Life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of Marcellus shale gas
By Mohan Jiang, W. Michael Griffin, C. Hendrickson, P. Jaramillo, Jeanne M. VanBriesen, A. Venkatesh. 2011
336 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This study estimates the life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the production of Marcellus shale natural gas and compares its emissions with national average US natural gas emissions produced in the year 2008, prior to any significant Marcellus shale development. We estimate that the development and completion of a typical Marcellus shale well results in roughly 5500 t of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions or about 1.8 g CO2e/MJ of gas produced, assuming conservative estimates of the production lifetime of a typical well. This represents an 11% increase in GHG emissions relative to average domestic gas (excluding combustion) and a 3% increase relative to the life cycle emissions when combustion is included. The life cycle GHG emissions of Marcellus shale natural gas are estimated to be 63–75 g CO2e/MJ of gas produced with an average of 68 g CO2e/MJ of gas produced. Marcellus shale natural gas GHG emissions are comparable to those of imported liquefied natural gas. Natural gas from the Marcellus shale has generally lower life cycle GHG emissions than coal for production of electricity in the absence of any effective carbon capture and storage processes, by 20–50% depending upon plant efficiencies and natural gas emissions variability. There is significant uncertainty in our Marcellus shale GHG emission estimates due to eventual production volumes and variability in flaring, construction and transportation.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Mechanics of Materials, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0b62acc8bef3b25b769990051c1bdcd0aa32102
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In Global and Planetary Change
- K. Caldeira
- R. B. Jackson
- S. Osborn
- A. Vengosh
- N. Warner
- G. P. Peters
- Robbie M. Andrew
- Justin Kitzes
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Climate benefits of natural gas as a bridge fuel and potential delay of near-zero energy systems (2016, result): “Some of the apparent disagreement among prior studies was due to the fact that different studies assumed different reference coal energy systems [1,6,12,43,44].”
- Increased stray gas abundance in a subset of drinking water wells near Marcellus shale gas extraction (2013, background): “These concerns include changes in air quality (6), human health effects for workers and people living near well pads (5), induced seismicity (7), and controversy over the greenhouse gas balance (8, 9).”
- The 'Shale Gas Revolution': Developments and Changes (2012, neutral): “The conclusions of Moore (2012) appear to confirm other reports, namely that the failures of the shale gas experience in the US have been ‘failures of regulation, not of the shale production technologies themselves’.”