Latest Studies Undercut EPA, Find Oil and Gas Development Not Increasing Global Methane Emissions
Monday October 17, 2016
Environmentalists have made no bones about what they blame for the trend of rising global methane emissions. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has hyperbolically characterized the environmental impact of methane emissions from the oil and natural gas industry as “staggering,” while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) has pushed its costly new regulations as a solution that is absolutely necessary to “combat climate change.”
But as environmentalists and the EPA continue to focus all their attention on methane emissions from oil and natural gas systems, study after study has found this tired narrative is indeed a methane myth.
Instead, recent studies find that microbial sources such as wetlands, agriculture, rice paddies and even man-made reservoirs are the reason a rise in global methane emissions in recent years. Let’s have a look at a few of them.
Washington State University-Vancouver Study on Methane from Man-Made Reservoirs
This study found that man-made reservoirs used primarily for hydroelectric power — long touted as a “clean” alternative to fossil fuel electrical generation — emit as much methane as world’s rice paddies, which have been estimated to be more than 700 million metric tons, or 10-12 percent of the world’s total anthropogenic emissions! As study co-authors John Harrison and Bridget Deemer told Climate Central in an email:
“To put these reservoir methane emissions in context, they are similar in size to other...