The process of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) shales to extract oil and natural gas has lowered prices and displaced some coal with cleaner-burning natural gas in the US. However, some of the methane we're extracting also escapes from oil and gas wells and heads straight to the atmosphere, where it is a potent greenhouse gas.
That leakage is harmful to the climate, a wasted resource, and lost profit for natural gas producers, so researchers are working hard to find out just how much is leaking. If enough of it gets loose, natural gas can even lose its carbon emissions advantage over coal, despite its cleaner-burning nature.
Many different natural gas fields have been investigated using different methods. Some estimates are “top-down,” using measurements from aircraft circling well fields to estimate how much is coming out of wells and pipelines. Other estimates are “bottom-up,” relying on measurements on the ground at individual sites and scaling them up to the total number of sites. Top-down techniques often yield larger estimates, and leakage rates can vary widely from one gas field to another. It’s complicated.
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