And the Problem is Growing
By Alanna McKee
The US is the biggest producer of natural gas in the world, and natural gas usage and infrastructure are steadily increasing in Massachusetts, according to the United States Energy and Information Administration (USEIA). But our natural gas production and delivery system is notoriously leaky; in a 2012 study, Boston University professor and former Massachusetts Sierra Club board member Nathan Phillips counted 3,356 leaks in Boston alone. This begs the question: what effects do all of these natural gas leaks have on public health?
The answer: the effects are many, and they aren’t good.
First a little background. The main component of natural gas is methane – CH4 – which, when burned in a power plant, produces about half the CO2 that coal would produce. This is one of the reasons it has been called ‘clean’ and has been touted as a good bridging fuel to enable our transition from high-pollution coal and oil, over to renewables. Further, characterizing natural gas as ‘clean’ ignores the fact that a significant amount of methane escapes intact into the atmosphere, the environment, and our bodies, without ever being combusted.
That’s bad news for the climate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculates that, over a twenty-year period, CH4 has 84 times the global warming potential of CO2. So, global-warming-wise, for a natural gas-powered power plant to ‘break even’ with a coal-fired power plant, Environmental Defense Fund chief scientist Steven Hamburg calculates that the amount of methane leaking out of the natural gas system needs to be less than 2.7%.
On-site measurements in key gas-producing states, reported in a 2018 study in Science, show that an average of 2.3% of methane escapes from natural gas production sites. According to Hamburg, who is one of the study’s authors, these measurements could easily underestimate the real percentage because they don’t account for possible leaks during consumption. In other words, he says, natural gas could be as bad for the climate crisis as coal is.
In the very near term, when methane leaks out and is in the air around us, it hurts us in a more immediate way. More methane means more smog, which can directly damage our bodies. It can make asthma worse, and harm the lining of our lungs, and recent research from a collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the EPA is uncovering mechanisms by which smog reduces immune function. What’s more, smog also damages crops and other plants.
And natural gas contains more than just methane. When it leaks out, it’s potentially carrying heavy metals such as chromium, arsenic, lead, and mercury with it. To further complicate things, the USEIA reports that an increasing amount of the natural gas used in Massachusetts is now fracked gas, which, according to Phillips, could carry a host of potentially toxic and carcinogenic exotic chemicals associated with the fracking process.
In the urban environment, methane leaking from underground pipes can kill trees, as a study in Chelsea, Massachusetts, led by Boston University School of Public Health’s Claire Schollaert, this year showed. Fewer trees mean more of an urban heat island effect, along with all of its attendant health problems. United Nations chief Antonio Guterres urges the world to “plant billions of trees” as an important mitigator for the climate crisis - but underground methane leaks are doing the opposite of this. A decade ago the city of Brookline, MA, identified more than $1 million worth of lost shade trees linked to gas leaks.
Leaking methane’s most visibly dramatic threat to public health is that it can explode. High-profile gas explosions such as the ones created by Columbia Gas in the Merrimack Valley in 2018 -- when more than 130 homes were damaged and one person was killed – – and the fatal explosion in Baltimore this past August, are not isolated events; the United States Department of Transportation’s pipeline tracking system reports more than 6,300 damaging incidents over the past ten years. Given that natural gas infrastructure is quickly expanding right now, it’s disturbing to note that the highest frequency of incidents in gas distribution pipelines are in the newest pipes; if that correlation continues to hold true, we can expect to see even more damaging incidents in the future.
Though methane comes from various sources, including rotting debris in swamps, the IPCC finds that 50-65 percent of the world’s methane emissions come from human activities. We clearly have a problem with unintended leaks, but we also need to deal with another category of ‘leaks’: the intended kind. For example, in places like Texas’s Permian Basin – where natural gas and oil infrastructure is increasing at a staggering pace -- unwanted methane at oil production sites is vented and flared, contributing to the measurable release of enough unburned methane to fuel 7 million houses, according to the Environment Defence Fund (EDF). Closer to home, residents in the Boston-area Fore River Basin were disturbed this summer to learn that the methane-venting going on at a nearby natural gas regulating station is permitted to happen multiple times a year.
With all of this, it’s no surprise that methane is forecast to play an increasingly large part in the climate crisis if we don’t rein in our emissions. It will take all of us to help fix this problem. To get involved, please contact Michele Brooks at michele.brooks@sierraclub.org.