From cow burps to garbage mounds: The Methane Fix | ft. Hisham Mundol

[Podcast intro]

Welcome to the season five of the India Energy Hour podcast. This podcast explores the most pressing hurdles and promising opportunities of India energy transition through an in depth discussion on policies, financial markets, social movements and science. Your hosts for this episode are Shreya Jai, Delhi based energy and climate journalist and Dr. Sandeep Pai, Washington based energy transition researcher and author. The show is produced by 101 reporters, a pan India network of grassroots reporters that produces original stories from rural India. If you like our podcast, please rate us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or the platform where you listen to our podcast. Your support will help us reach a larger audience.

Methane is often overlooked in the climate change discourse, as against carbon. Methane is over 80 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 20-year period. Released from sources like livestock, landfills, and leaky oil and gas infrastructure, methane is a tricky problem to solve. 

In this episode we understand what methane emissions are and how to plug them. Cutting methane emissions can be one the fastest ways to slow global warming.

For this relevant issue, we talked with Hisham Mundol is a seasoned development sector executive with experience in both government and private entities.

[end]

[Podcast interview]

Sandeep Pai: Hisham, thank you so much for joining us today at the India Energy Hour. I don’t know why we haven’t had you before. It’s a surprise to me that you have not been on the podcast yet. I mean, it speaks more about us than you. But, anyway, really, really delighted to have you today. Thank you so much for joining.

Hisham Mundol: Thanks so much for having me, Sandeep.  I followed the podcast, and I find it thoughtful. So delighted to be here.

Sandeep Pai: Wonderful. So in our tradition of this podcast, because we have so many different people who are entering the energy space, the climate space, and there’s always a third hop path to get to this this space. There is no conventional sort of route that one takes. So we always like to start with sort of the person’s journey and, you know, where you’re from, what did you study, how did you actually get to work on interesting topics including methane and others.

Hisham Mundol: Sure. I’m gonna hang out on a limb and say I might have one of the more convoluted parts to how I got here, but, let’s start in the beginning, which is normally a good place to start. So, I’m from Kerala. The the surname is deceptive. Many think of it as from, Bengal, West Bengal or or Bihar or Orissa because of Mundal or Mandal. But this is actually Mundol, which is the name of a little village just south of the Karnataka border in Northern Kerala. So I’m as Mallu as they come. You can despite my best efforts, you can hear the accent kind of sneak in every once in a while. Again, carrying on with the Mallu theme, like most good Mallus, my parents decided to go abroad to The Gulf, as we call it in my land. But, my my my parents were adventurous. They they missed the usual hot spots of Sharjah and Dubai and Ras Al Khaim, and they got all the way to Libya. So left India when I was two, and it was in Libya, Malta, Austria, Nigeria, and then came back when I was 16. Completely ruthless. It is alleged by my mum that one of my first words when I got off the aircraft, as a 16 year old in, Bombay, as it was then called, airport, was, oh my god. There are so many Indian people around here. So that’s that’s how grand things were. Subsequently, I’ve kind of dropped anchor and then built some roots. I, then proceeded to study, and I wanted to do an MBA. So I managed to get into the Bajaj Institute, and I got a job with Hindustan Lever. And as a sales and marketing person, that was, really the pinnacle of what you could ever achieve. And I remember when I got into Hindustan Lever was, I think, the only moment in life when I sat down and said, I have achieved everything I could possibly ever want to achieve. I wish those moments come more frequently. But I then started a fifteen year career in the corporate world. I was in sales and marketing and consulting, and I worked and and and lived in Mumbai and in London. And then I had, about fifteen years ago now, what you only later accurately diagnose as the midlife crisis. The one where you wake up one morning and ask yourself, who am I? Or more worryingly, why am I? And I’ve tried to get an answer to that by saying, let me give back. You know, let me spend one year in the development space, that might help me find who I am and, the the whole purpose thing. That one year hasn’t quite worked out because I’ve been in the sector now for fifteen. But along the way, I’ve been, ridiculously privileged to work, in a wide set of thematic areas with some, remarkable organizations. I started with, with the government of India in public health where I helped run a couple of interventions and under the AIDS control organization, and then spent two years, two completely fascinating years with the Wikimedia Foundation, which is like the parent body to, free knowledge projects like Wikipedia, helping them set up, their portfolio and operations in in South Asia. For the next seven and a half or so years, I was with the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which is a private philanthropy. It’s a smaller a much smaller version of the Gates Foundation, but it is the world’s largest philanthropy dedicated to children. And, I help them, again, set up, and establish their operations in India. Until then, I hadn’t worked on climate change. And to be honest, it took me a while when you, you know, read in magazines and newspapers about this being an existential threat. What does that actually mean? And, it’s at safe that, two things started happening. One is that we started doing work on climate in India, and so I started learning about it. And, also, you were beginning to see in any other thematic area that you worked in, eventually, one of, the real risks down the horizon or, or an impediment to achieving whatever impact you were looking at, was, climate change. And so I was looking around for a place where I could pursue more, as a career. And I happened to find environmental defense fund, and they happened to find me, and, that’s how we got to where we are.

