New Tools Pinpoint Natural Gas Leaks, Maximizing a Fuel’s Green Qualities

WASHINGTON — Natural gas is hailed as green and safe, but its environmental benefits and ability to temper climate change are reduced by its tendency to leak into the air undetected. Now, laser technology, some of it borrowed from the telecommunications industry, is giving engineers and scientists crucial new tools to measure leaks and track them to their source.

Pacific Gas & Electric, which operates in northern and central California, has begun training employees to use the technology, a portable gas detector that was recently used in a car driven 785 miles through the streets of Boston.

Natural gas escapes into the atmosphere from two basic sources: natural ones, like swamps and marshes, and human activity, like leaking gas wells and pipelines. The boom in natural gas production, including hydraulic fracturing, has raised concerns about a subsequent boom in leaks, although how much gas escapes remains a mystery. The Environmental Protection Agency has been working on the question for years and “is still operating with guesses,” said John C. Bosch, who specialized in that issue before he retired from that agency four years ago.

But whether from man-made or natural causes, methane — the main component in natural gas — is a major contributor to global warming when released in the atmosphere. According to the E.P.A., over a 100-year period, a pound of methane is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in warming the climate. It can also be dangerous: In 2010, one of Pacific Gas & Electric’s pipelines leaked in San Bruno, south of San Francisco, and the ensuing explosion killed eight people.

“Leaking methane is becoming increasingly relevant from a greenhouse gas standpoint,” said Joseph T. Hodges, a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the Commerce Department, who helped develop the laser technology used in the new portable gas detector.

The detector, built by Picarro, a manufacturer of scientific instruments that has recently moved into the field of portable methane detection, is able to determine whether the gas originated from wells or was produced by the bacteria in swamps, landfills and sewers. Distinguishing between the two can prevent industrial polluters from plausibly denying that they have leaks.

The system was demonstrated in 2011, when researchers bolted it in the trunk of a car that drove through the streets of Boston, a city with a labyrinth of aging underground gas pipelines. In a peer-reviewed scientific journal last year, the researchers said they had found 3,356 leaks of methane, and some with concentrations 15 times normal methane levels in the atmosphere.

Robert B. Jackson, a professor of global environmental change at Duke and an author of the paper, said Picarro was “pushing the envelope on portability.”

The Picarro detector works like this: An inlet tube takes in air samples, which are sent to a chamber in the trunk of the car. The chamber, about the size of a drum major’s baton with mirrors at either end, bounces a laser back and forth between the two mirrors thousands of times, like a fold-up yardstick. The laser’s path is ultimately several miles long and so is able to precisely measure concentrations of methane in the range of parts per billion.

An anemometer, an instrument for measuring wind speed and direction, is mounted on top of the car, as is a GPS device. In some models, an inlet pipe samples air from various elevations. The system uses an onboard computer to turn the readings into a three-dimensional model of a gas plume — a funnel-shaped flow of contamination — and calculates the location and size of the origin. Methane molecules incorporate a carbon atom of two different types, one more commonly found in gas from wells and the other in gas from landfills and sewers. Studying the ratio, the instrument can say where the gas came from.

Michael R. Woelk, president and chief executive of Picarro, said the advantage of the detector was that it could be used on public roads to locate leaks on private property.

Pacific Gas & Electric has bought six Picarro systems.

“I see it as a game-changer,” said Nick Stavropoulos, the utility’s executive vice president for gas operations. “It’s amazing how much more effective it is in finding gas leaks on our system than traditional technology.” Previously when gas was detected, he said, the utility had to stay on the site until it was determined by a distant laboratory whether the gas was from its pipes or a landfill. Now that determination can be made almost immediately.

Other companies use different techniques for gas detection. Physical Sciences of Andover, Mass., has an instrument like a lantern that projects a laser beam and measures what bounces back. About 2,000 are in use worldwide, according to Michael B. Frish, a manager there.

LI-COR Bio-Sciences, of Lincoln, Neb., makes an “open path” model in which air flows naturally through a chamber. The company has deployed instruments at several landfills to measure their emissions, said Dayle K. McDermitt, vice president for research and development for environmental products. Measurement technology is advancing, he said, but modeling plumes is “still a work in progress.”

The Environmental Protection Agency, which has a history of requiring new controls as technology improves, intermittently hints that it might regulate methane emissions. It already counts on the presence of large amounts of methane to help spot smaller quantities of toxic gases that are currently regulated. Remote detection is outside the norm for the agency, said Eben D. Thoma, an E.P.A. researcher. More often the agency requires measurements at known sources, like tailpipes and smokestacks. Measuring plumes is easiest in wide-open spaces, and harder in “urban canyons” and wooded areas, where the plume is distorted, he said.

