EPA Injects Shale Gas Producers with Adrenalin

Location: New York

Date: 2013-04-30

Shale gas producers have gotten an injection of adrenalin by an unexpected source: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which now says that much less methane is leaked during discovery.

It’s welcome news to the natural gas industry whose economic revival could be overshadowed by environmental skepticism. Now that developers have learned to drill the unconventional shale gas from the rocks where it is embedded, their industry is able to fuel everything from power plants to automobiles to manufacturing facilities -- cheaper than many other fuels and cleaner than coal.

"The new EPA numbers show both that methane leakage was never as high as was previously thought, and that leaks are being reduced through better drilling practices,” says Michael Shellenberger, president of the Oakland, Calif.-based environmental think tank Breakthrough Institute, in an interview. “This makes sense, since it's always been in the industry's self-interest to reduce leakage of its main product.”

The hydraulic fracturing process used to plumb that energy source from a mile beneath the earth’s surface is accused of damaging surface waters. Meawhile, the extraction and delivery of that gas is also getting blamed for releasing methane, which is the most potent greenhouse gas of them all.

For its part, the natural gas industry is addressing those issues. It is maintaing that its discovery methods do not foul drinking water supplies while also noting that methane lingers in the atmosphere for 20 years, whereas carbon dioxide does so for about a century. Regulators are pushing the sector to be more transparent.

The Associated Press has a story that the EPA is crediting industry with doing a lot to reduce the amount of escaping methane. In April, the agency released a report saying that tighter pollution controls have resulted in a 20 percent reduction in those releases from 1990 to 2010.

The Obama administration sees natural gas as a bridge fuel until green energy can get its legs, and produce a greater share of the nation’s electricity consumption. By all estimates, natural gas is winning market share and taking most of it from coal. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration is saying that natural gas will increase its market from roughly 20 percent today to 45 percent by 2035.

EPA says that such prominence requires more of its attention. Specifically, it wants to cut volatile organic compounds, or smog levels, by 25 percent. But the EPA says that would be done by using proven technologies that can capture natural gas that currently escapes into the air -- gas that would be made available for sale. It goes on to say that this would result in an additional $30 million annually in sales for the natural gas industry -- more than enough to compensate the developers.

"It's reasonable to expect drilling practices will continue to improve, and that leakage rates will continue to go down,” says Shellenberger. “This should be treated as very good news by anyone concerned about climate change."

Environmental Skeptics

A Cornell University study conducted two years ago concluded that total greenhouse gases over 20 years as a result of exploring for shale are at least 20 percent greater -- possibly as much as double -- when compared to those of coal. That’s because natural gas is composed mostly of methane, which may have the ability to dissipate but is still capable of trapping more heat than carbon dioxide.

“The large greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas undercuts the logic of its use as a bridging fuel over coming decades, if the goal is to reduce global warming,” says Robert Horvath, a Cornell University ecology professor and lead author of the study.“We do not intend that our study be used to justify the continued use of either oil or coal, but rather to demonstrate that substituting shale gas for these other fossil fuels may not have the desired effect of mitigating climate warming.”

The Cornell professor goes on to say that leakage within pipelines is a primary culprit for those methane releases. So if EPA is addressing that issue and is espousing tougher rules on pipeline and storage containment, then industry could head off some potential opposition as it goes forward. Separately, he told the AP that EPA is downplaying other analyses that have come to different conclusions, adding that it needs to listen more to independent sources and less to voices from industry.

One of the studies that Horvath notes is by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It is showing that air samples in Colorado that are near fracking wells contained twice the levels of methane that EPA had expected, or about a 4 percent leakage rate. Meantime, the Natural Resources Defense Council insists that fracking must be postponed until drillers can demonstrate that it is always safely done.

"That some people are clinging to outdated leakage rates suggests they are more interested in slowing the coal-to-gas transition than in slowing global warming and reducing air pollution," the Breakthrough Institute's Shellenberger responds.

By any standard, EPA has not been considered one of industry’s confidants. Its conclusions here, with respect to the amount of methane releases during the natural gas discovery process, must be taken seriously. While its research won’t satisfy much of the environmental movement, the findings will, generally, lend credence to the cause of shale gas and to the use of natural gas as a bridge fuel.

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