Few ‘super-emitter’ wells guilty of almost all Marcellus methane emissions – study

摘要

The vast majority of methane emissions in the booming Marcellus shale play in Pennsylvania are generated by a tiny handful of “super-emitter” wells, according to new research that promises to help alleviate the problem by enabling quicker identification of culprits and fixing faults. A team of Princeton University researchers found that 10% of wells account for more than three quarters of gas leaked into the atmosphere during extraction, after a two-year campaign sampling emissions from the Marcellus.