Enormous methane leak in US Southwest

Enormous methane leak in the southwest being painstakingly studied—oil and gas likely suspects

Daily Kos,

7 May, 2015

The methane hotspot reported by NASA this past October is getting science's most rigorous method applied to it. Steve Conley is using the sky for parts of his research:

Flying at about 2,000 feet, he banked hard left to circle the ventilation shaft of a coal mine as inlet tubes under the right wing of the aircraft sucked in air, which passed through equipment that detects and quantifies methane and provides results in real time.

“That’s a huge spike right there. It’s scary big,” said Conley as the instruments registered more than four times the background level downwind of the vent shaft, about 25 miles southwest of Durango. “That means that this thing is blowing out stuff like crazy.”

Whereas the original study stressed the underreporting of methane emissions from the coal industry, it was based on NASA satellite imagery. Conley's study hopes to be more definitive in its identifying of emissions sources.

“We can tell the difference between a methane plume that is coming from cows or from landfills [and] from different types of oil and gas extraction,” said Gabrielle Petron, an NOAA scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder as she drove across northwestern New Mexico in a van decked out with a long pole to collect air samples. “Based on that, we’re going to try and reconcile what we see in the air, which is a mix of all these sources, and try and untangle how much is coming from the different categories.”

A mass of data gathered during three weeks of fieldwork in April will be collated, analyzed and submitted to peer review before the report is published next year. Researchers declined to make a quick read of the data, which they said were being gathered at a rate of half a terabyte a day. Nevertheless, a look at the raw data as they were being gathered in the field over two days suggested that substantial contributions to the plume from coal mine gas venting and fugitive emissions from natural gas facilities would likely figure significantly in the findings.

The work being done here is important since, up until now, conservatives and coal and gas industry officials have been able to hide, as they do with climate change, behind the vagaries of chemical and compound makeups—between what is naturally occurring and what is man-made.