Flares burn off methane and other hydrocarbons at an oil and gas facility in Lenorah, Texas in 2021. New research shows drillers emit about three times as much climate-warming methane as official estimates.
Methane is the main component of natural gas, and it is also produced when extracting crude oil. Methane is among the greenhouse gasses heating the planet,The study's researchers used airplanes to gather 986,238 measurements of methane emissions from six domestic oil and gas production areas. The data include about half the country's onshore oil production and 29% of natural gas production.
"These are places where production is mostly focusing on oil," says Evan Sherwin, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. But oil and gas often come out of the ground together, and if there wasn't a way to transport the less-valuable gas to where it could be sold, leaks were higher.
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