Photo Credit: APRevised data from the Environmental Protection Agency now shows that methane emissions released by natural gas drilling are substantially lower than previously estimated, which undercuts claims made environmental groups that methane leaked during drilling accelerates global warming.

“We need a dramatic shift off carbon-based fuel: coal, oil and also gas,” Bill McKibbern, founder of the environmental group 350.org, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “Natural gas provides at best a kind of fad diet, where a dangerously overweight patient loses a few pounds and then their weight stabilizes; instead, we need at this point a crash diet.”

“New data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may not answer all of those questions in a comprehensive fashion, but they do strongly suggest that activists’ arguments about ‘the methane problem’ for natural gas development are without merit,” according to Energy in Depth.

“They also suggest that methane emissions aren’t increasing it all. They’re decreasing, actually — even as more wells and greater production come online,” the industry-funded group added.

The EPA said that tighter pollution controls by the gas industry has allowed methane emissions to decrease substantially between 1990 and 2010 — by about 41.6 million metric tons per year on average for a total of more than 850 million metric tons overall.

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