Natural Gas Extraction Is Booming

With new drilling technologies, natural gas extraction has boomed in recent years. In British Columbia, hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. “fracking”) in earlier hard-to-reach deposits allow natural gas production to double between 2006 and 2017.
Though natural gas burns cleaner than coal, it’s no climate savior. And a new study of gas and oil resources of the northeastern part of British Columbia shows that many of the wells there are losing gas through leaks. That gas is mostly made up of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. “It’s a really impressive dataset in terms of the number of samples,” says Amy Townsend-Small, a biogeochemist at the University of Cincinnati who was not involved in the study.
At mining sites, operators extract oil and gas through steel-lined wells, some reaching depths of over a mile to extract deep shale gas deposits. These wells can leak oil, gas, or fracking fluids (a mix of water, sand, and chemicals) into the environment while they’re active or after they are retired. Since 1995, Canadian officials have required operators of these sites to report leaks they find, and since 2010 those regulations have grown stricter, requiring testing for leaks after the well is drilled and during maintenance.
Romain Chesnaux, hydrogeologist at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, used these leak reports, compiled by government officials, to examine how common leaks were in the region. Of the 21,525 wells, 2,322 had leaked at some point—that’s more than 10 percent. The vast majority of those leaks involved natural gas seeping from the top of the well into the air. A small portion—3.42 percent—were liquid leaks, often a mix of saltwater from deep reservoirs and fracking fluids.
Most of the gas leaks were small, less than a cubic meter of gas a day, but 15 wells leaked up to 300 times that much. Townsend-Small says that matches findings from other studies, in which so-called “super emitters” contributed heavily to the total volume of leaked methane winding up in the atmosphere.
All those gas leaks pack a punch for the climate. Using an average emissions rate, the Chesnaux and his team estimated that the wells could add up to 75,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions every year, roughly the same as a Canadian town of 5,000 people. The average leaky well produces the same amount of methane burped up by 24 cows, the study estimates. And methane is about 28 times as powerful in warming the climate as carbon dioxide.

By – Abhishek Singh
Content - https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/natural-gas-leaks-methane/