Gas Industry's Interpretation of Latest EPA Emissions Report Comes Under Attack

The energy industry has been proudly proclaiming that the methane emissions argument against natural gas drilling was dealt a major blow by an EPA report in which the agency “dramatically lowered its estimate of how much of a potent heat-trapping gas leaks during natural gas production.”  Anti-drilling activists are now pushing back against those claims, saying that a closer look at the EPA report reveals something different.

From the Cynics & Charlatans blog:

Going straight to the source, the EPA report itself, and ignoring the AP report—and EID’s subsequent gloating over it and ad hominem attack on Cornell professor Bob Howarth—is very revealing. The AP report missed significant aspects of the report that the industry is using as a red herring to distract attention form just how large a contributor to greenhouse gasses (GHG) the gas industry is.

Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of the EPA report was the section describing the methodology stated, “Emissions of GHGs from various source and sink categories have been estimated using methodologies that are consistent with the Revised 1996 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.” In addition to the fact that the EPA relied to a significant extent on data provided by the industry, but more damaging to the report’s credibility still was the statement on methodology in the  agency’s 1997 report on methane emissions that “A group of industry experts was also used to review the data and approach for estimating emissions, so that any additional biases could be identified and eliminated.” The word oxymoron comes to mind with that statement. It’s like trusting the fox to give an accounting of the chickens in the coop after letting it guard them overnight.

Read more here.

And from the NRDC:

A new report issued by EPA in late April – an update to the national emissions inventory for greenhouse gases – continues to highlight the oil and gas sector’s role as the country’s top industrial source of methane pollution and one of the top industrial sources of greenhouse gases overall. Moreover, while the update shows a net reduction in methane emissions from the sector relative to EPA's previous understanding, there are many reasons to believe EPA’s new numbers underestimate the real extent of the climate problem from oil and gas development. 

Methane is a highly potent heat-trapping pollutant that the oil and gas industry vents and leaks from equipment and operations throughout the sector’s exploration, production, transmission, and distribution phases. In particular, hydraulic fracturing – a relatively new and highly controversial method for extracting oil as well as natural gas – poses risks to water resources and results in far more upfront methane released than traditional drilling methods. 

Much debate has centered on exactly how much methane pollution the oil and gas sector emits, and thus how natural gas lines up versus coal in terms of its contribution to dangerous climate change. That debate has heightened since EPA began its long-overdue process of updating air pollution standards for the industry in 2011. The industry is now coming forward with data that it claims show oil and gas development isn’t as bad for the climate as we might have thought. But even if taken at face value, industry’s data still show that the sector is still a huge problem for our climate. As I wrote last summer, one major industry study that reduced estimates of methane from certain sources confirmed that the oil and gas sector is one of the country’s top climate polluters.

Read that whole article here. 

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