Bakken and Eagle Ford basin leaks emitting 9 to 10 percent of natural gas into atmosphere

Oil and gas basins in North Dakota and East Texas leaked large amounts of natural gas into the atmosphere between 2006 and 2011, says a study published this month in the journal Earth's Future, Gayathri Vaidyanathan reports for Environment and Energy Publishing. "The study finds that the Bakken and Eagle Ford basins leaked between 3 percent and 17 percent of the natural gas produced between 2009 and 2011, with the Bakken most likely emitting 10.1 percent and the Eagle Ford most likely emitting 9.1 percent."

Those are significant numbers, considering North Dakota's Bakken Shale produced 485 million cubic feet per day of gas in September 2011, while the Eagle Ford of East Texas produced 1,232 million cubic feet of gas per day in 2011, Vaidyanathan writes. "A methane leakage rate above 3.2 percent may negate the fuel's climate benefits in the power plant, scientists say. And in such a case, gas will be as bad as coal."

"The study used a European remote-sensing instrument, SCIAMACHY (affectionately referred to as "Scia" by scientists), to get a picture of emissions from the Bakken, the Eagle Ford and the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania," Vaidyanathan writes. "The instrument, aboard the Envisat satellite, captured a range of atmospheric conditions between 2006 and 2012. Scientists led by Oliver Schneising, a researcher at the University of Bremen in Germany, spent years deciphering the signature of methane from the satellite data." (Read more)