Oil and natural gas production releases more methane than previously thought

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dismisses methane emissions from oil and gas production in its annual U.S. Gas Sinks Gas Emissions Report, according to a new study from Harvard John School of Engineering and Applied Sciences A. Paulson (SEAS). The research team found 90 percent higher emissions from oil production and 50 percent higher emissions for natural gas production than EPA estimated in their most recent investment.

The paper is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The research team, led by former SEAS graduate student Joannes Maasakkers, developed a method to locate and map total distributions of satellite data to their ground source.

“This is the first nationwide assessment of the emissions reported by the EPA to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC),” said Maasakkers, who is currently a scientist at Dutch SRON Institute for Space Research.

Currently, the EPA only reports total national emissions to the UNFCC. In previous research, Maasakkers and his colleagues, including Daniel Jacob, Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering at SEAS, worked with the EPA to map regional emissions of methane from various sources in in the US. This level of detail has been used to simulate how methane moves through the atmosphere.

In this paper, the researchers compared these simulations with satellite observations from 2010-2015. Using a transport model, they were able to trace emissions from the atmosphere back to earth and identify areas across the U.S. where the ideas and symbols did not fit.

“When we look at emissions from space, we can only see how total emissions from an area should be reduced or reduced, but we don’t know where those emissions came from,” Maasakkers said. that we spent so much time with the EPA finding out where these different emissions are happening, we were able to use our transport model to go back and find out what sources that rely on those that are understated or projected in the national population. “

Emissions were most different from oil and natural gas production.

The EPA measures emissions based on processes and equipment. For example, the EPA estimates that a gas pump emits a metric amount of methane, multiplying that by how many pumps operate across the country, and estimates total emissions from gas pumps. .

“That approach makes it very difficult to get estimates for individual facilities because it is difficult to take into account all the potential distribution sources,” Maasakkers said. “We know that a small number of facilities make up the majority of emissions so it is clear that there are facilities that are making more emissions than we would expect from these overall estimates.”

The researchers hope that future work will shed more light on where these emissions come from and how they change.

“We plan to continue to monitor U.S. methane emissions using new high-altitude satellite ideas, and work with the EPA to develop emissions investments,” Jacob said.

“It is important to better understand these emissions but we should not wait until we fully understand these emissions to start reducing them,” Maasakkers said. “There are already many things we know we can do. to reduce emissions. ”