Methane leaks from US oil and gas are triple government estimates

Major oil and gas-producing regions in the US are leaking much more methane than current estimates suggest, according to nearly a million aerial measurements of the potent greenhouse gas.

“Our study used the largest such dataset that’s ever been assembled,” says Evan Sherwin at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who conducted the research while at Stanford University.

He and his colleagues combined data from numerous aerial surveys that used infrared sensors to measure methane leaking from wells, pipelines…