Fracking's Contribution to Greenhouse Gases Worse than Estimated

The argument for burning gas instead of coal goes something like this: burning gas is “cleaner” because it emits less carbon dioxide than oil or coal – even though methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas.

So if you can keep the gas you drill from escaping before it is burned as fuel, you might have an advantage. The problem is that gas escapes – from wells, pipelines, compressors. A couple years ago the federal Environmental Protection Agency had estimated that 0.8 percent to 1.6 percent of natural gas production escapes, on a national average.

Then last year the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) published a paper finding that as long as escaping methane was less than 3.2 percent of lifetime production, natural gas would be better than coal for electrical production.  According to EDF, 3.2 percent is the “threshold”;  methane emissions above that level would eliminate the justification for using gas as a “transition fuel” to replace coal for electricity generation.

Now, new research shows that more – much more – methane is escaping from gas production than thought. Studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Utah’s Uintah Basin showed that up to 12 percent of the gas produced could be going into the atmosphere instead of the pipeline. The basin serves about 6,000 wells and accounts for about one percent of the nation’s gas production.

A research team from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) flew over the basin at about 1,000 feet, gathering air samples and taking readings over a period of several weeks. They used a “mass balance” technique which follows an air mass at it moves into a region and then flows out of that area. During their Feb. 3 testing they found that the area leaked 60 tons of gas an hour. Some days it was far greater.

It’s not just the wells that are leaking; methane could potentially be leaking from processing plants, pipelines, and compressors. The problem with all this leaky methane is that it contributes to smog – and Utah has smog levels that rival Los Angeles on its worst days. An EPA report concluded that the oil and gas industry was responsible for about 99 percent of the volatile organic compounds found in the basin which, when mixed with sunlight, creates ground level ozone. The smog was so bad at times that the Salt Lake City airport has had to divert flights.

Add up the studies and you get a picture that shows drilling pollutes the air people breathe, creates smog, and adds a higher-than-predicted burden of greenhouse gases to our atmosphere. Now US Fish and Wildlife Service say drilling is contributing to the loss of two plant species. The agency is asking for federal protection for two rare plant species, Graham’s beardtongue and White River beardtongue and is asking for them to be listed under the Endangered Species Act.

According to US Fish & Wildlife, both plants are endemic to the Uintah Basin and over the past few years their range has been reduced by oil and gas development, invasive species and grazing. The plants grow where oil shale deposits that are rich in calcium carbonate touch the surface.

You Can't Frack Your Way out of Global Warming

In his State of the Union address, President Obama said a lot of things - some outright contradictory, including: we need to take steps to address climate change, followed later by exhorting us to exploit US oil and gas.

We can't have it both ways. Yes, yes, burning gas creates fewer climate impacts than burning coal or oil. We've heard it over and over and over and over.... and it's not correct. Because getting that gas out of the ground, shattering it out of the rock, extracting if from tarry sands - those things put more emissions into the air. And all those leaky pipelines and compressor stations - they're emitting methane which is a potent greenhouse gas. Flaring alone produces 400 million tons of greenhouse gases. It's not just affecting our climate, it's harming our health.

Despite the hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, despite the thousands of letters to state and local officials, despite stockholder resolutions ... no one seems to be listening. Well, at least until this week. On Thursday Senators Bernie Sanders (Senate energy committee) and Barbara Boxer (chair of Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works) submitted the Climate Protection Act that, they hope, will reverse climate change.  (It's short - only 25 pages)

Introducing this act, Bernie Sanders said:

I fear very much that our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back on this period in history and ask a very simple question: Where were they? Why didn’t the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth, lead the international community in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and preventing the devastating damage that the scientific community was sure would come?

Tomorrow thousands of citizens will march from the Washington Monument to the White House in a huge climate rally. They're sincerely hoping that the president, who promised climate action earlier this week, is listening.

