Methane Emissions in Texas Fracking Region 50% Higher than EPA Estimates

The release of 11 research papers Tuesday marked another milestone in the Environmental Defense Fund's ongoing effort to understand the natural gas industry's carbon footprint.  Overall, the studies found that emissions of methane––a greenhouse gas at least 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide––in the Texas Barnett Shale were 50 percent higher than estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EDF-sponsored research adds to a growing body of work on the amount of methane leaking from natural gas operations, and the results are crucial for understanding whether natural gas will accelerate or delay the effects of climate change as it's increasingly used in place of coal.

Dozens of scientists from 20 universities and private research firms contributed to the 11 studies, collectively called the "Barnett Coordinated Campaign."  Twelve research teams took measurements over an area that included 30,000 oil and gas wells, 275 compressor stations and 40 processing plants.  All of the studies were published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology.  Another study that synthesizes the papers' results will be published later.

The Barnett campaign is a major part of EDF's $18 million methane study series.  Launched in 2011, EDF's project has won praise for the scope of its research and the scientists' unprecedented access to well sites, which allowed them to take direct measurements at emission sources.  But EDF has also been criticized for working closely with industry and for requiring researchers to sign nondisclosure agreements that prevent them from sharing preliminary results with the scientific community.

The scientists behind the Barnett campaign used both "top-down" methods—where emissions are measured from aircraft over a large area—and "bottom-up" methods, where emission sources such as pneumatic valves and compression stations are individually measured and tallied up.  Both methods showed that a large portion of the leaks come from a relatively small number of "super-emitters."  The scientists also used chemical "fingerprints" to distinguish the methane emitted by oil and gas production from the methane coming out of landfills and agricultural sources.  One of these "fingerprints" is ethane, a light gas that's found only in fossil fuel-produced methane.

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