We started doing measurements in the Denver Basin, north of Denver.
And we noticed we had a signal there we had never seen before.
Gaby Petron couldn't believe what she was seeing.
High levels of methane, a greenhouse gas up to 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.
I had never seen these kinds of measurements.
So we're like, okay, let's try to understand better what this tower is telling us.
Petron needed to find out where the methane was coming from.
So she turned this old van into a high-tech, mobile methane detector.
Soon, she was crisscrossing vast stretches of northeastern Colorado,
taking thousands of measurements.
She thought the methane might be coming from landfills,
or the 2.6 million cows in the area.
Look at these levels!
There is no questioning where the methane is coming from.
It's natural gas, okay?
Definitely.
We saw a lot of emitters in these oil and gas fields.
What she was finding was alarming, but was enough methane leaking to make it a serious
problem?
To find out, she needed more data.
Around the same time that Gaby Petron was driving her van across Colorado, another scientist,
at Cornell University in New York, was starting an investigation of his own.
Natural gas is essentially methane.
Methane, when it's burned, produces less carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced,
than coal or oil.
But the problem with methane is if it gets into the atmosphere without being burned,
it becomes a very potent greenhouse gas.
We'd have to leak 80 pounds of carbon dioxide to do the same harm as one pound of methane.
Any leaks make natural gas less clean than advertised.
The question is, how much methane can leak before natural gas starts to get as bad as
coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Most experts say the threshold is about 3%.
As long as no more than 3% of the natural gas we produce ends up leaking into the atmosphere,
it's not necessarily good, but it's still better than coal.
We gathered the information we could from the EPA, from the Department of Energy,
from industry sources.
We concluded that as an upper bound, 7.9%
at the lower end, we said about 3.6%.
It could be this much, but even if it's only this much…
Even at the low end of the range, the news was bad.
Yes.
The natural gas industry maintains that the leak rate is only about 1%, well below
the 3% threshold.
But in Colorado, Gaby Petron's research was finally yielding some concrete results.
After more than two years driving around collecting samples, Gaby Petron had a wealth of data
showing leaks throughout the entire natural gas system in the Denver Basin.
On average, 4% of the gas that was extracted from the ground ended up in the atmosphere,
instead of in the pipeline.
Here was an independent study, produced by top government scientists, suggesting that,
at least in the Denver Basin, natural gas is far from clean.
Not surprisingly, the industry argued that Petron's results were just an outlier.
A single snapshot of a vast natural gas system.
The Uinta Basin in eastern Utah is home to thousands of natural gas and oil wells.
I'm here with a team from Picarro, a company that's working on cutting-edge technology
for measuring methane emissions.
They want to know if the methane problem could possibly be as bad as Petron's numbers suggest.
We're driving down this road, and then within minutes, it first doubled, now it's-
Now it's sitting at-- now it's close to tripled.
Triple.
Yeah, that's correct.
That's insane.
When we got to Utah I was shocked.
The leak rate was about 11%.
Utah, in other words, is even worse than Colorado.
And on the heels of Picarro's findings, another group of NOAA scientists looks at
methane emissions coming from a mixture of oil and gas wells in the Los Angeles Basin.
Their number?
17%.
We hear industry say, 'there's just not that much in the way of leaks.
Maybe we're losing 1%.'
They're just flat-out wrong, in terms of what these emissions are.
But it's like so many other inaccuracies in life, if you repeat them often enough,
and if you repeat them loud enough, and you defend them vociferously, then that kind of
becomes accepted as truth.
Then I started thinking about all the places across the country where gas can leak.
Not just the hundreds of thousands of wells.
But a pipeline system 1.5 million miles long, with tens of thousands of compressor stations,
countless valves, and corroded pipes running under towns and cities everywhere.
Even under the very city where the future of natural gas will be decided.
This one, we can smell it.
Yeah, you can smell it just walking up.
Oh yeah.
We literally have thousands of very small leaks spread out all across the city.
It's death by 1,000 cuts.
There's a lot more we still don't know.
But from everything I've seen, it seems like right now natural gas could be making
our climate problem worse, rather than better.
I think we need to ask ourselves if that's a risk worth taking.
Because the natural gas boom in this country is just getting started.
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