Shreya Jai: Very interesting. I, was really hoping that this was a wellness podcast and we could discuss midlife crisis, and you give us, some advice on that.

Hisham Mundol: So I have some advice. There are other options available when you have the midlife prices. You could, you know, buy the expensive sports car, which is the high end version of the solution. Another much more cost effective version is buy a fake leather jacket and a secondhand motorbike. There are many options. You don’t have to make this dramatic career shift just because you have a good life crisis. That’s for sure.

Shreya Jai: That would be a better idea because if I look at roads in Delhi, it seems like with the large SUVs, a lot of people are going through a midlife crisis. That brings me to the emissions problem. I’ll just ask Sandeep if he has anything further to ask or we’ll just jump into Maithe now.

Hisham Mundol: Is he allowed to ask about midlife crisis as well or are we not? Sorry.

Sandeep Pai: No, She already asked, so we keep it at that.

Shreya Jai: So we know we’re going through it among both of us.

Hisham Mundol: Right. Right.

Sandeep Pai:  I think we can start with the we have a lot to pick, Hisham’s brain on the methane, so we can actually dive in.

Shreya Jai: So I’ll just start with a very simple question, and this is for our listeners to understand. What exactly is the methane problem, and why does it matter in the whole climate discourse?

Hisham Mundol: Sure. Sure. So temperatures global temperatures are rising, and they’ve been rising since the start of the industrial age. They increase because of greenhouse gases. The one that most people know most about is carbon dioxide. And it’s obviously, carbon dioxide is a big part of the the the problem. Methane is also a greenhouse gas, but it has two things which are peculiar to it compared to carbon. One is it absorbs a lot more heat than carbon dioxide, even though it lasts in the atmosphere for shorter. So in the short run, and short in this case is defined as twenty years or so, it absorbs much more heat than carbon dioxide. As a result of which, it’s, is causing about a third of the increased temperatures that the planet is experiencing are caused by methane. There’s other gases as well like nitrous oxide, but methane is a particularly difficult one, because of the short term impact. The sources of methane emissions are different from carbon dioxide or indeed nitrous oxide. The solution sets are different, and there are many, including us, who say that methane is probably the fastest way to slow down the rate of warming on the planet because of its short term impact. And, some of its sources are more difficult than others, but some of them are relatively easier, faster fixes that you can put.

Sandeep Pai: Right. So just let’s just take that same question and, let’s try to understand what are the major sources of methane emissions in India, because this podcast is focused on India. And is it different from more global, trends?

