US oil and gas system emissions from nearly one million aerial site measurements

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Sherwin, Evan D.; Rutherford, Jeffrey S.; Zhang, Zhan; Chen, Yuanlei; Wetherley, Erin B.; Yakovlev, Petr V.; Berman, Elena S. F.; Jones, Brian B.; Cusworth, Daniel H.; Thorpe, Andrew K.; Ayasse, Alana K.; Duren, Riley M.; Brandt, Adam R.
• 署名单位: Stanford University; National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA); NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL); California Institute of Technology; University of Arizona; United States Department of Energy (DOE); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• 刊物名称: Nature
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0028-4304
• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07117-5
• 发表日期: 2024-03-14
• 关键词: human stem-cells; natural-gas; methane concentrations; quantifying methane; dna methylation; point sources; transcription; reads; leaks; vegf

摘要

As airborne methane surveys of oil and gas systems continue to discover large emissions that are missing from official estimates1-4, the true scope of methane emissions from energy production has yet to be quantified. We integrate approximately one million aerial site measurements into regional emissions inventories for six regions in the USA, comprising 52% of onshore oil and 29% of gas production over 15 aerial campaigns. We construct complete emissions distributions for each, employing empirically grounded simulations to estimate small emissions. Total estimated emissions range from 0.75% (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.65%, 0.84%) of covered natural gas production in a high-productivity, gas-rich region to 9.63% (95% CI 9.04%, 10.39%) in a rapidly expanding, oil-focused region. The six-region weighted average is 2.95% (95% CI 2.79%, 3.14%), or roughly three times the national government inventory estimate5. Only 0.05-1.66% of well sites contribute the majority (50-79%) of well site emissions in 11 out of 15 surveys. Ancillary midstream facilities, including pipelines, contribute 18-57% of estimated regional emissions, similarly concentrated in a small number of point sources. Together, the emissions quantified here represent an annual loss of roughly US$1 billion in commercial gas value and a US$9.3 billion annual social cost6. Repeated, comprehensive, regional remote-sensing surveys offer a path to detect these low-frequency, high-consequence emissions for rapid mitigation, incorporation into official emissions inventories and a clear-eyed assessment of the most effective emission-finding technologies for a given region. We integrate approximately one million aerial site measurements into regional emissions inventories for six regions in the USA, finding methane emission intensities that vary by more than a factor of ten.