Here’s a Quiz: How Much Methane is Seeping from Old Wells?

I’ll be posting my video on the US/China climate agreement on monday, from San Francisco, where I’ll be attending the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.
It’s an important piece, one I’ll be following up on in coming months, because there are a lot of under-examined issues here.

One is – we assume that US carbon emissions are on the downswing, and to the best of my knowledge, that’s true. However, there are some emissions that we don’t count, because they are poorly understood. These include the gentle seeping of powerful greenhouse gases from thousands of abandoned wells around the country.

USAToday:

One study found that millions of abandoned oil and gas wells across the USA could release a significant quantity of methane into the atmosphere but are not included in total emission counts.

A second study found that only a few active natural gas wells produce the majority of known methane emissions.

Methane is a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat and thus is a prime contributor to global warming. Methane accounts for nearly 9% of all greenhouse gases emitted as a result of human activity in the USA.

The Environmental Protection Agency said the oil and gas industry is the largest source of methane in the atmosphere in the USA, followed by livestock emissions and landfills.

The authors found that all of the wells emitted some level of methane. Three wells were “high emitters,” releasing the gas at a rate much higher than the others.

“These measurements show that methane emissions from abandoned oil and gas wells can be significant,” Kang and her co-authors wrote in the first study ever to measure methane from old wells.

Kang said wells are pathways for gases and other fluids that would otherwise remain trapped deep underground to migrate upward.

The authors estimate that abandoned wells in Pennsylvania could account for 4%-7% of all human-sourced methane emissions in the state. The researchers say the wells in Pennsylvania could be representative of all the wells across the country.

Description:

CIRES, NOAA study confirms leaks from oil and gas operations

During two days of intensive airborne measurements, oil and gas operations in Colorado’s Front Range leaked nearly three times as much methane, a greenhouse gas, as predicted based on inventory estimates, and seven times as much benzene, a regulated air toxic. Emissions of other chemicals that contribute to summertime ozone pollution were about twice as high as estimates, according to the new paper, accepted for publication in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

EcoWatch:

A study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that switching from coal to natural gas would not significantly lower the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change.

That’s chiefly because the shift would delay the deployment and cost-competitiveness ofrenewable electricity technologies for making electricity,” concluded the three researchers from the University of California Irvine, Stanford University and Seattle-based nonprofit Net Zero.

“Increased use of natural gas has been promoted as a means of decarbonizing the U.S. power sector, because of superior generator efficiency and lower CO2 emissions per unit of electricity than coal,” said the study. “We model the effect of different gas supplies on the U.S. power sector and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Across a range of climate policies, we find that abundant natural gas decreases use of both coal and renewable energy technologies in the future.”

All that being said, we also know that renewable energy is dropping in price so quickly, that the presumed buildout of natural gas generators in coming years may not be the done deal it is portrayed to be.

New York Times:

For the solar and wind industries in the United States, it has been a long-held dream: to produce energy at a cost equal to conventional sources like coal and natural gas.

That day appears to be dawning.

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas.

Utility executives say the trend has accelerated this year, with several companies signing contracts, known as power purchase agreements, for solar or wind at prices below that of natural gas, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest, where wind and sunlight are abundant.
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