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B.C. lowballing fugitive methane emissions from natural gas industry

Posted on 8 October 2015 by Andy Skuce

This article was first published in the Corporate Knights Magazine.

There is a supplementary article at my blog Critical Angle, that has more detail, links and references, along with an estimation of the GHG emissions (excluding end-use) associated with one liquefied natural gas project and the effect this will have on the feasibility of BC reaching its emissions targets.

There is a further piece at DeSmog Canada, where I compare the situation in BC's gas industry with the Volkswagen emissions reporting scandal, in which a corporation cheats on its emissions tests, with the tacit approval of industry-friendly regulators and governments, only to be exposed by independent researchers performing tests in real-world situations.

The push by British Columbia to develop a new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export industry raises questions about the impact such activities would have on greenhouse gas emissions, both within the province and globally.

One of the single most important factors relates to the amount of methane and carbon dioxide that gets released into the atmosphere, either deliberately through venting or by accident as so-called fugitive emissions. Fugitive emissions are the result of valves and meters that release, by design, small quantities of gas. But they can also come from faulty equipment and from operators that fail to follow regulations.

Photo by Jesús Rodríguez Fernández (creative commons)

According to the B.C. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report 2012, there were 78,000 tonnes of fugitive methane emissions from the oil and natural gas industry that year. B.C. produced 41 billion cubic metres of gas in 2012. This means about 0.28 per cent of the gas produced was released into the atmosphere.

By North American standards, this is a very low estimate. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses a figure of 1.5 per cent leakage, more than five times higher. Recent research led by the U.S. non-profit group, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), shows that even the EPA estimates may be too low by a factor of 1.5. B.C.’s estimate, in other words, would be about one-eighth of what has been estimated for the American gas industry.

Although the amounts of methane released are small compared to carbon dioxide emissions, methane matters because it packs a much bigger global warming punch. Determining the effect of methane emissions is complicated because molecules of methane only last in the atmosphere for a decade or so and the warming effect from its release depends on the time interval it is measured over. Compared to a given mass of carbon dioxide, the same mass of methane will produce 34 times as much warming over 100 years, or 86 times as much over 20 years.

There are reasons why B.C.’s methane emissions might be low relative to American operations. Much of the conventional natural gas in B.C. is sour – that is, it contains hydrogen sulphide in small but dangerous concentrations. The need to handle this gas with great care before it is processed has produced strict regulations and a culture of compliance among operators. In addition, B.C. does not have the ancient and often leaky iron pipes installed as much as a century ago to distribute gas in some U.S. cities. Nevertheless, differences in the industry practices between the two countries are likely insufficient to explain the factor-of-10 variance in leakage estimates.

The B.C. government estimates its fugitive emissions by using a combination of inventory methods and detailed field reporting from industry. Inventory methods involve taking, for example, the expected leakage from a certain type of valve and multiplying that factor by the number of such valves employed in the field. The reports provided by industry record emissions from combustion, leaks and venting of all greenhouse gases. These two methods are known as bottom-up approaches and they depend on equipment working as designed and on the operators fully reporting emissions.

Entirely lacking in B.C.’s approach, however, are so-called top-down measurement approaches that the EDF researchers have used in the United States. These techniques measure the methane concentrations in the atmosphere around gas industry operations, using sensors mounted on towers as well as on ground and airborne vehicles.

major 2014 survey by Stanford professor Adam Brandt and colleagues in the journal Science shows that top-down methods almost invariably reveal more emissions than the bottom-up, inventory methods. One important reason for the discrepancy seems to be the presence of “super-emitters” – for example, unreported leaks from pipelines or rogue operators flouting regulations. One study found that 58 per cent of emissions came from merely 0.06 per cent of the possible sources.

A recent Canadian example of a super-emitter would be the operations of Murphy Oil, which was recently