Quality data

Apr 12, 2011
Bishop Hill in Energy

The New York Times seems to want to head up the fightback against shale gas, publishing a rather uncritical article about a forthcoming paper about whether gas really is better than coal.

Cornell University researchers say that natural gas pried from shale formations is dirtier than coal in the short term, rather than cleaner, and "comparable" in the long term. That finding -- fiercely disputed by the gas industry -- undermines the widely stated belief that gas is twice as "clean" as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. The gas industry has promoted that concept as a way for electric utilities to prepare for climate change regulations by switching from coal-fired plants to gas.

There is a link to the preprint of the paper, which finds that the root of shale gas's problems in leakage of methane during the production process. I particularly liked their description of where they got their methane leakage figures from:

Between 0.6% and 3.2% of the life-time production of gas from wells is emitted as methane during the flow-back period (Table 1)... However, we note that the data used in Table 1 are not well documented, with many values based on PowerPoint slides from EPA-sponsored workshops.

The source of the Table 1 figures for quantity of methane emitted at the Haynesville site - the highest in the table -  is a paper by Eckhardt et al (2009). Oddly, this paper doesn't appear in the list of references. Can anyone identify likely candidates?

Article originally appeared on (http://www.bishop-hill.net/).