Energy in Depth: MIT Report Takes Square Aim at Howarth’s “Unreasonable” Inputs

A new paper by two experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters suggests that Cornell professor (and activist) Robert Howarth’s thesis about greenhouse gas emissions from shale is even more irreconcilably divorced from the facts than was previously thought.

The MIT paper — coauthored by one of the lead authors of the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report of the IPCC — is appropriately titled “Shale gas production: potential versus actual greenhouse gas emissions.” As many will remember, Dr. Howarth erroneously assumed that every single cubic foot of natural gas that he couldn’t account for was vented into the air as pure methane, contrary to technological realities and regulations requiring at least partial capture (more on that in a minute). You might also remember that Howarth’s paper has been widely panned by the U.S. Department of Energy, various universities, and even his own colleagues at Cornell. Many of these critiques stemmed from Howarth’s unreasonable leakage assumptions, not to mention an inflated global warming potential of methane far above what even the IPCC recommends.

Lo and behold, the new paper finds that the use of existing field technologies and “reduced emission ‘green’ completions” have resulted in actual GHG emissions that are “substantially lower than several widely quoted estimates” – and Cornell’s in particular.  MORE