“GAME OVER” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 102

h e scholars' argument was straightforward. Chemically, natural gas
is methane, a combination of one carbon and four hydrogen atoms.
When it's burned in a power plant, one of the products is carbon diox-
ide. h is is why using natural gas contributes to climate change. But
methane itself is an immensely potent greenhouse gas. A molecule of
methane in the atmosphere traps far more heat than a molecule of car-
bon dioxide does. h is means that if small amounts of methane leak
from natural gas operations such as wells and transport pipelines, the
climate consequences can in principle be severe. h e one big thing
weighing against this is that methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere
for nearly as long as carbon dioxide does. To go back to our bathtub
analogy, the methane drain isn't nearly as clogged as the carbon diox-
ide one. If you look at a span of twenty years, a molecule of methane
traps about seventy times as much heat as a molecule of carbon dioxide
does, but if you look over a hundred years, the factor falls to about
twenty-i ve . 38
Howarth and his colleagues used this fact to their advantage.
Exploiting crude data from the i eld, they estimated that between 3.6
and 7.9 percent of produced natural gas was leaking into the atmo-
sphere. 39 And, pointing out that climate change was an urgent prob-
lem, they argued that people should be looking at impacts over a span
of twenty years, greatly boosting the relative impact of methane. h e
consequence was that gas was indeed worse for the climate than coal.
Early in 2012, their case seemed to get some real-world reinforcement:
a team of thirty scholars led by researchers at the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had taken careful measure-
ments of leakage around gas i elds in Colorado and had come to similar
conclusions. 40
However, there were three big problems with the analysis. h e esti-
mates that Howarth and his colleagues used were wrong. As several
other Cornell professors later explained, they misread the data. 41 h ey
looked at how much gas was coming out of wells and at how much was
being delivered to customers, and inferred that the dif erence between
the two was what had leaked. In reality, though, most of the missing gas
was being used to power generators and the compressors that make gas
pipelines work. h e researchers also used real-world data to estimate