New MethaneSAT Images Reveal Shocking Details About Methane Emissions

The oil and gas industry in the US is belching methane three to five times higher on an average compared to what the country's Environmental Protection Agency estimated, the latest aerial measurements from MethaneSAT suggest. This is way beyond the rate the industry agreed upon last year, CNN reported.

MethaneSAT, a cutting-edge satellite, zooms around the Earth 15 times a day and searches for leaks of methane, the invisible gas that has been warming the planet.

The early findings suggest the Permian Basin, among the most productive oil and gas basins worldwide, has been leaking methane to the tune of nine to 14.5 times the limit the industry had agreed to.

The Appalachia Basin has been leaking methane four times the rate set by the industry.

In the Uinta Basin in Utah, the rate of methane leaks is a shocking 45 times the limit. It's still leaking less methane overall compared to the Permian Basin. The one in Utah is an older basin with older and leaky equipment. It produces less oil and gas.

As per the satellite's early reports, more than half a million wells, which produce a mere 6 to 7% of US oil and gas, are generating nearly 50% of the industry's methane pollution.

Ritesh Gautam, lead senior scientist on MethaneSAT, said the observations are "revealing".

"This is just very, very revealing -- for the first time, to see this kind of observation... The images we started to see were just extraordinary in terms of the overall precision of the data," Gautam said.

For a long time, the pollution from methane has not been well-understood by people. Natural gas, which includes up to 90% methane, continues to rise as the choice of fossil fuel for generating electricity.

According to scientists, methane has the capability of trapping around 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere.

Antoine Halff, co-founder and chief analyst at Kayrros, an environmental monitoring group, said, "Understating real methane emission levels means underestimating their warming impact." 

Halff added that if we don't understand the scale of the problem, our "mitigation efforts won't nearly be aggressive enough.”