Leaks of heat-trapping methane – about 3% of fuel produced in US – price $9.3bn yearly in local weather harm, however the issue is fixable

US oil and pure fuel wells, pipelines and compressors are spewing 3 times the quantity of the potent heat-trapping fuel methane as the federal government has decided, inflicting $9.3bn in yearly local weather harm, a brand new complete research calculates.

However as a result of greater than half of those methane emissions are coming from a tiny variety of oil and fuel websites, 1% or much less, this implies the issue is each worse than the federal government has decided but in addition pretty fixable, stated the lead writer of a research within the journal Nature.

The identical difficulty is going on globally. Giant methane emissions occasions around the globe detected by satellites grew 50% in 2023 in contrast with 2022 with greater than 5m metric tons noticed in main fossil gasoline leaks, the Worldwide Vitality Company reported on Wednesday in its Global Methane Tracker 2024 report. World methane emissions rose barely in 2023 to 120m metric tons, the report stated.

“That is actually a chance to chop emissions fairly quickly with focused efforts at these highest-emitting websites,” stated lead writer Evan Sherwin, an power and coverage analyst on the US Division of Vitality’s Lawrence Berkeley Nationwide Lab who wrote the research whereas at Stanford College. “If we will get this roughly 1% of websites beneath management, then we’re midway there as a result of that’s about half of the emissions generally.”