HEARING EXAMINES NEED FOR REGS ON FRACKING METHANE RELEASE

Karen Frantz
GHG Monitor
11/15/13

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s subcommittee on Oversight explored in a hearing last week whether the natural gas industry will voluntarily employ existing and effective technology to keep methane—a potent greenhouse gas—from leaking into the atmosphere during the hydraulic fracturing process, or whether regulation is needed to keep emissions in check. “The federal government needs to do more to limit the release of methane and other pollutants from the production and distribution of natural gas,” testified Vignesh Gowrishankar, staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, before the subcommittee members. “The good news is that the technologies to reduce the leak and release of these pollutants exist today and the oil and gas industry can actually make more money using them.”

He said that “there is no evidence” to suggest that companies are using such technology widely. “Our analysis suggests that potentially the primary reason for them not being used more widely goes back to the question of capital constraints and other strategic initiatives that may potentially make more sense for the companies. … There are some companies that are doing it. But voluntary action is not sufficient.”

But other witnesses at the hearing argued that it is in industry’s best interest to deploy methane-capturing technology. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) questioned Darren Smith, environmental manager at Devon Energy Corporation, an oil and natural gas exploration and production company, on whether it was to his company’s benefit to capture leaking methane without regulation. “A lot of the control technologies that have been discussed today are already being conducted by industry,” Smith responded. “We have data from industry that suggest that green completion equipment is being deployed very consistently across the industry. So the incentive, I think, to employ these control technologies is already there. … I think there’s some believe that in these conditions of low gas prices that because gas is maybe not worth so much that companies aren’t paying so much attention to leaks of it. But in reality, the inverse is really true. Because if you consider a company needing to make profits from these wells, the only way that a company can offset our operating costs of these wells is to really scrape the bottom of the barrel, to really capture and sell every cubic foot of gas that we can.”

Practices in use to Capture Fugitive Methane

Panelists described a number of technologies and practices that have been used to reduce methane leaks. Gowrishankar said some of those include “capturing the big release of gas that occurs when a well is fracked, using better seals for compressors and making sure they’re properly maintained and functioning, ensuring that wells that control gas don’t actually leak the gas, putting a sealed lid on storage tanks so that gas does not escape and using detectors to identify when and where equipment is leaking.”

He said a number of leading companies are already using the technologies in some of their operations, and they allow industry to capture the leaking gas—saving industry money, as gas is their product. “NRDC has identified 10 such technologies that are especially cost-effective,” he said. “Employing these 10 technologies could potentially reduce 60 to 80 percent of methane leakage, and possible even more.”

Mark Boling, president of V+ Development Solutions at Southwestern Energy Company, the fifth largest producer of natural gas in the U.S., also pointed to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Natural Gas Star Program, a voluntary program that fosters collaboration on best practices among industry, as being effective in encouraging natural gas companies to adopt practices that will reduce methane emissions. He said Southwestern has been part of the program since 2005. “Since our initial report in 2006, Southwestern has reported cumulative methane reductions of over 37 billion cubic feet of gas, primarily due to our use of Reduced Emission Completions, also known as ‘Green Completions.’ Additionally, due to the hard work and innovation of our employees, Southwestern was able to drive down the incremental cost of conducting Reduced Emission Completions in our Fayetteville Shale project from approximately $20,000 per well to $0 per well, while at the same time capturing a significant amount of natural gas that would have otherwise been vented or flared.”

And Smith said that his company has written what may be the “only carbon methodology for creating fungible emission credits from emission reductions in the oil and gas sector.” “We did that with the methodology for the retrofit of pneumatic controllers, so it was taking high bleed pneumatic controllers out of service and replacing them with low bleed pneumatic controllers. And that methodology is available to the public and so any industry could use that and establish carbon credits for it,” he said. He added that in addition to focusing on reducing emissions from pneumatic controllers, the company does not have a wet seal—a higher emitting devise than a dry seal—on any of its compressors. “We’re really centralizing a lot of our production equipment so that some of the control equipment that is outside of its operating range at individual well sites is now feasible when you aggregate more equipment together. We’re doing a lot of things—and not just us, but industry’s doing a lot of things to be proactive in reducing methane emissions voluntarily,” he said.

New EPA regulations

The EPA finalized its first air pollution standards for hydraulic fracturing operations in Oil and Gas New Source Performance Standards in April 2012, which will require the capturing of emissions to take effect starting in 2015, and estimates that the rules will result in the reduction of up to 1.7 million tons of methane annually.

Sarah Dunham, director of the EPA’s offices of Atmospheric Programs and Air and Radiation said at the hearing that methane is a potent greenhouse gas. “Although the majority of greenhouse gas emissions consist of carbon dioxide, other powerful greenhouse gases significantly contribute to climate change, including methane, which is also an ozone precursor,” she said. “The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report estimates the 100-year warming influence from one ton of methane is 28 times greater than from one ton of carbon dioxide. In 2010, methane emissions accounted for 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and approximately 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. However, total U.S. anthropogenic methane emissions are projected to increase by 3 to 9 percent by 2030, compared to 2010 levels.”

But the hearing focused largely on a new study that showed that the EPA’s estimates of methane emissions from hydraulic fracturing, which it used to finalize the EPA regulation, were off base. David Allen, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering and director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Resources at the University of Texas at Austin, conducted the study, which directly measured methane emissions from 190 production well completions. “For two-thirds of the completions sampled during the study, reduced emission completion equipment was used to reduce methane emissions,” he said. “This equipment reduced emissions by 99 percent; for these wells, only 1 percent of the methane leaving the well during the completion flowback was emitted to the atmosphere. Because of this equipment, our estimates of national methane emissions from well completions are significantly lower than calendar year 2011 national emission estimates that were released by the Environmental Protection Agency in April 2013.”

But he also said that “emissions from certain types of pneumatic devices, which control devices such as valves on well sites, are 30 percent to several times higher than calendar year 2011 EPA estimates for this equipment; we estimate the combined emissions from pneumatics and equipment leaks account for about 40 percent of national emissions of methane from natural gas production.” “Total methane emissions from natural gas production, from all sources measured in the study, were comparable to the most recent calendar year 2011 EPA estimates,” he said. Smith said the study indicates “immediate action” is needed. “EPA estimates have been relied upon by researchers, financial analysts and various policy makers as a basis for critical public policy considerations,” he said.