Methane Is Leaking All Over The Place

[Bill USA]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/methane-is-leaking-all-over-the-place/

It’s now been 103 days since workers from the Southern California Gas Company discovered a natural gas leak coming from the Aliso Canyon underground storage field near the Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles. In late November, 58,000 kilograms of methane per hour were leaking into the atmosphere.1 As of Jan. 21, that number was down to 20,000 kilograms per hour, but overall the leak has released more than 91,000 metric tons of methane — emissions equivalent to burning more than 862 million gallons of gasoline.

The leak, SoCalGas says, will finally be stopped by late this month. The methane, though, will linger in the atmosphere.

Although California health officials have determined that the leak poses minimal health risks, its danger to the climate is more severe. About 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions came from methane in 2012, and 30 percent of those emissions came not from fuel use, but from the extraction and distribution of oil and natural gas. Methane sticks around in the atmosphere for decades, rather than centuries like carbon dioxide, but it absorbs much more heat. On a time scale of 20 years, methane’s effects on global warming are about 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide’s.23

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Methane is the primary component of natural gas, and it can leak almost anywhere in the natural gas supply chain. Studies show that it is leaking at almost every point in the supply chain — at drilling sites, along pipelines, at compression stations, at storage facilities like Aliso Canyon and along the networks of piping that deliver natural gas to homes. About the only thing unusual about the Aliso Canyon leak is its size.
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