A new comprehensive study has shown that US oil and natural gas wells, pipelines and compressors are spewing three times the amount of the potent heat-trapping gas methane as the government has determined, causing $9.3bn in yearly climate damage.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, Methane over a two-decade period traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, but only lasts in the atmosphere for about a decade instead of the hundreds of years that carbon dioxide does.
Lead author of the study published in the journal Nature said that because more than half of these methane emissions are coming from a tiny number of oil and gas sites, it means that the problem is both worse than the government has determined but also fairly fixable.
The same issue is happening globally. Large methane emissions events around the world detected by satellites grew 50% in 2023 compared with 2022 with more than 5m metric tons spotted in major fossil fuel leaks, the International Energy Agency reported on Wednesday in its Global Methane Tracker 2024 report. World methane emissions rose slightly in 2023 to 120m metric tons, the report said.
“This is really an opportunity to cut emissions quite rapidly with targeted efforts at these highest-emitting sites,” said lead author Evan Sherwin, an energy and policy analyst at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab who wrote the study while at Stanford University. “If we can get this roughly 1% of sites under control, then we’re halfway there because that’s about half of the emissions in most cases.”
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Sherwin said that the fugitive emissions were produced throughout the oil and gas production and delivery system, starting with gas flaring. That’s when firms release natural gas into the air or burn it instead of capturing it as it is produced during energy extraction. There are also substantial leaks throughout the rest of the system, including tanks, compressors and pipelines, Sherwin said.
“It’s actually straightforward to fix,” he said.
The study found that about 3% of the US gas produced is wasted and released into the air, compared with the Environmental Protection Agency figures of 1% in general. Sherwin said that was a substantial amount, about 6.2m tons an hour in leaks measured over the daytime. It could be lower at night, but it has not been measured.
The study arrived at the figure using 1m anonymized measurements from aircraft that flew over 52% of American oilwells and 29% of gas production and delivery system sites over a decade. Sherwin said the 3% leak figure is the average for the six regions the study looked at, and a national average was not calculated.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