In case you have forgotten why it's important to reduce our carbon footprint:

Fracking and Excessive Greenhouse Gases

Tara gas field, Queensland Australia

Ninety-four hundred miles (give or take) from the Marcellus gas fields folks are worried about the same things: the air they breathe and the water they drink. Farmers in Queensland, Australia have already noticed the water table dropping – not to mention the piles of junk left behind by drilling operators.

Now, residents near Australia’s biggest coal seam gas field can add one more worry to their list: excess greenhouse gases. When researchers from Southern Cross University took mobile air testing equipment to the Tara gas field near Condamine in Queensland, they discovered that the air has more than  three times the level of toxic gases than expected – at least based on the industry's claim that leakage from the wellheads is "negligible."

At sites within a few miles of the Tara field wellheads, methane was measured   as high as 6.89 parts per million, compared with a normal background level of about 2 parts per million, the air test results showed.

Add to that a growing number of health concerns. One physician (with the New South Wales chapter of Doctors for the Environment) told the press of increasing complaints of rashes, nausea, headaches and nose bleeds among people living close to the Tara gas fields.

In unsurprising comments to the press, industry representatives calls the study awaiting peer review “incomplete” and “lacking rigor” and claim the scientists are biased against the gas industry.Read more here.

Shale Boom leads to Increased Air Pollution

Billions of dollars worth of natural gas is wasted each year, says the World Banks’ Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership. Gas that could otherwise be used to heat homes, cook food or fuel local economies is instead going up in smoke – burned or flared at oil fields across the world. That flaring produces some 400 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year.

Now, preliminary data from World Bank shows that the shale energy boom is fueling a rise in the burning of waste gas. Around the world, gas flaring crept up by 4.5 percent in 2011 – an amount “equivalent to the annual gas use of Denmark” according to a Reuter’s report published yesterday. The World Bank report is due out at the end of the month.

The data indicate that this increase is mostly due to the rise in shale oil exploration in North Dakota, an increase that pushed the US into the top ten gas flaring countries.

Flaring is used to eliminate gas at exploration sites and to test production of the well. The problem is that flaring gas releases a large number of pollutants into the air, including chemicals used to frack the well. In addition to the methane, flaring adds another five dozen chemicals into the air, including: acetalhyde, acrolein, benzene, ethyl benzene, formaldehyde, hexane, naphthalene, propylene, toluene, and xylenes.

Flaring is permitted, but companies could use “greener” technologies that would not only keep these chemicals out of the air but would save money (a savings of $9 for every $1 spent on these technologies according to Deborah Rogers). One tiny detail: these cleaner technologies usually require a gas pipeline to be in place first.

A 2009 report on green completions from SMU explains that companies could capture up to 70% capture of formerly released gases with green completions.

EPA Proposes Air Pollution Standards for Oil & Gas Production

Natural gas is touted as a “cleaner, greener” fuel. But drilling, producing and transporting gas from well to market puts a tremendous amount of pollutants into the air. Volatile organic chemicals (VOCs), diesel fumes, particulates, and fugitive methane emissions contribute to smog, ground level ozone and climate change.

For the past year Cornell scientists Robert Howarth, Tony Ingraffea and Renee Santoro have warned that emissions from shale gas development are much higher than conventional drilling and likely to aggravate global warming. Their peer-reviewed research was published in Climate ChangeLetters this April, and just last month they released a new report that looks at the indirect emissions of carbondioxide from Marcellus shale development.

Since last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been taking a harder look at air pollution resulting from oil and gas drilling operations. Today the EPA proposed updated standards - issued in response to a court order – that would rely on cost-effective existing technologies to reduce emissions. EPA believes these standards would help improve operators’ ability to capture and sell methane currently leaking into the air as “fugitive emissions” and result in more efficient operations while reducing air pollution.

Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation noted that the proposed standards will help ensure responsible production of domestic energy. “Reducing these emissions will help cut toxic pollution that can increase cancer risks and smog that can cause asthma attacks and premature death - all while giving these operators additional product to bring to market,” she stated in a press release.

