Whether it will quell the fears of environmental opponents remains to be seen, but a new study finds that lesser amounts than feared of the greenhouse gas, methane, are being released to the air at natural gas drilling sites.

A long-awaited study led by the University of Texas at Austin shows that methane emissions are about 10 percent lower than recent estimates by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Associated Press reports today that the findings “bolster a big selling point for natural gas, that it’s not as bad for global warming as coal. And they undercut a major environmental argument against fracking, a process that breaks apart deep rock to recover more gas.”

About 90% of the study funding came from nine energy companies that drill for natural gas with the rest coming from an environmental group. But study authors said they controlled how the research was done and how the wells were chosen for study. And even Robert Howarth of Cornell University, 1 of the scientists who first raised the methane leak alarm, calls the results “good news.”

Howarth, who didn’t participate in the new work, did caution that the results may represent a “best-case scenario.” It might be, he said, that industry can produce gas with very low emissions, “but they very often do not do so. They do better when they know they are being carefully watched.”

He and the study authors say more research is needed to explain why some studies have found high rates of leaking methane and others have not.

Not comprehensive, but it produced hard numbers

The University of Texas study wasn’t a comprehensive study of all the places natural gas can leak. But Steve Hamburg, chief scientist at the market-oriented Environmental Defense Fund, which helped fund the study, noted that it presents “direct measures of things that everyone’s been hand-waving about before. These are hard numbers using the best scientific approach that we can.”

The study found that during the process of extracting natural gas from the ground, total leakage at the study sites was 0.42% of all produced gas. That is a bit less than what the EPA suggested is the national average. The U.S. produced 24.1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2012, so that means about 101 billion cubic feet of methane leaked into the air during the first stage of production. Additional leaks occur in the second half of the process: delivery from wells to homes and power plants.

Related environmental news stories:
Gas Leaks in Fracking Disputed in Study – New York Times
Fracking May Emit Less Methane Than Previous Estimates – Climate Central

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