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Natural gas can have a huge climate impact before it even makes it to your furnace or stove.
While the fuel releases fewer carbon emissions than coal when it’s burned, it’s mostly made up of methane — a planet-warming gas that’s far more potent than carbon in the short term if it leaks from gas infrastructure. And at thousands of gas storage wells across the U.S., leaks are more likely than storage site owners may be accounting for. As many as 11,446 storage wells could have a single point of failure, meaning only one thing has to go wrong for a leak to start, Floodlight’s analysis of a new report finds.
Those potential disasters could look just like what happened at the Rager Mountain storage site in November 2022.
At the Pennsylvania site, a heavily corroded gas storage well broke below the ground, sending methane aboveground and into the air. The leak wasn’t stopped for two weeks, and by then, it had released the equivalent of the annual greenhouse gas emissions from 300,000 gas-powered cars. Bloomberg even labelled it the worst climate disaster of the year.
And there’s more than just a climate risk. Storage fields essentially work as “a huge battery system” that keeps fuel ready to use in power plants and home heating, researcher Drew Michanowicz told Floodlight. Leaks jeopardize that supply.
It all makes for a big challenge for federal and state regulators as they work to keep energy resources secure and cut down on a big source of methane emissions.
Read the whole story from Floodlight here.
🚢 Hitting pause on gas: The Biden administration pauses all approvals of new liquefied natural gas export facilities to further review their climate and other impacts, crediting “the calls of young people and frontline communities” for its decision. (E&E News)
🏭 Fossil fuel switch: States are dependent on hundreds of millions of dollars of annual fossil fuel revenues that pay for schools and roads, and they’ll need to find other funding sources as they transition to renewables. (Axios)
🌎 Devastating climate impacts: Researchers estimate climate change has killed at least 4 million people around the world since 2000, crediting increasingly extreme weather for excess deaths. (Grist)
🏫 Building solar resilience: FEMA will soon start putting solar panels on schools, hospitals and other public buildings when they’re rebuilt after disasters, with the hopes of boosting resilience in future extreme weather events. (New York Times)
💸 Going public: In the face of high electric rates and unreliable power, several communities around the country are pushing to replace investor-owned utilities with public, resident-owned power companies. (Grist)
💰 Pro-propane: A propane industry lobbying group has spent millions of dollars over the past two years to promote the fuel as a clean energy source, even though it’s a byproduct of oil and gas refining. (The Guardian/Heated)
☀️ Solar for everyone: A solar nonprofit matches socially conscious investors’ cash with lower-income homeowners to spread the benefits of clean energy in a Minneapolis neighborhood. (Energy News Network)
🚘 An EV charging solution: Advocates say making many Level 1 charging outlets available to renters in large buildings could do more to convince them to adopt electric vehicles than installing a few faster charging ports. (Grist)
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