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With New Tools, A Focus On Urban Methane Leaks
With New Tools, A Focus On Urban Methane Leaks
Until recently, little was known about the extent of methane leaking from urban gas distribution pipes and its impact on global warming. But recent advances in detecting this potent greenhouse gas are pushing U.S. states to begin addressing this long-neglected problem.
Battered by storms and weakened with age, the natural gas distribution pipes of urban New Jersey have long been in need of repair. And for a long time, the state’s largest utility, Public Service and Enterprise Group (PSE&G), has wanted to replace them. The problem is that pipelines cost upwards of $1.3 million per mile, and the utility owns 4,330 miles of it. Replacing it all would cost at least $6 billion, not to mention decades of work.
In December 2014, however, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) approached the utility with a solution. Using new technology that can trace methane emissions back to their sources with great precision,
researchers could home in on the highest-risk pipes, allowing the utility to prioritize repairs along the worst offending lines. EDF and its collaborators, from Colorado State University and Google Earth Outreach, then spent six months gathering data the utility could use.
The state’s Board of Public Utilities, which determines how much money PSE&G can raise from its customers and how it can spend it, had earlier rejected a request from the utility to raise $1.6 billion for 800 miles of new pipeline. But after the results of the monitoring effort were in, the utility narrowed its request to 510 miles of pipeline replacement, at a cost of $905 million over three years. Work on the project begins this month.
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Is Natural Gas As Clean As We Think?
Is Natural Gas As Clean As We Think?
This week U.S. President Barack Obama took aim at the American coal industry as part of a comprehensive climate change plan to limit air emissions from what many consider the country’s worst polluter.
Under the plan, states will have until 2030 to cut CO2 levels by a third from what they were in 2005. Outside the United States, Europe is using less coal, the Canadian province of Ontario shut down its coal-fired power generation (albeit in favor of more expensive renewables), and the World Bank last week rejected the notion that coal can cure poverty.
Even coal-hungry China has banned coal-fired power plants in Beijing, finally cowing to health and environmental concerns in the smog-choked capital.
Having turned their backs on coal, many countries are looking to natural gas as an alternative power source. China is plunging headlong into building liquefied natural gas import terminals, and countries are lining up to export it, including Australia, Russia and the United States, which in 2014 approved its fourth LNG export terminal, Dominion Cove Point in Maryland.
Related: Global Oil Supply More Fragile Than You Think
British Columbia’s governing Liberal Party has staked its political future on developing LNG terminals to receive natural gas from the Canadian province’s northeast region, telling voters in the last election it would use revenues from LNG production to wipe out the provincial debt.
Part of the sales job was to characterize natural gas as a clean fuel whose use will actually help decrease global fossil fuel emissions, since nations that switch to it are typically moving from dirty coal-fired power to clean LNG.
But is natural gas really as pristine as its proponents claim?
Not according to a new report released by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in June. The report estimated the amount of gas that is leaked, vented or flared from natural gas and oil production on U.S. federal and tribal lands. It found that 65 billion cubic feet was released in 2013 – the equivalent of the greenhouse gases produced by 5.6 million cars. In New Mexico, a methane “hot spot,” was detected by NASA satellites and in one drilling-heavy part of Wyoming a town measured air pollution readings that rivaled Los Angeles.
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Key Greenhouse Gas Study May Have “Systematically Understated” Methane Leaks, New Research Shows
A widely cited study on the amount of methane leaking from oil and gas sites, including fracked wells, shows signs of a major flaw, a newly published peer-reviewed paper concludes.
“The University of Texas reported on a campaign to measure methane emissions from United States natural gas production sites as part of an improved national inventory,” researcher Touché Howard wrote in a paperpublished today in the journal Energy Science & Engineering. “Unfortunately, their study appears to have systematically underestimated emissions.”
The University of Texas study, the first in a 16-part research series backed by the oil and gas industry and the Environmental Defense Fund , had been hailed as “unprecedented” when it was published in October 2013. The drilling industry and its supporters cited it as clear-cut evidence that methane leaks were lower than previously believed and falling further due to new technology.
The study’s key contribution to the science on methane leaks was that researchers were allowed to access to oil and gas wells, including 27 wells where fracking was underway, and test individual pieces of equipment. “This is actual data, and it’s the first time we’ve had the opportunity to get actual data from unconventional natural gas development,” Mark Brownstein, an Environmental Defense Fund associate vice president, told FuelFix when the UT study was published.
But the problem stems from the tool that the University of Texas study used to collect its data – which can malfunction when leaks are spewing at high rates. The “University of Texas study underestimates national methane emissions at natural gas production sites due to instrument sensor failure,” Mr. Howard, who invented the basic technology used by that instrument, wrote.
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Natural Gas Needs To Clean Up Its Act
Natural Gas Needs To Clean Up Its Act
To call natural gas ‘clean’ would be a misnomer. Natural gas is a fossil fuel that emits carbon dioxide when burned and is an important contributor to climate change. The general consensus, however, is that when compared to oil (and petroleum products) or coal, natural gas it is by far the ‘cleaner’ choice for providing base-load power generation, heating homes, and for a series of other industrial and transport applications.
Still, the debate over methane emissions from natural gas production, transport, and distribution calls into question this assumption.
A new study by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) examined the methane emissions from natural gas production on federal and tribal lands. The study found that total natural gas loss, including flaring, amounted to 65 billion cubic feet (bcf) in 2013, or enough to meet the heating and cooking needs of around 1.6 million homes.
The implications of the study are serious. Not only does natural gas loss represent a waste of finite natural resources but it makes a significant and unnecessary contribution to the already seemingly impossible task of combating climate change.
Related: Can This Next Shale Hotspot Live Up To The Hype?
While methane (the major component of natural gas) has a far shorter lifespan than carbon dioxide, it is more efficient at trapping radiation, making the impacton climate change 25 times greater over a 100 year period. Over 20 years, methane’s warming potential is 84 times greater than CO2.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), methane accounts for around 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, almost 30 percent of which came from the production, transport, and distribution of oil and natural gas.
The latest study is part of a much broader effort by the Environmental Defense Fund to measure methane emissions across the United States, not just on federal and tribal lands. In an earlier study released last year, the EDF argued that adoption of existing technologies and operating practices, as simple as more frequent inspections, could help the U.S. reduce methane emissions by 40 percent by 2018.
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