America’s natural gas system is super-leaky, and that’s bad news for the climate

http://grist.org/news/americas-natural-gas-system-is-super-leaky-and-thats-bad-news-for-the-climate/

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Like a free-riding bus passenger whose expired ticket gets overlooked by the driver, the natural gas industry has been getting a free pass from the EPA for its global warming impacts for well over a decade.

A new mega-analysis of 20 years worth of research suggests that the EPA is underestimating the fossil fuel’s climate impacts by 25 to 75 percent.

The problem with the EPA’s math doesn’t concern the burning of natural gas, which produces less carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels (but way more than solar panels or wind turbines). The problem is in the leaky systems that extract and transport the fuel.

The EPA relies on 1990s estimations to calculate the climate-warming effects of the natural gas industry. A new paper published in the journal Science concludes that the EPA is severely underestimating the amount of natural gas that leaks into the atmosphere during drilling, processing, and distribution.