Study: Landfills Bigger Leakers of Fugitive Methane than O&G Wells

It doesn't happen often, but every once in a while, academic researchers do real, actual, in-the-field research, as opposed to running computer simulations. Such an act of real research was just published in the journal Science last Thursday. A research group led by Carbon Mapper, with researchers from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Arizona State University, University of Arizona, Scientific Aviation, and the Environmental Protection Agency used advanced aircraft to conduct the largest direct measurement-based survey of active municipal solid waste landfills to date from 2018 through 2022, looking for fugitive methane emissions. They found that 52% of surveyed landfills had "observable point source emissions" (i.e, they are super-emitters), as compared with a 0.2% to 1% detection rate observed for super-emitters from surveyed oil and gas infrastructure in California and the Permian Basin.

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