methane. When burned, it releases less CO2 per unit of energy than oil and coal. But it doesn’t always get burned, it just leaks into the atmosphere where it is said to be about 30x more enthalpic than CO2. It barely matters that methane breaks down over the period of a few decades; a few decades is the time-frame on which the Termination is happening. They keep re-discovering and re-reporting on the fact that accounting for leaks, flammable natural gas is much worse for us than coal. The trouble is that no one really measures the leaks, and they certainly could be much bigger than what’s reported.

It is impossible to know how leaky all our gas infrastructure is. It could all very well be spewing vast amounts of methane into the air at every transition-point. We don’t know how much, and we don’t want to know. The gas leaks from every pore on its way into the factory or stove, and also it frequently explodes. We do know that methane levels suddenly surged in the 1990s, then plateaued for five years starting around 1999, a period when scientists hoped the methane cycle had reached a new equilibrium, before the growth suddenly started accelerating again in earnest, on a steepening curve, in 2006.

About 30% of that is attributable, via isotropic profile, to industrial leaks. Then there are the fumes of feedlots and other livestock operations, and also landfills and city dumps. But that greater part is from wetlands, beaver dams, permafrost, and other nonhuman sources. People in the disinformation business may find solace in the idea that the methane isn’t being released by humans — after all, it seems to exonerate their corporate masters. First of all, that thirty percent could be the difference between life and death. But more to the point, these facts only denote that we have triggered a cascade of positive feedback loops over which we may never be able to reassert control: it means that it is too late to avoid the most dramatic erathication in the natural history of the planet. These are sources of methane we can’t turn off.

Methane oxidizes into CO2 and hydrogen over about ten years. That does not make methane less important to as an agent of global enthalpy. All that means is that the methane we release right now matters the most right now. Makes right now a great time to go around blowing up pipelines under the Baltic Sea.

As we will see in later chapters that show the narrative thread between fracking, LNG, and the war in Ukraine, Methane will be the driving force of the 21st century as an object of and an occasion for war. Also, it will trigger the next big surge in erathication. The final bombogenesis of the storm will happen in a world where humanity no longer can effect it with its actions, because thawing ecosystems are belching out methane at an enormous rate. All will finally be forced to give up the dream of a decarbonized capitalism that was so virulently opposed at the time when it would have still made a difference.

most sources linked, except:

Charles Blanchard, The Extraction State: A History of Natural Gas in America, University of Pittsburgh, 2020.

Daniel Yergin, The Prize (is where the thing about being able to read at midnight in East Texas came from)