Rick Wilkinson from the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association says US research conducted three years ago isn't relevant to Australia.
A US professor from Cornell University, well known for his expertise on fracking, is calling on Australia to abandon coal seam and shale gas production and focus on alternative energy.
Dr Anthony Ingraffea is a professor of engineering at Cornell and one of TIME Magazines "People Who Mattered" (2011).
He says methane emissions from gas production are 'a hell of a lot more than we thought' and the risk of water contamination is too great.
The US and Canada have hundreds of thousands of coal seam gas wells.
Three years ago Professor Ingraffea, together with two colleagues from Cornell University, did the first peer reviewed scientific investigations of methane emissions from shale gas.
He didn't do any on-the-ground study, but looked at existing sources of information from the US Government, industry and academics.
He found much higher levels of emissions than were previously thought.
"At the high end could have been as much as eight per cent of all the gas produced from a shale formation would be emitted to the atmosphere without being burned. And at the low end, somewhere about 3.5 per cent, so we said someone ought to go out there and take those measurements because they are really important."
His research looks at fugitive emissions from the whole life cycle of producing gas, which is a much wider approach than previous studies.
He has been criticised by other scientists for that approach, but he says they are 'putting their heads in the sand' by ignoring other emissions escaping from the well pad or the casing, or the drilling, processing and transmission stages.
Rick Wilkinson says Professor Ingraffea is wrong about the size of fugitive emissions from gas mining in Australia.
He says the industry is required to report to the on emissions and they are "insignificant", about two per cent higher than conventional gas.
"We have to report that as part of the National Greenhouse Inventory."
He also says cold venting into the atmosphere to test wells isn't done here.
"I've worked 16 years in Australia and I'm not aware of any wells that are tested in that way. We generally flair or preferably hook it up to pipelines as quickly as possible."
Professor Infgraffea is also concerned about the impact of coal seam and shale gas extraction on the water resource.
He says a study is about to be published looking at Pennsylvania's experience.
"There has been an onslaught of shale gas development there. Eight thousand wells drilled in the last five years. We looked at the regulatory agency and discovered that there is a very significant percentage of those wells that are leaking."
He says it's about one in twenty wells.
"If you have tens of thousands of coal seam wells drilled in Australia you're going to see the same effect."
He says those leaking wells have contaminated farm water in Pennsylvania.
"Hundreds of families have lost access to their wells because they've been contaminated."
He believes the impact is long term.
"The wells deteriorate. You're talking cement and steel underground, transporting saline or acidic (material), and eventually the wells start to deteriorate and they leak more often."
Rick Wilkinson from APPEA says he can't comment on this latest research as it hasn't been published and he thinks it's highly unusual for a researcher to talk about research before it has been released.
Professor Ingraffea says he has not and will not take money from any other source other than the University which pays his salary and that his view of gas mining changed in the last five years as more 'extreme' forms of extracting gas evolved.
"Shale gas and coal seam gas is not accumulated in a pocket. It's distributed throughout the shale and to get it you have to drill closely spaced wells and use fracking.
"At that scale you are using much higher volumes of fracking fluid, producing much higher volumes of waste, needing to drill many more wells resulting in much more land disturbance and more equipment on the surface, and all those wells have to be connected by pipelines and processing units and you wind up industrialising the country side."
Professor Ingraffea acknowledges the industry does provide a short term economic boost for rural communities, but says it's not lasting.
"It's not creating a long lasting industry with a lot of trickle down. The money leaves with the gas."