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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 18 2019, @05:41AM
There was basically the exact opposite article about how Canada's tar sands were emitting more methane than expected. I pointed out a bunch of reasons why the observation shouldn't be considered gospel just yet.
Unfortunately, that's at least partially true here as well. On the one hand, this is still a wide open area where the data has to interact with the natural environment. On the other hand, the Canadian study was just one set of aerial observations. This is done over a long period of time, so it is more credible in some ways.