For years, many environmental groups and experts on the growing human contribution to the planet’s heat-trapping greenhouse effect have sought to turn carbon dioxide into a commodity by giving it a rising price. Through a so-called cap and trading system, those making extra-deep cuts in emissions can profit by selling what amounts to their extra credit to those who cannot afford to cut their own gas releases so deeply or quickly.  But the second most important heat-trapping greenhouse gas from human activities, methane, already has a distinct value. It’s the main ingredient in natural gas, a fuel that is increasingly seen as a vital bridge toward a less-polluting global energy supply.  Nonetheless, vast amounts of methane escape from landfills, livestock, coal mines and oil and gas wells, pipelines and storage tanks. The video above, shot in various places in oil and gas country for the Environmental Protection Agency, vividly shows emissions escaping from all manner of equipment. The emissions are in many cases avoidable — at a profit.  Changing practices are capturing growing amounts of landfill and coal-mine methane. Changed feed for livestock and other agricultural practices can cut the flow from cattle (as can eating less meat, of course). And there is plenty that can be done to stanch emissions from the oil and gas industry. In a story appearing Thursday in The New York Times, which I wrote with great contributions from Clifford Krauss in Texas and Andrew Kramer in Moscow, experts at the E.P.A. acknowledge publicly for the first time that the flow from standard practices at gas wells, not including leaky valves and the like, is at least 12 times higher than the longstanding agency estimate. The new total, again just from gas wells, has the climate-warming power in a year of the carbon dioxide emitted by eight million cars. And agency officials say the total could be many times higher than that.  Companies working to cut flows of the gas from oil storage tanks say that source of emissions is similarly grossly underestimated. This, of course, is both a big environmental problem (the escaping gas contributes to local smog) and a financial opportunity, particularly given that methane, besides having 25 times the climate impact of carbon dioxide when the gases are compared over a 100-year period, is a fuel and chemical feedstock.  Reducing such releases alone would only blunt warming in the long run, climate scientists stress. This is particularly true because carbon dioxide, unlike methane, accumulates (like water in a filling bathtub with a clogged drain).  Marcus Sarofim, who conducted studies of the climate benefits of cutting methane emissions while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now in Washington on a fellowship, put it this way:  There are two problems in the climate world. There’s the short-term problem, where we want to slow the rate of changes we are already seeing such as Arctic sea ice retreat, more frequent heat waves, and increasing stress on ecosystems. Reducing methane is a cheap, fast solution to the short term problem. But we still need be working on solving the long term problem, where the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will eventually swamp the reductions we can get from all the other gases.
The E.P.A. says its own estimates of a potent greenhouse gas escaping from natural gas wells are 12 times too low.