A Single Fracking Well Generates Massive Methane Leak

A study on methane “super emitters”  has revealed something about the scope of the environmental threat represented by Donald Trump’s refusal to regulate methane release at wells. Not only are these sources making a significant and often unrecognized contribution to the climate crisis, but they can be difficult to find. Methane is invisible and, without the mercaptan added by utility companies to give gas its distinctive stink, even high levels of the gas can be odorless. Even when a satellite or plane identifies high methane in an area, pinpointing a specific well or storage facility is almost impossible without the kind of monitoring devices that the Trump Environmental Protection Agency is trying to eliminate.

Or it is almost impossible most of the time. A brand-new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows an example of a single well venting methane in a way that was not only highly visible, but almost unbelievable. As in, this single well released more methane in three weeks than most entire nations do in a year. So much methane that this single well, venting over a period of about 20 days, may have been a significant contributor to altering the climate.

This particular super-duper emitter came from a fracking well in Ohio that blew during development in 2018. The emissions from the well were so strong that they became almost immediately visible to the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument aboard the orbiting Sentinel-5P satellite. What that instrument saw indicated that the well was producing between 100 and 160 tons of methane every hour. The satellite doesn’t have information for the full period, but if that rate continued over the 20 days before the well was capped, one Ohio blowout released more methane into the atmosphere over that period than either Germany or the U.K. released during all of 2018.

And this staggering, potentially world-altering in a very literal way event went more or less unnoticed. If it weren’t for the new instrument, and images taken both before and during the venting event, there would have been no way to quantify just how horrible a single well blowout can be, and how significant these events really are when compared to the amount of methane lost from pipelines, tanks, and in normal use.

The authors of the paper use this incident to point out the effectiveness of their space-based instrument, and it certainly is effective. But it also reinforces the need to maintain monitors on each well, and to recognize the fantastic threat generated through fracking by levying massive penalties against companies who fail to regulate emissions.