Energy Exchange

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A pair of new scientific papers published in the journals Nature and Science argue that levels of so-called fossil methane coming from naturally occurring sources — underground seeps, volcanoes, and so forth — are much lower than previous estimates, and that human-made emissions from the fossil energy industry account for a much larger share of the global methane budget.

The widely reported findings arrive in the midst of a robust debate among researchers in which a great deal is still unsettled. Whether these latest findings eventually prove correct remains to be seen. But the ongoing discourse leaves no doubt about the continued need to dramatically reduce the vast amounts of methane that we know are currently emitted by oil and gas production and distribution.

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By Stefan Schwietzke and Steven Hamburg

A decade of extensive scientific research has demonstrated that methane emissions from the oil and gas supply chain have been substantially underestimated and has placed pressure on governments and industry to act. Because of methane’s potency and the feasibility and cost efficiency for reducing emissions of it, methane presents among the most powerful opportunities we have to slow the rate of planetary warming in our lifetimes.

Still, methane research continues — the more precisely we can identify global emission sources and quantify their volume, the more precise and effective mitigation efforts will be. And as this challenge is examined by different teams with different methods, we sometime have to address discrepancies among the results. Such is the case with two new papers that examine the proportion of rising atmospheric levels of methane associated with shale gas production in the United States. We know oil and gas methane emissions are higher than previously thought — and the scientific debate surrounding these papers is about where the global increases in emissions are coming from.

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