Hisham Mundol: Sure. Sure. So, half the methane emissions from India come from livestock, and then the next contributing ones are, agriculture, mostly paddy fields. And then, you know, kind of almost at the same level are things like, waste. So landfills, oil and gas leakages, and transport leakages. You know, let’s go into each one of those. So on the livestock one, I do want to make the case for cattle because they’ve got a little bit of bad press. It does come from a gas, but it’s not where you think it is. It’s from relatively more benign burping because of the nature of how they digest food. India has 300,000,000 heads of cattle. India is the world’s biggest milk producer. India makes a quarter of the world’s milk. And so, you know, you can understand that India has a methane a significant component of methane from livestock. On rice, it’s basically if you flood an area or you keep it submerged or relatively moist over a period of time and then it’s got, you know, vegetation in there, it will generate methane. That’s the same reason why a landfill generates methane from the food waste that goes into a landfill and moisture that also enters there. The oil and gas one is a different one. The oil and gas one is when you’re extracting gas, there is a risk of leakages of methane. And, in India, it’s maybe 5% to 10% is the broad number of where it’s coming from in the oil and gas sector. So that’s how it’s split up across sectors. How it’s different from other countries is that the share of livestock is lower in global numbers and the share of oil share of oil and gas is higher, because you don’t have such a big livestock population across the world. So it’s a more balanced oil and gas, as the main sector followed by livestock and agriculture and waste globally.

Sandeep Pai: Let me ask the next question, which is which is I think it right now, the whole field globally and in India is grappling with, which is the question of measurements. There are so many different methods. If you can describe what are some of the key challenges for each method, and also, like, how do we reconcile the top down, the bottom up, and all of that?

Hisham Mundol: Sure. So there’s two ways that you can do the measurement. One is if you would take a bottoms up approach, from a theoretical perspective, if I can call it that, which is to say, you know, each cow, if they are fed this much and produce this much milk, are likely to produce this much gas. There will be variations of that based on the breed of the cow, the kind of feed that they have, etcetera, but you can do some kind of an approximation there. Similarly, with a paddy field, you can, you know, relatively, simplistically start off by saying per acre or per hectare or whatever. Those ones are the ones where you can do one set of measurements. They are always open to debate and discussion because my cow is different from your cow. I fed my cow something different, etcetera, etcetera. And so nobody ever really agrees. You can then go really, intense in a sense and have the equivalent of it’s an awful term. They call it gas masks. But, basically, it’s a, apparatus that’s placed on around a cow’s head, and then it, you know, physically measures the amount of of a methane that that gets emitted. As you can imagine with, you know, this kind of technology, it’s expensive, it it can’t be all over the place, so it needs to be in a lab, etcetera. So you’ll have limited sets of those, but that’s another option that’s available. Now one of the ways if there is a positive about methane is that it can be spotted using thermal imaging software, equipment. And this thermal imaging could be either handheld thermal imaging cameras, or, satellite space thermal imaging. Handheld thermal imaging cameras are relatively cheaper, and can do the job to some degree of accuracy. The problem with that is that they are often classified as dual use, as in civilian and military dual use. And so, there are export restrictions or import restrictions or buyer restrictions depending on whichever country you look at. So it’s not like it’s readily available to everyone. Satellite imaging, is something that EDF has been working on for a while. And the advantage is that, yes, the unit cost of a satellite is high. But after that, the amount of information that it can give you by oil field with what level of accuracy makes it an incredibly cost effective solution, which is where the satellite comes in.

Shreya Jai: If I may quickly just ask about on the waste, part, you talked about how, you know, difficult it is, to gather methane data for livestock. I I’m assuming it is much more difficult when it comes to waste management as well or or, you know, gathering data on methane emissions from waste, especially in a country like India where there are no proper mechanism datasets for even waste management. So how much of, you know, data for methane, is easy or difficult to get in that, case?

Hisham Mundol: Yeah. So I’m not going to suggest that this is a proper mechanism because it is a highly improper mechanism, but there is a mechanism in place, which is landfills. Where does all of our urban waste go? It goes into landfills and you see them, you know, they’re like gigantic monstrosities, multi, floor high structures. And, the thing with the satellite and methane tracking is that this a satellite is able to track methane emissions when they come at a reasonable level of concentration. You know, individual dustbin by dustbin, I mean, you know, it’s gonna be impossible for a satellite to track it. You might not even need a satellite. You might not want to track a dustbin by dustbin. However, at a landfill level, because of the sheer volume of waste and the sheer volume of vegetative activity that’s going in there, you will have, traceable, retractable levels of methane emission. I’m now you started off by saying, is there a proper mechanism? I’m not suggesting this is the proper mechanism. It is a mechanism. Anyone who’s seen a landfill, who smelled a landfill, who, is unfortunate to live near a landfill knows that it is not a proper mechanism.

