OIL AND GAS PRODUCTION EMIT MORE METHANE THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is underestimating methane emissions from oil and gas production in its annual “Inventory of US Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks,” says a study from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Science Daily reported.

The research team found 90 percent higher emissions from oil production and 50 percent higher emissions for natural gas production than EPA estimated in its latest inventory. The paper is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

Led by Joannes Maasakkers, a graduate student at SEAS, the team developed a method to trace and map total emissions from satellite data to their source on the ground. "This is the first country-wide evaluation of the emissions that the EPA reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC)," said Maasakkers, who is currently a scientist at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

Currently, the EPA only reports total national emissions to the UNFCC. In previous research, Maasakkers and his collaborators, including Daniel Jacob, the Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering at SEAS, worked with the EPA to map regional emissions of methane from different sources in the US.

That level of detail was used to simulate how methane moves through the atmosphere. In this paper, the researchers compared those simulations to satellite observations from 2010-2015. Using a transport model, they were able to trace the path of emissions from the atmosphere back to the ground and identify areas across the US where the observations and simulations didn't match up.

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