Mr. Bosch, the retired E.P.A. official, who now consults for Picarro, said that the agency had had more success in reducing emissions from smokestacks and vent pipes than from “fugitive” sources like leaky pipes and valves.

But Mr. Woelk, of Picarro, said his technology could locate leaks and prioritize them, and that the majority of the gas was generally escaping from a small fraction of the sources.

“Natural gas is the new green energy, supposedly,” he said, but finding and fixing the leaks would make it greener.

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Shell Makes Big Bet on Boom in Natural Gas

More than any of its rivals, Royal Dutch Shell, which will report its quarterly results on Thursday, is betting its future on the business of bringing natural gas from remote locations like Qatar to energy-hungry destinations like China and Japan.

And while analysts expect the results to show a sharp decline from last year’s first quarter, in part because of disruptions in its Nigerian gas operations, many experts say Shell may eventually show big benefits from its natural gas emphasis.

Increasingly, to make gas a global commodity, companies supercool it into a liquid form for transport on specialized ships. Shell has already invested about $40 billion in liquefied natural gas, or L.N.G., production plants, storage terminals and related systems, and plans to continue pumping money into that business.

Shell now has about 7 percent of the world L.N.G. business, with ambitions to more than double that share through new projects and acquisitions. Last year, L.N.G. and related businesses earned Shell $9.4 billion of its $25.1 billion in profit.

“We are in the lead, and we want to stay in the lead,” Andrew Brown, Shell’s head of international exploration and production, said in a mid-April interview. Mr. Brown said Shell expected global demand for L.N.G. to grow rapidly in the coming years, doubling by 2025 to about 500 million tons a year, the equivalent of about 4.5 billion barrels of oil, making it by far the fastest-growing fuel.

The main reason for the anticipated growth is that natural gas is abundant. And because of the U.S shale gas boom, it has become relatively cheap — especially in North America, where prices lately have been in the range of $4 per million British thermal units, compared with highs of $13 as recently as 2005. The European spot price is around $10 per million B.T.U.’s, and the Asian price around $15; contract prices, often linked to oil, may be higher.

And because it burns much cleaner than either coal or oil, it will very likely stay in favor because its use can help lower the greenhouse gas emissions that are blamed for causing global warming.

To Mr. Brown’s frustration, not everyone gets the message. That is one reason Shell’s big L.N.G. bet is no sure thing.

The United States has wholeheartedly embraced gas. But Europe, mired in economic doldrums, has turned to coal, which is less expensive. This has driven down demand for gas in the region, which in recent decades had been one of the world’s biggest markets for natural gas via pipelines and L.N.G.

Europe does not have “the right balance” in terms of promoting gas, Mr. Brown said. About 75 percent of Shell’s L.N.G. goes to Asia.

As much as anyone, Mr. Brown is responsible for making Shell a gas broker to the world. Before taking his current job, Mr. Brown presided over more than $20 billion in investments in gargantuan installations for turning the extensive gas deposits in Qatar’s North Field into exports in the form of L.N.G. and liquid fuels like diesel.

To build on its lead, Shell agreed in February to buy the L.N.G. business of the Spanish company Repsol for about $6.7 billion. Some industry analysts considered the price too high. But according to Repsol, Shell had to outbid more than dozen competing offers.

The impact of Shell’s L.N.G. investments on the company’s financial performance will, of course, fluctuate from quarter to quarter. The first-quarter results on Thursday are expected to be hurt by a shutdown at a Nigerian L.N.G. plant caused by sabotage. And yet, Shell’s quarter was probably helped by high L.N.G. prices in Japan, which continues to import large quantities of gas since the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in 2011.

Analysts’ consensus forecast anticipates that Shell will report adjusted net profit of $6 billion for the quarter, an 8 percent gain over the preceding quarter, but an 18 percent decline from a year earlier, according to Peter Hutton of RBC Capital Markets in London.

On Tuesday, one of Shell’s main rivals, BP, reported a first-quarter profit of $4.2 billion after adjusting for inventory changes and one-time items, which handily beat analysts’ forecasts. BP, though, continues to emphasize its oil business.

Over the longer run, being a big player in L.N.G. is likely to help Shell outearn its peers, predicted Martijn Rats, an analyst at Morgan Stanley in London. The huge upfront investments of several billion dollars per gas liquefaction plant might seem prohibitive, Mr. Rats said, but those projects “generate large amounts of operating cash flow over two or three decades.”