The updated standards would cut volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from several types of processes and equipment, including a 95 percent reduction in VOCs emitted during the completion of new and modified hydraulically fractured wells. Technologies referred to as “green completions” already exist that allow companies to capture gas that currently escapes to the air.

According to the EPA, domestic gas production is growing, with more than 25,000 new and existing wells fractured or re-fractured each year. The proposed VOC reductions will help reduce ozone and reduce methane, which EPA labels “a potent greenhouse gas”.  Not only that, upgrading storage tanks and other equipment could save the industry tens of millions of dollars each year, says EPA.

EPA is required to take final action by Feb. 28, 2012. As part of the public comment period, EPA will hold three public hearings, in the Dallas, Denver and Pittsburgh areas. Details on the hearings will be announced soon at http://epa.gov/airquality/oilandgas

Shale Gas Wells Have Bigger Carbon Footprint than Conventional Wells

Cornell professor Robert Howarth reports that emissions from shale gas development are much higher than conventional drilling and likely to aggravate global warming. Working with Tony Ingraffea and Renee Santoro, Howarth spent the past year calculating the total contribution of greenhouse gas emissions generated from unconventional drilling. Their research will be published this April in the peer-reviewed journal, Climate Change Letters.

A couple weeks ago the researchers discussed the numbers behind their findings during a lunch-hour seminar. Although no one has definitively calculated the contribution of greenhouse gases from gas drilling, their numbers show a big difference between conventional and unconventional drilling. Turns out that drilling shale gas wells puts anywhere from 30 percent to twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as conventional gas wells.

That’s because unconventional gas wells are bigger, says Ingraffea. Longer horizontal wellbores mean more drilling time and heavier drilling equipment, which means burning more diesel. Add to that more fracking stages and more cement plugs in the horizontal bore – plugs that must be removed before the gas flows.

Bigger wells also mean more flowback and more produced drilling fluids. And at every one of these stages carbon is lost, mostly in the form of methane that released into the atmosphere either through venting or by flaring.

The Cornell team used data from Chesapeake wells drilled in Pennsylvania Marcellus shale to characterize a “typical shale gas well”. Then they determined how much carbon was emitted from each stage of drilling and production.

Carbon dioxide emissions are important, Howarth said, but methane is a more critical problem. Natural gas is 85 to 95 percent methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. No one has measured actual methane emissions from gas wells throughout the various stages, so the Cornell relied on data from the gas industry, the General Accountability Office and EPA.

“A shale gas well can lose up to 3.2 percent of its lifetime production of methane in the first 12 days,” Howarth said. The amount of gas vented during initial drilling activities varies with the rock formation, so the team calculated an average using industry data from five different formations.

Even with their conservative estimate, the Cornell researchers figure that 1.9 percent of a shale well’s lifetime methane production escapes during initial drilling and completion. For conventional gas wells that figure is 0.1 percent. That difference, says Ingraffea, is due to hydro-fracking.

Once a gas well begins producing, gas continues to leak at the well site, said Howarth. This holds for both types of wells, with little difference between the two. Additional methane is lost during processing, and even more when gas is vented from storage tanks and lost from pipelines. Just how leaky are Amaerica’s aging gas pipelines? According to Texas companies operating in the Barnet shale, 3.6 percent of the gas shipped through pipelines never makes it to the end consumer.

When you tally up all the numbers from drilling to production to transport, something like 3.6 to 7.9 percent of the gas from a shale well disappears into the atmosphere over the lifetime of the well. That amount is 30 percent to two times greater than the amount lost during conventional gas production and development.

All the methane that is vented and flared during gas drilling ends up in the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming. The question, Howarth explained, is how to translate methane emissions into “carbon dioxide equivalents” Previously, scientists multiplied the amount of methane by 21. The Cornell team believes that multiplier should be much higher. Their conclusion: shale gas contributes twice as much greenhouse gas as coal.

You can see their slides here.