have you ever heard of shale gas?

“A satellite finds massive methane leaks from gas pipelines.” - NPR news 2/03/2022

I heard this shocking news this morning. I know methane is very bad for the earth. Then we must understand what is happening now to cause this NEW problem.

Methane is the greenhouse gas that traps a lot of heat which is a large contributor to global warming. It is a serious problem because apparently over a 20-year time frame, methane traps 86 times as much heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  

The world has been using gas pipelines for a long time but why all of a the sudden they discover massive methane leaks now? And how long has this been going on? 

That question made me want to research more about the cause of the increase. 

First I checked the graphs of global methane emissions from several websites. (It’s always good to check more than one site!) I found some increase of methane around 2010 and more after 2015. Although the graph shows the increase of methane over the course of years especially from the 90's but from 2015 to today the increase is literally skyrocketing. 

Next, just in case, I checked the graph of global meat production because as we know, agricultural methane emissions are also becoming a serious problem. If meat production had a rapid increase from 2010, maybe that could be one of the reasons why methane levels have rapidly increased since then. 

Although the world meat production has had a dramatic increase since the 1960's, I didn’t see a big increase around 2010.

Then I checked the graphs of oil production. And I started to see the word ”shale gas” which I had never heard of. 

Shales are fine-grained sedimentary rocks. And shale gas is a natural gas using fracking technology: drilling a very deep hole vertically into the shale area and pumping high pressure fluid to create cracks in the deep rock layers to reach natural gas and petroleum.

When this shale gas operation kicked off in the US, the production of oil and natural gas was significantly increased. People even called it The U.S Shale Revolution. The development seemed to have taken off around 2010. Same time as the big jump of methane levels.

Then I found this from a 2019 article in National Geographic. 

“Fracking boom tied to methane spike in Earth’s atmosphere -The chemical signature of methane released from fracking is found in the atmosphere, pointing to shale gas operations as the culprit.”

What! 

“…new research points to methane emissions from fossil fuel production—mainly from shale gas operations in the United States and Canada—as the culprit.” 

Robert Howarth, an ecologist at Cornell University even mentioned that the massive increase in methane emissions happened at the same time as the use of fracking for shale gas took off in the U.S.

Then it totally made sense. 

Although we cannot directly stop these methane leaks, at least we can tell adults about the relationship between fracking and methane. 

The good thing is methane lasts only about a decade in the atmosphere. So reducing the current methane will help climate change for sure. And several states have started to ban fracking.

I know politically it’s extremely hard to ban all the U.S shale gas operations at this moment (especially now). But we must find a way to stop methane leaks from those facilities.