Sandeep Pai: Right. That actually is a good segue to the next question where I wanna spend some time, which is your day job, EDF’s, MethanSat, which has made so much news. Maybe start by describing how this idea came into being, and where where it had where it was heading, and have you achieved your goals, and what’s next?

Hisham Mundol: Sure. Sure. So I’ll start the story actually not in the satellite, but in the sector, the oil and gas sector. When we and others started researching methane from, from the oil and gas sector, it became clear that a large majority of it was leakages at the gas extraction points. You know, the drill, the the drilling machines and and the gas extraction facilities. We also then figured that so, this is sorry. Just as an aside, what you typically tend to find in gas facilities is the traditional picture that you have is there’ll be a flame burning somewhere. Right? That’s that tells you that there is a gas facility, and that’s basically gas flaring. Now many, many it’s not a pretty sight. It’s not environmentally responsible, and it’s economically wasteful if you’re just burning off gas because you can’t find a better way of managing it. And so, gas flaring became a major topic of concern and companies and countries across the world have committed to stopping it. So this was the visible flaring out. Methane was still leaking and the solution set of methane, which is actually what makes it a really interesting, pollutant to work on, is, the the solution set, and I’m exaggerating only slightly, but to to make my point, it is tightening, the the the valve and and closing the gasket. That is your solution set. Depending on which country you look at, 60 to 80% of the solution exists is possible with existing technologies. 50 to 70% of it is at net additional no costs, at no net additional costs. So the technology is at hand. There is, you know, no major CapEx expenditure that’s required, which then begs the question, why isn’t it being done? Oh, I forgot to mention that if you stop leaking gas, you get to bottle it and sell it. So there’s a positive business case as well. So if the technology is at hand, if it’s not very expensive, and if you can make money by doing it, why isn’t it happening? Part of the reason for this was because it was difficult for people to accurately trace where the leakages were happening. It was dependent on an individual company or an individual facility manager taking that initiative to try and track it down. And hence, the idea came that you could, I mean, the audacious idea of let’s launch a satellite. When EDF launched the satellite last year, we became the first NGO ever to launch a satellite. So it’s, I think it’s still reasonably in that phase where we can extract the coolness factor of it for a few more months yet, and then then claim some street cred on that. What’s the status now? So the satellite was launched successfully. You wanted to get into stable orbit, and then you wanted to start deploying its various component parts, and you wanted to start generating, data. And there’s a whole host of algorithms that you need to build in and you need to double check and you need to ground truth. So all of that process is happening, and the eventual plan is that the data then gets shared with the International Methane Emissions Observatory. It’s called IMAO, and this then serves as kind of the central authoritative global repository for information sharing, to all of the countries. It’s under the aegis of the United Nations. So that’s the glide path for that. Now if the main objective, is as it is, the oil and gas sector, just landing up one day and telling the oil and gas sector, yippee, we launched a satellite. Here’s some data, is gonna, attract, severe amusement or suspicion or or, antipathy. I don’t know what it might be. And so we’ve spent a long period of time, years and years, you know, nurturing relationships with the oil and gas sector and oil producing and oil importing gas producing and gas, importing countries, telling them about why methane was important, telling them what the, the economic opportunity is, the technical viability of the solution, etcetera, and encouraging them to form coalitions, etcetera. So the the information isn’t going to come as some kind of an expose, of the sector, but more in terms of, hey. This you know, if you’re an oil and gas company and you’ve been looking you’ve been trying to figure out what the state of your gas operations are, here’s the information for you. Or maybe you were doing something, to fix the problem, and, you know, here’s the current state of it, and then you can track how the status, progresses over time. So that’s the the broad glide path. I wanna just come to India for a second because, Sandeep, you’d asked the question about, what’s next. So one of the unfinished tasks that Methane SAT still has is Methane SAT currently doesn’t have the capabilities to accurately track gas, methane over  a water body. And the water body becomes relevant because most of the gas that India produces comes from offshore. Now it’s not an impossible problem to fix. We knew it that this was something that was going to be required because India is not unique that way. And so, you know, efforts have started to build out what is called glint mode. And it’s basically how do you configure your algorithms and the operations of the satellite to factor in the reflection from the water surfaces of oceans. Once that comes in, then we’ll be able to provide a lot more accurate information to the Indian gas sector, about, you know, methane emissions from there. I would also imagine that if it was not already on the radar of, you know, municipal authorities or national governments across the world, like I said, where there are high concentrations of methane like landfills, you already know you need to do something about the landfill, but here you have an added incentive, to do it because, you get the methane emission component of it in addition to all of the other, downsides to landfills that that you oftentimes already know.

