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| A New York Times video with an infrared filter, at right, captured natural gas leaking from a plant in Midkiff, Texas. |
The study found that if only 0.2 percent of gas leaks into the atmosphere, it is "as big a driver of climate change as coal," Tabuchi reports. "That’s a tiny margin of error for a gas that is notorious for leaking from drill sites, processing plants and the pipes that transport it." Her story does not give any estimates of what the actual leak volume might be, or any comments from the gas industry.
The study was led by Deborah Gordon, the lead researcher and an environmental policy expert at Brown University and at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that promoptes clean energy. It also involved researchers from NASA, Harvard University and Duke University, and is scheduled for publication next week in the journal Environmental Research Letters. It "adds to a substantial body of research that has poked holes in the idea that natural gas is a suitable transitional fuel to a future powered entirely by renewables, like solar and wind," Tabuchi writes.
Power plants' shift from coal to gas "has helped reduce carbon emissions from power plants by nearly 40 percent since 2005," Tabuchi notes. "But natural gas is made up mostly of methane, which is a far more potent planet-warming gas, in the short term, than carbon dioxide when it escapes unburned into the atmosphere. And there’s mounting evidence that methane is doing just that: leaking from gas systems in far larger quantities than previously thought. Sensors and infrared cameras are helping to visualize substantial leaks of methane from oil and gas infrastructure, and increasingly powerful satellites are detecting “super-emitting” episodes from space."
The study was led by Deborah Gordon, the lead researcher and an environmental policy expert at Brown University and at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that promoptes clean energy. It also involved researchers from NASA, Harvard University and Duke University, and is scheduled for publication next week in the journal Environmental Research Letters. It "adds to a substantial body of research that has poked holes in the idea that natural gas is a suitable transitional fuel to a future powered entirely by renewables, like solar and wind," Tabuchi writes.
Power plants' shift from coal to gas "has helped reduce carbon emissions from power plants by nearly 40 percent since 2005," Tabuchi notes. "But natural gas is made up mostly of methane, which is a far more potent planet-warming gas, in the short term, than carbon dioxide when it escapes unburned into the atmosphere. And there’s mounting evidence that methane is doing just that: leaking from gas systems in far larger quantities than previously thought. Sensors and infrared cameras are helping to visualize substantial leaks of methane from oil and gas infrastructure, and increasingly powerful satellites are detecting “super-emitting” episodes from space."
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