There’s a great front-page article at the “NY Times” today about how three trillion cubic feet of methane leak into the air every year, much of it from oil and gas operations, and how some companies are attempting to stem the tide of leaks. The article says “This amount has the warming power of emissions from over half the coal plants in the United States.”
The article describes how one big company, EnCana, is trying to capture the gas which is “…also a cheap, effective way of blunting climate change that could potentially be replicated thousands of times over, from Wyoming to Siberia, energy experts say.” P.S. EnCana doesn’t lose revenue-enhancing natural gas to the atmosphere. Once again, common-sense approaches so often have tremendous bang for the buck. As 3M has said (and demonstrated) for many years: Pollution Prevention Pays.
Meanwhile, there’s another hugely wasteful standard practice in the oil and gas industry that intensifies GHG loading: gas flaring. I’ve written about this here at the blog. (This was in the context of Mexico’s attempts to reduce its footprint.) Altogether, gas flaring has a global impact on climate change by adding about 400 million tons of CO2 annually.