Sandeep Pai: Right. I have two follow-ups that they’re bit different, but they’re, kind of, you know, coming from your answer. One is, like, you talked about oil and gas. What about the coal sector? And we know that India’s coal production is going to increase. And so, there’s a debate about how much gassy things are, but, what about coal? So that’s one question. Second, you know, even in our work, one of the things that the coal industry or the oil industry is constantly saying is, like, we’re gonna have to spend so much money to measure this where to really know what the true sense of the source is. The second is to track this, especially in the oil and gas sector. We’ll have to do shutdowns, or to mitigate, and that will lead to losses. So these are two different question. One is about, the coal sector, and one is about, sort of the financial case to actually do this.

Hisham Mundol: Sure. So I have some sympathy for the coal sector in terms of the techno economic case on coal is nowhere near as is not as attractive as for gas. So, and the our primary objective behind the satellite for India is the gas sector. On the gas sector, sometimes when as a as an as a not for profit, you get carried away by your own enthusiasm, and you start making the case of how, you know, easy it is and how quick you can do it and how cheap the solution is, etcetera, etcetera. But the point that you just made in terms of the cost of the tracking of methane and the cost of potential disruption to even do these relatively easy fixes is as high as it is. So let’s take the both of them separately. The first is the cost of the monitoring. If you were to go to commercial satellite providers, and there are commercial satellite providers out there, it would cost a pretty considerable amount of money to get the amount of data that you need for a reasonable spread in India. The estimates that I’ve heard are between forty to fifty million dollars is what you would be spending just on the monitoring data side of it. But that, however, presupposes that you’re only going or you can only go to the commercial satellite data providers. Solutions like EDFs, MethaneSAT are free. So that cost barrier of that information, it is not there. So that part, I trust will be one that we fix. The second one is the potential disruptions that exist when you need to make those fixes, to reduce leakages. And the broader background to that is right now, gas represents roughly 6% of India’s energy mix. There are ambitions by the government to take it up to 15, so the share of gas is going to only grow, which means that you can’t afford any kind of prolonged disruptions, and that is a legitimate and real concern of the the gas sector. Now, the most obvious way of fixing this would be that you start by doing a technical feasibility of how long the disruption might actually be, and you find where there might be ways that you could, do, you know, the fixes that you need for methane gas with any other kind of, maintenance, activities that you’re already, you know, planned maintenance, shutdown, or any other kind of activities. Is there a way that you can bring the two together? And then the third bit is to start doing that cost, opportunity analysis of this is the amount of disruption that I will take in the short run. But in the long run, quite frankly, till perpetuity as long as the gas exists in that field, I will be saving as much money as abc. So that’s the way to do it. It doesn’t help if somebody turns around and says it’s really easy and you can fix it just like that because it isn’t going to be something that is really easy that you can fix just like that with no disruption. But it is likely also not the other extreme where, you know, for months and months, an operation has to be shut down. And there are ways that you can do this kind of feasibility assessment, to a high degree of accuracy and and confidence.

