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OI Olya Irzak On Catalyst with Shayle Kann

“That's 15% of U.S. grid emissions is what we can prevent by building these data centers with tackling the methane in mind, right? … So this is like by far the biggest climate lever that I ever had a chance to pull in my career.”

Catalyst with Shayle Kann · Climate & Energy · October 2026

“That's 15% of U.S. grid emissions is what we can prevent by building these data centers with tackling the methane in mind, right? … So this is like by far the biggest climate lever that I ever had a chance to pull in my career.” — Olya Irzak, Catalyst with Shayle Kann

Irzak estimates that 50 gigawatts of new on-site gas generation for data centers would add about 380 megatons of CO2e, and that 40 to 50% of it comes from methane leaking upstream and slipping from engines. Shayle Kann had asked her to put that number in context.

Transcript

Catalyst with Shayle Kann Around 17:29 into the episode
Olya Irzak

…being methane. So there's kind of a big question of like, are we looking at a 100-year time horizon for warming or at 20? If at 20, the methane completely dominates. If 100, then yes, then it's double. So it might be even worse, depending on when you think we will start reducing our emissions.

Shayle Kann

Sticking, I guess, with the 380 megaton number, like, can you contextualize that a little bit? You said it's a lot, but like, how much?

Olya Irzak

Yeah, fair point. So the preventable part, right? So that let's call it 50%. That's 15% of U.S. grid emissions is what we can prevent by building these data centers with tackling the methane in mind, right? So that's like the biggest climate in the next 18 months, right? It's not like we're going to stop building the data centers afterwards. So this is like by far the biggest climate lever that I ever had a chance to pull in my career. I don't know if you had 15% of electric grid lying on the ground in your career, but I'm like... I like to think so,

Shayle Kann

but despite a long career in this space, I don't think I have. Okay, so you said preventable. Let's talk about what it takes to prevent it. And I guess, you know, it makes sense to probably similarly walk through the value chain because there's different things you have to do at each step in the…

Olya Irzak

Exactly. So in the upstream wellheads, like there are two things you can do. A, you can buy it from a basin that has lower leaks. That obviously has a bunch of knock-on effects about where you locate your data center or buying pipeline capacity to pipe the methane from where it's produced to your…

Shayle Kann

Is it an issue for like aeroderivative turbines or no?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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