NOAA’s paper on methane emissions from the Denver-Julesburg Basin was touted this week byNPR as a major clue in the ongoing “detective story” about how much natural gas is lost during the production, transmission and distribution of oil and gas.
Like many other news outlets, NPR does its best to portray methane emissions from oil and gas as a mysterious, lurking threat to the environment:
“A lot of research shows power plants pump out fewer greenhouse gases when they run on gas instead of coal. But no one really knows how much natural gas leaks out when companies are drilling for gas and getting it to power plants. Natural gas is primarily methane. …
Methane is very effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere. And already, natural gas production is the biggest manmade U.S. source of methane. …
The way it is now, the Environmental Protection Agency relies on estimates of methane emissions. They’re based on some measurements of emissions from individual pieces of equipment and lots of complicated math.”
Chilling. Especially the part about complicated math. There’s just one problem – the story about methane emissions isn’t scary at all, once you hear the facts that NPR left out.
True, the EPA’s current estimates say oil and gas systems are the nation’s “largest human-made source of methane emissions.” But even so, the estimated total is still a tiny fraction of overall U.S. greenhouse gas emissions – only 3.8 percent, according to the EPA.
The EPA and NOAA can’t make-up their minds on whether methane is short-/long-…lived, having contradictory papers & statements, but un-mentioned in the NPR piece, are facts that a forest in Wisconsin where NO Methane was being drilled/pumped, had HIGHER methane levels than producing fields, and WHY is that? One of the reasons WHY, is that releases of methane are now capped by valving, reducing by 70-90% what was before,–something NOT MENTIONED by NPR. Further, animal methane was not figured into the study, when it was a “big-deal” previously, plus methane-atmosphere estimates have been arbitrarily raised to over 1200% since fracking started in earnest, in an attempt to discredit the practice. Imo, that “estimate” is a GUESS encouraged by the “minions of Zoroz”, as is much of the EPA’s & NOAA’s “WAR” on: the USA economy, and our future energy independence. When your “Cheif”, imo, is “owned by Zoroz”, the govt. bureaus say the darned-est things.
“Methane is very effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere.” ……… I would like to see some proof of that statement.
The facts are that EPA/NOAA are operating on theories that they can’t prove, and they don’t have any more that a suspicion of where the atmospheric methane comes from. Further, they don’t know if it has any bad effects on the environment, and they can’t seem to figure out how long it takes for sunlight to break it down.
And we pay our taxes to support these people.
Just another attack on an energy source that is clean and will last hundreds of years. Of course that means we don’t have to kill off 4 billion humans. Neo Mathusians and dirt worshippers heads explode at the very idea that humans will still inhabit the Earth.