Methane Leaks from North American Natural Gas Systems

By Adam R. Brandt, G. Heath, E. Kort, F. O'Sullivan, G. Pétron, S. Jordaan, P. Tans, J. Wilcox, A. Gopstein, D. Arent and 6 more. Science, 2014

829 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Methane emissions from U.S. and Canadian natural gas systems appear larger than official estimates. Natural gas (NG) is a potential “bridge fuel” during transition to a decarbonized energy system: It emits less carbon dioxide during combustion than other fossil fuels and can be used in many industries. However, because of the high global warming potential of methane (CH4, the major component of NG), climate benefits from NG use depend on system leakage rates. Some recent estimates of leakage have challenged the benefits of switching from coal to NG, a large near-term greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction opportunity (1–3). Also, global atmospheric CH4 concentrations are on the rise, with the causes still poorly understood (4).

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Mechanics of Materials, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d15df85577f66b74727da2d7ee4052d8caa18aee

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Mechanics of Materials

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

The Environmental Costs and Benefits of Fracking (2014, background): “Two inverse modeling studies (142, 143) constrained with atmospheric measurements and a recent synthesis (114) suggest that total methane emissions from anthropogenic activities in the United States, including oil and gas production, were ∼50% higher than EPA estimates (115).”
Integrated life-cycle assessment of electricity-supply scenarios confirms global environmental benefit of low-carbon technologies (2014, background): “these emissions or how much they might differ by location and type of gas resource (61, 95).”
Renewables, nuclear, or fossil fuels? Scenarios for Great Britain’s power system considering costs, emissions and energy security (2015, background): “Natural gas in particular may have higher emissions from extraction than assumed so far [44], so assigning higher emissions to CCS technologies than to renewable ones appears justified.”
The Economics of Shale Gas Development (2015, background): “…sector that are robust to the range of methane emissions estimates, though their magnitude, of course, varies depending on those estimates (Brandt et al. 2014).16 Within the range of available methane leakage estimates, however, substitution for gasoline and diesel in transportation could…”
Climate benefits of natural gas as a bridge fuel and potential delay of near-zero energy systems (2016, background): “Conversely, for the highest leakage rate case we considered, 6%, the breakeven delay is less than 30 years (6% is the mean high-value of recent published data) [8,9,34,41,42], meaning transitional energy systems must be shut down more than 30 years before the comparable coal energy systems.”