Each year brings new research showing that oil and natural gas wells leak significant amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane.
Each year brings new research showing that oil and natural gas wells leak significant amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane.
A new University of Vermont study just published in the journal Environmental Geosciences is the first to offer a profile of which wells are the most likely culprits.
The research, conducted by Civil and Environmental Engineering professor George Pinder and James Montague, his former doctoral student, is based on a study of 38,391 natural gas and oil wells in Alberta, Canada. Companies in that province are required to test wells at the time they begin operating to determine if they have failed and are leaking natural gas, which contains methane, and to keep careful records of each well’s construction characteristics.
The study used a machine learning algorithm to correlate wells that leaked and those that didn’t with a set of 16 characteristics.
Read more at University of Vermont
Image: A new study to published in Environmental Geosciences is the first to offer a profile of which oil and natural wells are most likely to be leaking methane. Research published in June in Science estimated that natural gas wells are leaking 13 million metric tons of methane each year, 60 percent higher that EPA estimates. (Credit: Gerry Dincher)
