The Environmental Defense Fund has been releasing maps of methane leaks for various US cities, created with the help of Google Map’s vehicles. Here’s Pittsburgh:
Pittsburgh methane leaks, Source: EDF.
Here’s Indianapolis.
Indianapolis methane leaks. Source: EDF.
Who do you think spends more on fixing methane leaks?
Megan Treacy on Treehugger.com comments:
Why don’t more cities replace the pipes? The upgrades are very expensive. Replacing just a mile of pipeline can cost between $1.5 and $2 million. Utilities typically only replace pipes where major leaks are found while slower leaks are left alone.
The exception is in New Jersey where the state’s largest utility is taking on a major pipe replacement project. The Public Service Electric & Gas (PSEG) worked with the Environmental Defense Fund and Google to map out hundreds of miles of urban pipeline and found that their own estimates were way off. The utility now has a detailed plan to replace 510 miles of pipes and reduce methane emissions by 83 percent by 2018.
At a price of $1.5M / mile, that suggests New Jersey will be spending something like $750M to $1B. Has anyone told GOP Governor Chris Christie about this?
And the importance of methane? Jason Mark of the Sierra Club explains in Earth Island Journal:
Actually, any CH4 released today is at least 56 times more heat-trapping than a molecule of CO2 also released today. And because of the way it reacts in the atmosphere, the number is probably even higher, according to research conducted by Drew Shindell, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Center. So why is the 21 times figure the one that gets bandied about? Because methane breaks down much faster than carbon dioxide. While CO2 remains in the atmosphere for at least a century (and probably much, much longer, according to Stanford’s Ken Caldeira), CH4 lasts only about a dozen years. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to come up with a way for comparing different greenhouse gases, it decided to use a century baseline to calculate a molecule’s “global warming potential.”
