Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 115, Issue 46, Pages 11712-11717Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1805687115
Keywords
natural gas; methane emissions; top-down; bottom-up; spatiotemporal inventory model
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Funding
- Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America/National Energy Technology Laboratory [12122-95/DE-AC26-07NT42677]
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This study spatially and temporally aligns top-down and bottomup methane emission estimates for a natural gas production basin, using multiscale emission measurements and detailed activity data reporting. We show that episodic venting from manual liquid unloadings, which occur at a small fraction of natural gas well pads, drives a factor-of-two temporal variation in the basin-scale emission rate of a US dry shale gas play. The midafternoon peak emission rate aligns with the sampling time of all regional aircraft emission studies, which target well-mixed boundary layer conditions present in the afternoon. A mechanistic understanding of emission estimates derived from various methods is critical for unbiased emission verification and effective greenhouse gas emission mitigation. Our results demonstrate that direct comparison of emission estimates from methods covering widely different timescales can be misleading.
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