GHG Emissions
Methane from Natural Gas

Grist ... Today is Tuesday, June 26, and ExxonMobil is plugging methane leaks and making new friends. ... Large Methane Leaks Threaten Perception Of 'Clean' Natural Gas

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Today is Tuesday, June 26, and ExxonMobil is plugging methane leaks and making new friends.

The biggest oil and gas company in the world is ready to do something about its methane problem. In May, ExxonMobil announced plans to reduce its methane emissions by 15 percent by the year 2020. The company says it’s already trimmed down by 9 percent since 2016 — a pretty big deal for a business that produces enough natural gas to satisfy 14 percent of the U.S. demand.

Methane, as regular Beacon readers know, is a greenhouse gas that’s 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Reining it in is key to avoid runaway climate change — which makes Exxon’s recent efforts critical.

The oil giant just announced partnerships with a bunch of different organizations, to develop technologies to clamp down on methane leaks. Among its new commitments: participation in studies conducted by the Department of Energy and the EPA’s Oil and Gas Initiative, as well as a methane emissions consortium dedicated to reducing greenhouse gases with fellow oil giants like Chevron.

Exxon’s moves come not a moment too soon. A six-year methane study published last week in the journal Science showed that the EPA has drastically underestimated how much methane companies produce — it’s about 60 percent higher than the agency reported. Most of those emissions come from undetected leaks, hence Exxon’s new commitment to developing leak-detection-and-repair technologies and programs.

The recent methane push has also earned Exxon at least one strange bedfellow: the Environmental Defense Fund. Yep, the same Environmental Defense Fund whose president, just three years ago, supported an investigation into the corporation’s handling of research it had on the reality of climate change.

To prove to the world that their unlikely pairing is official, the EDF and Exxon co-hosted a panel about methane at the 2018 World Gas Conference on Monday. Congrats, guys! Can’t wait for the wedding.

— Zoya Teirstein
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ENERGY ... Large Methane Leaks Threaten Perception Of 'Clean' Natural Gas

June 23, 20184:30 AM ET Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday LEIGH PATERSON


A gas flare is seen at a natural gas processing facility near Williston, N.D. in 2015. A new study says the amount of methane leaking is more than government estimates. Matthew Brown/AP

A new study published in the journal Science finds that methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas operations are 60 percent higher than previous estimates from the federal government.

This comes at a time when U.S. is getting more and more of its power from natural gas; in 2017, 31.7 percent of U.S. electricity came from natural gas-fired generation, up from 27.3 percent in 2013. It's widely considered to be a cleaner fuel than coal, and natural gas does emit less carbon when it is burned for electricity. But this new, higher estimate of how much methane is leaking from natural gas production could change the whole equation.

Anthony Marchese has been focused on measuring this problem for years. He's a professor of mechanical engineering at Colorado State University and in 2013 and 2014, he and his team of researchers spent months on the road, driving around to over 100 oil and gas sites in 13 states.

'You'd pull up to one of these facilities in the morning. And we'd do a quick survey of the facility with our optical gas imaging, so this is a camera that can detect methane which is usually invisible,' Marchese explains. 'And we would see the facility and what we could call an 'abnormal operating state.' For example, you might see natural gas spewing out of one of the condensate tanks.'

Environmental Group Plans Methane-Tracking Satellite

Marchese says his team observed these abnormal operating conditions on pieces of oil and gas equipment, like condensate tanks, at 20 percent of the facilities they visited during their five months of field work.

The nonprofit organization the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) put the new methane study together using Marchese's data as well as data from more than 100 other independent researchers. According to their analysis, these large, usually unplanned releases are a huge contributor to methane emissions overall. The EDF estimates that overall, the methane leak rate is around 2.3 percent of total yearly U.S. gas production. That might not sound like a lot, but according to the EDF, it's enough natural gas to power 10 million homes for an entire year.

'This paper shows that the emissions of methane from the oil and gas industry are a lot higher than what is currently estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency,' Ramón Alvarez, one of the lead authors of the new study, says. 'The fact is that the magnitude of emissions are so large that it has a material impact on the climate impact of natural gas as a fossil fuel.'

Methane is the primary ingredient in natural gas. It's also a powerful greenhouse gas, so leaks during natural gas production contribute to climate change.

'Industry needs to increase its vigilance around finding both the run-of-the-mill leaks and the more dramatic high emissions from the abnormal conditions that are discussed in this paper,' Alvarez says. 'Over time, they need to determine what are the root causes that lead to these high emissions and find better systems.'

But the energy industry is pushing back on these findings, questioning the methodology of the EDF study.

'Science is not one study and then it's all solved. It's the preponderance of evidence and there have been several studies which show much lower leakage rates,' says Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas trade group based in Denver, Colo.

Moreover, she argues that Colorado producers have done a 'great job' bringing down their methane emissions.

There is something to that. In 2014, Colorado become the first state to tackle the methane problem with regulations. Since then, the state says that the number of reported leaks has been steadily going down. Other states like California, New York and Pennsylvania also have plans to cut methane emissions. But at the federal level, the opposite is happening; the Trump administration is working to roll back two Obama-era rules meant to reduce methane emissions.
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Abstract
Methane emissions from the U.S. oil and natural gas supply chain were estimated using ground-based, facility-scale measurements and validated with aircraft observations in areas accounting for ~30% of U.S. gas production. When scaled up nationally, our facility-based estimate of 2015 supply chain emissions is 13 ± 2 Tg/y, equivalent to 2.3% of gross U.S. gas production. This value is ~60% higher than the U.S. EPA inventory estimate, likely because existing inventory methods miss emissions released during abnormal operating conditions. Methane emissions of this magnitude, per unit of natural gas consumed, produce radiative forcing over a 20-year time horizon comparable to the CO2 from natural gas combustion. Significant emission reductions are feasible through rapid detection of the root causes of high emissions and deployment of less failure-prone systems.