The World Is Hemorrhaging Methane, and Now We Can See Where

The Aliso Canyon breach is accidental, but thousands of other sites are flaring off methane intentionally, as waste.

For more than two months now, a ruptured storage well has poured thousands of tons of gas into the Porter Ranch section of Los Angeles.  The Aliso Canyon leak is huge—California’s largest known source of methane emissions at this point—but not compared to another font of wasted gas miles away in Venezuela.

Punta de Mata is home to the world’s largest gas flare, one of the flaming chimneys used to burn off excess natural gas at oil wells and other energy sites. In 2012 it incinerated about 768,000 metric tons of natural gas, almost 10 times the amount given off so far from the Southern California Gas Company’s facility at Aliso Canyon.

Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is 84 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over two decades.  As countries seek to comply with the new UN climate accord by slashing emissions, both gas flaring and leaks remain persistent problems.  Though widespread, they can be difficult to track, given that methane gas is invisible and odorless.

Now, high-tech cameras and satellites are capturing those releases better than ever, putting pressure on companies and officials to take action.  Flaring gas has a much lower impact on the climate than a vent directly into the atmosphere—the flame converts gas into an amount of carbon dioxide that will have 30 times less warming potential in the near term.  Still, the methane hotspots spanning the globe add a hefty sum to its greenhouse gas pollution.

Read more at The World Is Hemorrhaging Methane, and Now We Can See Where