A methane plume in California detected by an airborne spectrometer
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Major oil and gas producing regions in the US are leaking much more methane than current estimates suggest, according to nearly a million aerial measurements of the potent greenhouse gas.
“Our study used the largest such dataset that’s ever been assembled,” says Evan Sherwin at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
He and his colleagues combined data from numerous aerial surveys that used infrared sensors to measure methane leaking from wells, pipelines and other infrastructure in the oil and…