Shreya Jai: I’ll just focus more on, want to, you know, shift towards the policy and the regulatory part a bit, especially with regards to, India. And this is, both in terms of, as you said, identifying and also tapping into the scope. And, obviously, there’s a lot of scope. There’s a lot of demand as we sit now. But then there is no clear clarity on what path to take. One example that, you know, comes quickly to my mind is coal bed methane. It took ten years for the government to decide under which ministry’s purview should coal bed methane be. Waste is waste management is a serious problem, but then it is not being looked as a business opportunity per se where you can, you know, extract methane and use it to supply to, say, city gas distributors, etcetera. There’s a ready business model there. So, you know and you obviously talked about the livestock one. So where do you think there is a problem? There are business models. There is demand. There’s definitely a need. But what seems to be the problem?

Hisham Mundol: I think at one level, there’s been relatively low awareness about the methane problem, and its impact. It’s still, for the most part, something that is a conversation within the climate community. That’s one. The second is that some of the solutions are really difficult. You know, in the case of livestock, for instance, conceptually, the solutions are really strong. What you need is you know, I made the point that India is the biggest milk producer in the world. Here’s another statistic. The US is the second biggest. We make two times as much milk as The US with 10 times as much heads of cattle, which means that you have a productivity challenge. You also know that livestock farmers, tend to be poor, and you also know that for the most part, they are smallholder farmers. It’s not these large, you know, industrialized hundreds, thousands of cattle kind of operations. An advantage that the dairy sector has is that you’ve got the cooperative networks that have been built out over years in India. And the nature of the product is the farmer has to bring it to a milk collection center once or sometimes twice a day, and there is infrastructure that takes the milk, etcetera, etcetera. So, there are touch points with the farmer which are an advantage that you can and work with. The majority of the methane challenge the livestock methane challenge in India can be addressed through increased productivity, through better feeding practices. You know, what’s the right mix of wet and dry fodder? What is, you know, any kind of macronutrients that might need to be given as supplements to, to cattle? Now because of the wafer thin margins that farmers are operating in, you want these solutions to be such that they don’t incrementally add to cost, but disproportionately improve milk yields. The milk yield improvement, when it comes through, obviously, gives more milk, therefore, more incomes for farmers who are relatively poorer. It provides more protein to a largely vegetarian or a significantly vegetarian population as as India where there is, where there remain protein deficiencies. But now think about 300,000,000 heads of cattle and 70,000,000 farmers. How do you get mechanisms in place to reach that kind of scale? So I think that’s certainly one, one gap. And, you know, we’re doing something with dairy entrepreneurs, and I’m happy to talk about that later, if that’s of interest. Around landfills, the second area that I want to, maybe just give an illustration, the solution to address methane in landfills is to not dump food waste into landfills. And roughly half the physical volume of a landfill is food waste. So you need to segregate. And, the one guiding principle on any kind of recycling is it works only when you segregate at source. And if it’s food waste, you therefore need to segregate at the doorstep, individual households. I don’t know about you, but I know about my building and I know the deep philosophical battles that happen about segregating at source and, you know, who’s doing it and who’s not doing it, etcetera. But there are shining examples, where it has happened. And I often tell people that if you ever despair about, you know, citizens not doing enough about climate change or cleanliness, you should visit Indore, because it has Asia’s largest bio CNG plant running. And that fuels four four hundred and fifty maybe, of the city buses. And, it’s an impressive plant. It’s a public private partnership plant. It runs profitably, and the you know, that all of that bit looks, looks great. But the real magic in Indore happens because of the quality of the raw material that goes in. It’s high grade, raw material because it’s segregated. And 90% of Indore’s households segregate waste on the at their doorstep. Once you achieve that level of segregation, then everything else becomes so much easier. If you don’t achieve that, you’re constantly battling, you know, economics and, operational, challenges. Now while I hold this out as a shining example, it is one of a few rare shining examples. We don’t have that many, so we need many, many more. I’m I’m in in Chennai today, and I know that one of the partnerships that, Tamil Nadu has is to figure out from the organizations that worked on Indore, how did they do the behavior change communication, and then how did they mobilize, citizens to reach that kind of, levels of of of segregation. In oil and gas, the the gap has been it’s been really difficult to know where the leakages are. So individual sectors kind of tend to have their own, challenge. Maybe I’ll give you another one, which is rice. The our solution for this is to make sure that you drain out paddy fields regularly. So intermittently draining out paddy fields rather than having them, you know, permanently flooded. Conceptually, it’s, you know, very, very logical. The solution for it is actually like a 20 rupee piece of plastic that you place in the field, and it has two markers which says this is the level of water that you should be having. And when you drain it, this is where it needs to get to. The challenge with something like rice is you don’t have a delivery mechanism to take that, to scale. Unlike dairy where they have to come back every day and you can nudge a farmer and remind them it’s a a party farmer you meet once in a few weeks, months maybe. So those are the kind of operational challenges that that are there.

