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octoberlib

(14,971 posts)
Thu Mar 28, 2013, 06:05 PM Mar 2013

Are Exploding Manhole Covers In Washington DC Caused By Shocking Levels Of Leaking Natural Gas?

Residents of Washington, DC are used to jokes about metaphorical hot air, humidity, and the swampy history of their city. But there’s something they may not know about the District: it’s overrun with methane, which sometimes makes manhole covers explode.

Natural gas is mostly methane, and it is carried through underground pipes to heat buildings and cook food. Those pipes are often old, and this led ecologist and chemical engineer Robert Jackson of Duke University to drive around DC over a period of two months, regularly measuring the air to take methane levels.

He and his research team found methane leaks everywhere, with thousands of places having significantly higher than normal methane concentrations, and some places reaching 50 times normal urban levels (100 ppm vs 2 ppm). A similar study in Boston last year found essentially the same results. In DC, the source wasn’t the swamp on which the city was built — it was fossil fuel. (The methane they measured had more carbon-13 rather than the normal, modern carbon-12.)

Dr. Jackson, the researcher who mapped the high levels of methane leaking in DC, hopes his research will inspire cities and natural gas companies to fix the leaks. As there are many cities with aging infrastructure that could potentially leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, these emissions could represent a large source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Methane is 100 times more efficient at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over 20 years. NOAA has already confirmed that as much as 9% of the methane produced at natural gas wells leaks into the atmosphere. As the planet warms and permafrost melts, it starts the most dangerous feedback loop in the entire carbon cycle.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/03/28/1786281/are-exploding-manhole-covers-in-washington-dc-caused-by-shocking-levels-of-leaking-natural-gas/


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