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Methane beer festival

26.12.2019

The contributions of humanity to the formation of a warm blanket of our planet from greenhouse gases, although insignificant, are numerous. And methane, which, in terms of its harmfulness, that is, its heat-holding capacity, gives a twenty-fold head start to carbon dioxide, is one of the most important. This means that the fight against methane emissions is a serious task for climate advocates. And in order to fight seriously, you need to study the enemy well. It would seem that he noted for himself that cows give a hundred million tons of methane per year, became a vegetarian and calmed down in the hope that he had made a feasible contribution to the uncompromising struggle for the cold. But even in this case, you can’t relax, because the enemy has many faces and can lurk in an unexpected place.

Let's take folk festivals. It would seem, where is the emission of methane? But Chen Jia and Florian Dietrich from the Technical University of Munich, with the help of Dutch colleagues and smart devices, got close to the famous Munich beer festival - Oktoberfest. According to them, for 16 days on the central square of Munich, 2018 million people fell to the sources of the foamy drink in 6. They drank 8 million liters of beer, spent 100 million liters of water flushing sewage, 2,9 million kW of electricity and 201 liters of natural gas, of which 79% went to cooking and the rest to heating visitors and vendors.

Before the start of the holiday, methane emission was almost zero, and during the holiday it increased to 6,7 micrograms per second per square meter. Over the weekend, the issue rate doubled, as did the number of visitors. It would seem that this directly indicates that the source of methane is people who excrete it like ruminants. An no. Although methane can be seen in the exhalation of half the people, its amount is small: Oktoberfest attendees could breathe in only 0,13 micrograms of gas per second per square meter of area. The sewage system, although it took 100 million liters of water and 8 million liters of drunk beer, produced negligibly little methane during the holiday - the processing of waste by bacteria requires much more time than 16 days. There remains the spent natural gas, which, in terms of methane, amounted to 134 tons. To ensure the calculated emission, 16 tons had to fly into the atmosphere in 1,47 days, that is, 1,1% is a completely normal estimate for gas leaks.

The conclusion follows from this: it is not beer at the holiday that contributes to global warming, but gas. Abandoning it, say, switching to spirit lamps or gasoline stoves, will significantly improve the situation. True, there was a question for the authors of the work. Usually for portable burners, namely they are used in mobile pavilions, bottled gas is used. And this is not methane at all, but a mixture of propane and butane. If just such a gas was used at Oktoberfest, then the search for a source of festive methane will have to continue.

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