The natural gas leak at Porter Ranch, just north of Los Angeles (as reported by The Associated Press in this paper Jan. 7), should raise red flags for any Maine community, business or homeowner considering natural gas as a fuel.

This leak, deep underground, is spewing about 2.5 million pounds of methane into the atmosphere each day. That represents about 25 percent of the daily methane emissions for the entire state of California, with huge implications for global warming.

Experts don’t expect the problem will be solved for months, a scenario eerily similar to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s difficult to estimate the future likelihood of massive and catastrophic gas leaks like the one we are now witnessing, but there is one thing we know with certainty: A significant amount of methane (the primary component of natural gas) is continuously leaking from thousands of hydraulic drilling/fracturing sites around the country.

The methane molecule is about the same size as one of carbon dioxide, but it has a much greater capacity to absorb infrared radiation, i.e. heat, escaping from the Earth. Factoring its “life span” in the atmosphere before breaking down, methane is approximately 20 to 25 times as potent a greenhouse gas as an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.

This means that natural gas, considered by many to be a good transition or bridge fuel, contributes much more to global warming than the gas companies would have you believe. (Still not as much as coal, but not appreciably better than oil.)

Building pipelines to supply Maine communities with gas might have made sense 10 years ago, but with the impacts of climate change ever more apparent, we cannot afford to be locked into gas infrastructure for decades to come. The transition to solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy must occur much more quickly.

Joe Hardy

Wells

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