Methane gas leak is triple what the US government thinks

2024-03-13 17:38:02

Oil and natural gas wells, pipelines and compressors in the United States emit three times more methane—a powerful heat-trapping gas—than the government thinks, according to a comprehensive new study. The value of the climate damage they cause is 9.3 billion dollars annually.

Because more than half of those leaks come from a small number of sites, 1% or less, the problem is more serious than the government thought, but also quite fixable, said the lead author of the study published in the Nature magazine.

The same thing happens in the rest of the world. Large methane leaks detected by satellites increased 50% in 2023 compared to 2022, with more than 5 million metric tons located in large fossil fuel leaks, the International Energy Agency reported Wednesday in its 2024 Global Methane Tracker. Global methane emissions increased slightly in 2023 to 120 million metric tons, according to the report.

“This is a real opportunity to reduce emissions pretty quickly by focusing efforts on these sites that are the biggest emitters,” said lead author Evan Sherwin, an energy policy analyst at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. who wrote the report when he was at Stanford University. “If we control that 1% of the sites, we are already halfway there because it is half of the emissions in most cases.”

Sherwin said emissions from leaks occur throughout all oil and gas production and transmission, starting with gas flaring. That happens when companies release natural gas into the air or burn it instead of capturing the gas that comes out of energy extraction. There are also major leaks in the rest of the system, such as tanks, compressors and pipelines, he added.

“It’s pretty easy to repair,” Sherwin said.

Overall, regarding 3% of the gas produced in the United States is lost to the air, but the Environmental Protection Agency says it is 1%, the study says. It’s a significant amount, Sherwin says, regarding 6.2 million tons per hour in leaks measured during the day. They might be lower during the night, but they have not been measured.

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