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Methane Emissions from Natural Gas Production Sites in the United States: Data Synthesis and National Estimate

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  • Journal Title:
    Environmental Science & Technology
  • Personal Author:
  • NOAA Program & Office:
    OAR (Oceanic and Atmospheric Research)
  • Description:
    We used site-level methane (CH4) emissions data from over 1000 natural gas (NG) production sites in eight basins, including 92 new site-level CH4 measurements in the Uinta, northeastern Marcellus, and Denver-Julesburg basins, to investigate CH4 emissions characteristics and develop a new national CH4 emission estimate for the NG production sector. The distribution of site-level emissions is highly skewed, with the top 5% of sites accounting for 50% of cumulative emissions. High emitting sites are predominantly also high producing (>10 Mcfd). However, low NG production sites emit a larger fraction of their CH4 production. When combined with activity data, we predict that this creates substantial variability in the basin-level CH4 emissions which, as a fraction of basin-level CH4 production, range from 0.90% for the Appalachian and Greater Green River to >4.5% in the San Juan and San Joaquin. This suggests that much of the basin-level differences in production-normalized CH4 emissions reported by aircraft studies can be explained by differences in site size and distribution of site-level production rates. We estimate that NG production sites emit total CH4 emissions of 830 Mg/h (95% CI: 530–1200), 63% of which come from the sites producing <100 Mcfd that account for only 10% of total NG production. Our total CH4 emissions estimate is 2.3 times higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate and likely attributable to the disproportionate influence of high emitting sites.
  • Keywords:
  • Source:
    Environmental Science & Technology, 52(21), 12915-12925
  • DOI:
  • ISSN:
    0013-936X ; 1520-5851
  • Format:
    PDF
  • Publisher:
    American Chemical Society (ACS)
  • Document Type:
    Journal Article
  • Funding:
    Grant no. NA14OAR4310135
  • Rights Information:
    Other
  • Compliance:
    Library
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha256:52bf544c68f5f8f00407bd43509e8d2e399bcac24b926b36353961c3c8e3be56
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 3.80 MB ]
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