This story is one installment of a larger project by Grist and The Texas Observer. Support comes from the Pulitzer Center.
Amy Townsend-Small has been chasing methane her entire professional life. The quest has taken her from Southern California freeways to sewage plants to animal feedlots. Sniffing out the potent greenhouse gas, which traps 86 times as much heat as carbon dioxide after it’s emitted into the atmosphere, has required her to breathalyze cows and take chemical measurements at large manure lagoons. When fracking took off around 2010, Townsend-Small shifted her focus to a new and growing problem: methane leaks from oil and gas activity.
Natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane, was pitched as a fuel that could transition the U.S. to renewable energy, since it burns more cleanly than coal and is naturally abundant—and, thanks to fracking, newly inexpensive to extract. But the thinking at the time missed an important detail: The thousands of wells drilled, the millions of miles of pipeline that transported natural gas, and the refineries that processed it all leaked methane. Natural gas plants emit about half as much carbon dioxide as coal plants, but without knowing how much methane leaks when extracting and moving natural gas, the true climate effects cannot be assessed. As regulators and policymakers caught on to this fact, Townsend-Small’s work began to take on new significance.