Shreya Jai: No. No. Fantastic points, and I completely agree on the waste management part, you know, doing it at the source level. We we had this very interesting discussion. I think it was our episode 28 where we had, Bhati Chaturvedi of Chintan Research and Action Group. And she went to length talking about waste management. Very interesting insights there, and, you know, it makes me think a lot. I am sitting in Delhi, surrounded by hills of waste. So I think it is it we it it was yesterday when we were supposed to take action on waste management at source. But, yeah, to us, thank you for talking about that.

Sandeep Pai: Yeah. So, Hisham, just kind of you talked about incentives for different groups and why and you pointed out about behavior change. One of the things we have seen is, like, any financial incentive is always sort of very useful, carrot to to tangle in front of any stakeholder. So I’m wondering about is there any linkages around climate finance, carbon credits, any of that, especially for a country like India, which, you know, which would say that we haven’t even carbonized. How can we decarbonize? So, you know, is there anything real available globally where at least to do some pilot projects to show the business case for any of this?

Hisham Mundol: Sure. So on biogas units, wherever there is a relatively larger scale operation, those are the ones which tend to receive higher quality which tend to be able to deliver higher quality credits and therefore generate higher high value credits. And I make the distinction between the large and the small ones not because there isn’t environmental value from smaller units, but from the carbon credit market perspective, it’s really hard to track what’s going on in 50,000, a hundred thousand village level biogas units. But it’s easier to track, you know, relatively more industrial sized, operation. So that’s certainly one revenue stream that is there. Now the thing with carbon markets is because of the price uncertainty and the fact that we’re still struggling with relatively small prices, you’ve got to look at it as kind of an added bonus. Fundamentally, your enterprise has to be profitable, and this comes in as kind of the icing on the cake rather than you depending on that because then that doesn’t make it viable anymore. So that’s on the biogas side of it. On the, on the dairy productivity side, there is an incentive, but it is, it it’s it’s not upfront in the sense that if I’m able to, adopt those better feeding practices, etcetera, and I get more milk, then I get more monies, from from from my, for for my, cattle. On the oil and gas side, we’ve put together actually, let me not exaggerate. We have been one of the organizations that have supported this setting up of the oil and gas, methane partnership, OGMP. And this is a grouping of oil and gas companies’ peers, who, are either already doing something about methane or have committed to do something about methane or are exploring to do it. And you can have as many earnest NGOs telling oil and gas companies about it as you want to. But finally, and then part of it is human behavior, you will listen to peers, and you’ll get a lot more reassurance from, a peer who’s done it. So that’s why OGMP or similar constructs like that make a lot of sense. What it can do is provide that forum for you to get reassurance. It could also be a channel for technical capacity sharing if, if that’s the gap for for a particular gas company. And there are also finance facilities that are being built out to cover some of the costs for it. So those are kind of the three methods that are running in the gas sector.

Sandeep Pai: Amazing. But is there any kind of, you know, of any active deals or partnerships within India? Just a quick question on that.

Hisham Mundol: Within India, I haven’t yet heard of any active deals. I know that there are carbon credits being sold, from biogas. So those are certainly active deals. But if you’re asking on oil and gas, not yet.

