Last week, The Washington Post ran a story about the enormous plume of methane being produced in the 4 Corners area of New Mexico. In addition to fracking, the San Juan Generating Station is one of the main culprits responsible for the methane plume. As reporter Joby Warrick writes: Satellites that sweep over energy-rich northern New Mexico can spot the gas as it escapes from drilling rigs, compressors and miles of pipeline snaking across the badlands. In the air it forms a giant plume: a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud, so vast that scientists questioned their own data when they first studied it three years ago. “We couldn’t be sure that the signal was real,” said NASA researcher Christian Frankenberg. The country’s biggest methane “hot spot,”verified by NASA and University of Michigan scientists in October, is only the most dramatic example of what scientists describe as a $2 billion leak problem: the loss of methane from energy production sites across the country. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, methane is the second most prevalent greenhouse gas--those gases, like carbon dioxide, are responsible for the changing climate--in the United States. And the American Geophysical Union produced a report this year on the Four Corners methane hotspot. The Post article includes a link to a FLIR video made by the nonprofit Earthworks showing emissions coming from the Val Verde Blanco Plant in Bloomfield, N.M. FLIR, or Forward Looking Infrared, cameras can reveal more than 20 types of gases not visible to the naked eye, including methane, benzene, butane, ethanol, and propylene. Thats not the only FLIR video available for New Mexico. In September, Earthworks filmed more than ten videos in northern New Mexico that show leaking emissions.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 07:04:47 +0000
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