In focusing on carbon dioxide, the world is overlooking a more dangerous candidate for warming – methane. A recent EPA study showed vast amounts of methane escape from landfills, livestock, coal mines and oil and gas wells, pipelines and storage tanks. The emissions are in many cases avoidable — at a profit.
The new total, again just from gas wells, has the climate-warming power in a year of the carbon dioxide emitted by eight million cars.
Changing practices are capturing growing amounts of landfill and coal-mine methane. Experts at the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledged publicly for the first time that the flow from standard practices at gas wells, not including leaky valves and the like, is at least 12 times higher than the longstanding agency estimate.
And E.P.A. officials say the total could be many times higher than that.
Companies working to cut flows of the gas from oil storage tanks say that source of emissions is similarly grossly underestimated.
Methane, besides having 25 times the climate impact of carbon dioxide when the gases are compared over a 100-year period, is a fuel and chemical feedstock. So capping the leaks brings in two-sided advantage! Not just about belching cows!
The team at MIT that looked at climate benefits of cutting methane emissions says that reducing methane is a cheap, fast solution to the short term problem. Not to forget carbon dioxide which is still far ahead by virtue of its sources.
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