Mystery of Oil Field Fugitives Closer to Being Solved

Oil field fugitives aren’t people, of course, but gases — methane, benzene, toluene, xylene and other volatile organic compounds.  Some of them cause cancer.  Methane, like carbon dioxide, is a greenhouse gas that meddles with the climate, forcing a lot of warming in the atmosphere.
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In a new study published this month in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, scientists studying the air quality in Utah’s Uintah Basin were able to determine what specific kinds of oil and gas field machinery were leaking those gases.

The study is important because it’s one of the first that actually pinpoints the types of equipment that can leak large amounts of pollutants and greenhouse gases, said Cornell University environmental engineering professor Anthony Ingraffea, whose research detecting fugitive methane emissions from oil and gas fields was cited in the study.

“It names names,” he said.  “Dehumidifiers, separators, compressors.”

The study also shows that natural gas fields close to each other can have wildly different rates of leaking gases, illustrating why it’s important for regulators to actually measure pollution in the field instead of relying on leakage that is expected to occur based on lab testing, Ingraffea  said.

The Uintah Basin, part of northeast Utah’s rugged canyon country, is home to about 10,000 active oil and gas wells.  It’s also highly polluted, known for exceeding ozone air quality standards in the winter and having high methane emissions.
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“Typically, a piece of equipment has a certain emission rate that’s been assigned to it,” said study co-author James Roberts, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo.

When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculates greenhouse gas emissions rates from oil fields, they add all the assigned, or expected, emissions rates of oil field equipment operating in the field to create an estimate, he said.

There’s what leaks in the lab.  And then there’s reality.
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When the researchers measured leaking gases from wells they found levels of pollution they didn’t expect to find, he said.
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Most of the leaking methane the team discovered was leaking from oil and gas wellheads, a series of pipes and valves seen on the surface of the ground at the well site.  Methane also came from pipelines sitting on the surface of the ground.

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