Economix Blog: Another Look at Natural Gas

After my column on Wednesday about how the nation’s natural gas boom is helping reduce emissions of heat-trapping carbon, I received a bunch of e-mail arguing that gas obtained by hydraulic fracturing could, on the contrary, worsen climate change.

The main reason is that fracking wells — where water, chemicals and sand are pumped at high pressure into horizontal shafts to fracture shale rock deep underground — leak.

Cheap natural gas is helping to cut carbon emissions because power companies are using it to replace coal, a much dirtier fuel. But the benefits would be wiped out if a lot of the gas escaped into the atmosphere, because natural gas is mostly methane, which traps much more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

One study last year suggested that replacing coal with gas would reduce greenhouse gas emissions only as long as the leakage of methane into the air from gas production did not exceed 3.6 percent.

The question is, how much do these wells leak? “There is a lot of debate over that,” noted Susan Brantley, a geoscientist who heads the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Pennsylvania State University. “It is very vitriolic.”

According to a draft of the Environmental Protection Agency’s annual inventory of greenhouse gases, methane emissions from natural gas production declined by 45 percent from 2006 to 2011, to about 48 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent.

Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog has covered this controversy exhaustively. And in January, the magazine Nature published a good account of the state of knowledge on the subject.

But the best answer is that we don’t have a definite answer. Different groups of researchers have come up with vastly different estimates of leakage, from around 2 percent to a whopping rate of 9 percent, found in a recent analysis of a gas field in Utah.

Ms. Brantley suggests that the National Science Foundation underwrite an exhaustive study that could bring some clarity to the issue. But will it have the money? Sequestration just cut some $350 million from its budget for 2013.

Report Bolsters Case for Large U.S. Natural Gas Exports

The Obama administration has been cautious on whether to embrace large exports of gas out of concern that consumers who rely on gas for heating and cooking could see their utility prices rise. Higher exports could raise costs to manufacturers that now benefit from a glut of cheap gas, some economists warn, although huge terminal projects would generate thousands of construction jobs and gas could be a lucrative export earner.

The new report, prepared by NERA Economic Consulting for the government, concluded that domestic gas prices would not rise sharply as a result of exports and that expanded export revenue would generally help most Americans.

Noting that gas exports could produce up to $47 billion in new economic activity in 2020, when many new terminals would be up and running, the report said, “welfare improvement is highest under the high export volume scenarios because U.S. consumers benefit from an increase in wealth transfer and export revenues.”

Only a decade ago, it appeared that the country’s domestic gas supplies were drying up, and that huge amounts of expensive gas in liquefied form would have to be imported from Trinidad, Africa and the Middle East. But over the last few years, a technological revolution has occurred in shale gas fields across the country, producing a glut that has driven the price of natural gas down by two-thirds since 2008.

The report, the second Energy Department study this year, is likely to be challenged by manufacturing and chemical companies like Dow Chemical warn that large-scale exports that raise domestic gas prices would hurt their ability to compete with foreign firms.

Yet oil and gas companies are eager for exports to bolster the lagging price of natural gas, and the report is likely to spur a competitive lobbying campaign for regulatory approval of export terminals. Executives in the oil and gas industry were enthusiastic about the report. “It’s great news,” said Rodney Waller, a senior vice president at Range Resources, a natural gas producer. “It’s encouraging to see that experts are joining the expectation that we are in a global marketplace and the United States has a huge opportunity to generate economic growth and at the same time reduce our energy costs.”

But several powerful members of Congress, including Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who is in line to be the next chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, have opposed large-scale exports.

In a recent letter to the energy secretary, Steven Chu, Senator Wyden noted the importance of the country’s newfound gas wealth to “improve the economic competitiveness of American manufacturers” and that “U.S. law has long held that imports and exports of energy must be considered differently than other commodities.”

The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have joined the opposition to exports in a bid to limit domestic production, which is increasingly dependent on hydraulic fracturing, a technique that blasts open shale rock with water, sand and chemicals to release gas and oil. Environmentalists say drinking water supplies can be put in jeopardy, a charge disputed by the oil industry.

The Center for Liquefied Natural Gas, a trade group whose members include ExxonMobil, Sempra Energy and Royal Dutch Shell, has argued that more gas exports will bolster domestic gas production and with it expand demand for oil field equipment and steel piping.

The Energy Department report noted that large exports of gas would produce “some shifts in output by industrial sectors” and “the electricity sector, energy-intensive sector and natural gas dependent goods and services producers will all be impacted by price increases.” Industries that are likely to be most impacted, economists say, would be producers of chemicals and fertilizers.

But the report said that natural gas exports could produce $10 billion to $30 billion of annual export revenue. The country now exports some gas by pipeline.