Methane burned vs. methane leaked: Fracking’s impact on climate change

Natural gas being flared near a production well in North Dakota.

Tim Evanson

Fracking—the use of hydraulic pressure to crack layers of shale that hold oil and natural gas—is controversial. That’s one thing we know about a debate that mainly focuses on what we don’t know. The most common concern is the contamination of drinking water, either by the chemicals used in the fracking fluid or by liberated natural gas. And this issue has entered the public consciousness through media like the film Gasland and its imagery of flaming faucets—though almost 40 percent of people in the US say they’ve never heard of fracking.

In interviews promoting the recent sequel to Gasland, filmmaker Josh Fox has given voice to a new claim being made by opponents of fracking—that shale gas is just as bad for the climate as coal, and it might even be worse.

Throughout the US shale gas boom, natural gas has been described as a “bridge fuel”—a lower-CO₂ alternative to coal that yields immediate emissions reductions while renewable energy grows into the long-term solution. This is because burning natural gas—chiefly composed of methane, a molecule with one carbon atom and four hydrogens—produces less CO₂ than coal does when generating the same amount of energy.