Natural gas production in the United States has increased 46 percent since 2006, but there has been no significant increase of total US methane emissions and only a modest increase from oil and gas activity, according to a new NOAA study.
The finding is important because it's based on highly accurate measurements of methane collected over 10 years at 20 long-term sampling sites around the country in NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, said lead author Xin Lan, a CIRES scientist working at NOAA.
"We analyzed a decade's worth of data and while we do find some increase in methane downwind of oil and gas activity, we do not find a statistically significant trend in the US for total methane emissions," said Lan. The study was published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters.
[...] Methane is a component of natural gas, but it can also be generated by biological sources, such as decaying wetland vegetation, as a byproduct of ruminant digestion, or even by termites. Ethane is a hydrocarbon emitted during oil and natural gas production and is sometimes used as a tracer for oil and gas activity. By measuring ethane, which is not generated by biologic processes, scientists had hoped to produce an accurate estimate of petroleum-derived methane emissions.
A bit of good news.
(Score: 4, Informative) by pkrasimirov on Friday May 17 2019, @12:27PM
It's a downward trend because the other things like population and GDP rose. See here on Figure 3. https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions [epa.gov]
Compare to Figure 3. here: https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions [epa.gov]