Shreya Jai: We have this biofuel mission as well, and, you know, we did this, alliance and everything. What do you think of these steps? How much optics? How much actual work?

Hisham Mundol: So on biofuels, the country’s taken a target of blending 20% of ethanol, and it’s made reasonable progress. It’s actually quite it’s been quite, remarkable to see the level of progress that is there. Can you do more? Of course. Can you do it more efficiently? Absolutely. One thing that we’re not doing that we should likely be doing more of is to look at the net environmental impact of the, the raw material that’s going into the producing of ethanol, you want to avoid two things. One is you want to avoid, in a country which still needs, food supplies. You know, you don’t want to divert agriculture for food into agriculture for fuel. And the second is where there are additional resource usages if and most classically, it would be water. There is already significant pressure on ground water. If you looked at biofuels purely from the energy system point of view, it might be really attractive. It might not be as attractive if you load on the environmental, economic, and social costs of, you know, excessive water usage. So it is certainly an area of interest. It is an area where the government and India has done well. It’s an area where the biofuels alliance has players like India and Brazil. It provides us savings as well as additional energy security, but I think it’s within those two or three caveats that, and they’re not really caveats. They’re more guardrails rather than anything else.

Shreya Jai: Got it. That brings me to the concluding question, and I think this should, you know, sue it altogether. For India, what do you think, should be the short term and long term, you know, priorities for our methane management?

Hisham Mundol: So the overarching priority has to be India, and not just India, but every country in the world has to stop the rate of warming of temperatures. And the fastest way of doing that is methane. And, so India should look at methane in that context. Now, if you were to kind of phase out what are the kinds of things that we can do, from a methane in the gas sector perspective, half the gas we need, we make domestically and half we import. India should look at joining the equivalent of buyers alliances. These are informal groupings of gas importing countries that can work with gas producing countries and say, hey. We want you to fix the methane emissions, at your end so that we are importing, low emission low methane leakage, gas. So that’s the most immediate relatively shorter term one. The next, immediate one after that would be for, the oil and gas sector domestically, both national oil companies like ONGC or private sector organizations like Reliance, to, a, do that techno, economic feasibility assessment of, how much do they anticipate the problem, how much do they expect the disruption to be, and then actually start addressing it. So I think that would be in the very immediate and the next stage after that. On livestock, we need the equivalent of a new operation flood or a new white revolution, a dramatic increase in productivity, that will give us the in the protein intake that we need. It will mean that feed libraries need to be updated.It will mean that feed additives that can increase productivity and reduce methane need to be developed, homegrown, and and and cost engineered so that, they don’t become an affordable issue. Now, some of the things will take time, a year, two years, etcetera. But you can do some basic stuff like, mixing, drying, wet fodder. It’s never going to be easy, the the whole landfills and waste management and segregation piece. But if you were to take the example of Indore, the revolution, and it is a revolution, happened in four or five years. So it did not take forever for Indore to reach where it, it reached. Now not every city is gonna do it in three, four, five years. That’s fine. But if we’re able to hit an average of five years where, you know, we institutionalize, segregation at source, I think that would be remarkable because the actual production of the gas plants, the biogas plants are not very expensive, not very complicated. There isn’t any logical big barrier there. It’s just the quality of the raw material, that becomes an ash the challenge.

Sandeep Pai: Thank you so much, hisham. There’s so much to unpack there. I mean, one could spend their entire career on one of the subsectors of methane, let alone the whole methane problem. So but really appreciate you breaking it down, and I really always learn a lot from you every time I hear you or listen to you. So thank you.

Hisham Mundol: Thanks so much, Sandeep. Thanks so much, Shrey. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and then great questions. And if this generates interest in people to start building those careers and even one of those subsets, that will be amazing. I think that’s the mission accomplished for this podcast.

Shreya Jai: I hope it does, and thank you so much, for talking about this. And as Sandeep said, it was clearly a very learning experience, listening to you. So thanks again. And I hope we have you again to unpack much more subsets, many more subsets, of this methane journey, the whole industry per se. So thanks again.

Hisham Mundol: I’d love to. Thank you so much.

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