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Environment

Methane leaks from US oil and gas are triple government estimates

The largest ever dataset of its kind suggests methane is leaking from US oil and gas fields at a much higher rate than previously thought, implying the environmental damage caused by the greenhouse gas is greater too

By James Dinneen

13 March 2024

A methane plume detected by NASA's AVIRIS-NG in summer 2020 indicates a leaking gas line in oil field in California

A methane plume in California detected by an airborne spectrometer

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Major oil and gas-producing regions in the US are leaking much more methane than current estimates suggest, according to nearly a million aerial measurements of the potent greenhouse gas.

“Our study used the largest such dataset that’s ever been assembled,” says Evan Sherwin at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who conducted the research while at Stanford University.

He and his colleagues combined data from numerous aerial surveys that used infrared sensors to measure methane leaking from wells, pipelines…

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