NASA used aircraft-mounted sensors to track pollution from more than 250 sources- mostly gas wells, storage tanks, processing facilities and pipelines.
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Using airborne spectrometers, which can identify certain atmospheric gases including methane, by way these gases absorb sunlight, researchers measured these individual sources and found that these sources emitted gas at rates that range between a few pounds to 11,000 pounds per hour. It has also begun the process of developing rules for existing sources of emissions, although those standards won’t be finalized until the next presidential administration. Researchers say only a handful were natural seeps from underground formations. The report, based on air and ground measurements taken in the Four Corners in April of a year ago, aimed to identify the source of a 2,500-square-mile cloud of methane that had showed up in NASA satellite images in 2014. Ten percent of those methane sources contributed half of the region’s overall emissions.
It found that leaks from only 10 percent of the individual methane sources are contributing to half of the emissions, confirming the scientists’ suspicions that the mysterious hotspot was connected to the high level of fracking in the region. It’s actually more of a contributor (between 25 and 86 times, according to different estimates) to the greenhouse effect than is the media’s favorite environmental nemesis, carbon dioxide.
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Methane emissions in the Four Corners regions are primarily linked to the production and transport of natural gas from coal beds. The report says that the small number of large methane sources, “suggests that mitigation of field-wide emissions such as those estimated for Four Corners will be less costly because it only requires identifying and fixing a few emitters”. “The method shows that you can easily fly over an area and actually see the plumes in real time”, said study co-author Eric Kort, from the University of MI.
