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Valves, joins, cracks, corrosion and wear in protective coatings. Keep in mind that the transportation methods used in your house very, very likely do not scale the same to industrial production and distribution. Pressure is fundamentally different, volume matters, square cube law stuff, different types of oversight and accountability regimes, etc all make for potentially a quite different product (I'd say your "but my house" comparison is akin to people comparing a household budget to the US government's budget -- there are some pretty key differences and assumptions that change, like the whole taxation and money supply aspects). Also, a gas leak is less likely in a carefully-tracked, very small segment of the overall distribution network involved, and furthermore leaks are frequently fixed when found, while the same paradigm might not exist on a large-scale gas line! Now, to be quite fair, it's probably a good assumption that brand new plants and pipelines to support them would be less prone to leakage, but more construction-related accidents are also possible to offset this, so it's not an ironclad assumption. Keep in mind when a new natural gas plant is opened up, there's the plant itself, but also pipelines and transport of gas to feed it, and furthermore a possible net increase in gathering and production lines, which might have their own leaks. So yeah. It might also depend a little bit on timeframe -- a new plant will have newer methods and pipes, but at some point the plant will grow old! The question then becomes, how careful are the regulations and monitoring?
Biased source, fair warning, but here you can see a large report on the issue. They apparently did some legwork and tried to verify EPA estimates and found the EPA numbers to be a significant under-estimate. Some of existing pipelines are quite old, and clearly not monitored that extensively, so to some extent perfect data on some of these aspects do not exist. They give one example that for some types of pipeline only 7% of the length is actually monitored at all! Also, you claim not to have a leak at your house, but one of the methodologies used was data gathered directly from Google Street View vehicles. In 12 metro areas at least, they had sensitive gas meters on them, so they used this data alongside some other sources to find that some leaks seemed to definitely be occurring, in aggregate.
Overall I find a dismissal of methane leaks as not real does not seem to match this data at all, even the EPA numbers. Note that even the EPA numbers are equivalent to (on a 20-year time scale, where methane is 100x more potent than CO2, vs the aforementioned 28 on a 100-year scale) over 6 million cars on the road for a year, and the org above thinks the real number is actually equivalent to 23.5 million cars on the low end and 50 million cars on the high end.
Seems like a bit of a streetlight effect to me. These infrastructure leaks are likely tiny compared to methane generated by ordinary organic processes. Their high-end estimate of about 2.5 million tons is as compared to an estimated 570 million or so tons annual emissions, of which 40-50% is from single-celled organisms and most of the rest from agriculture and oil production. Since infrastructure leaks already come directly off the bottom line of the service providers, it seems likely to me that resources would be better utilized elsewhere than trying to reduce this number to zero. The simplest solution, if you want people to stop demanding natural gas service to the home, is to permit enough electrical generation to make electricity cost-competitive, but electricity rates are rising faster than inflation, providing pressure in the other direction.
From the point of view of the government, it's simpler to let them keep demanding but just say "no".
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If these numbers are correct, then natural gas actually has a significantly greater impact on greenhouse gas release than lignite coal (which does not leak into the atmosphere and has about twice the CO2 factor when burned as methane, whereas leaking methane is about 28 times the greenhouse gas impact as burning it). Would you, then, support going back to coal (with all modern scrubbers and other pollution control technology) as much as possible until such time as this leak problem has been solved? Would anyone producing these numbers?
If not, I submit they do not actually believe these numbers. They are merely a weapon to be used against fossil fuels.
You are actually correct! Great intuition following this to its logical conclusion. NYT description of recent study you might find interesting which also has some good links about natural gas leaks. Were climate activists misled? Yes, partially! Note that clean coal technologies have improved over the last few decades, and traditional coal was a classic and convenient boogeyman because of the visceral and visual aspect. At the same time the data involving methane leaks was insufficient and caused climate activists to make some bad assumptions. We shouldn't be too positive when it comes to coal, however, because greenhouse gasses are a big issue, but so is pollution, and coal is traditionally much worse about pollution. The two concerns don't always dovetail. Cost and the most efficient use of resources including money also looms over everything, too. This is the case in other related areas, as well! In my home state of Oregon, they've been destroying a couple of hydropower dams for other environmental and/or so-called environmental justice reasons (native tribes, fishing, etc) even though I personally (and some portion of dedicated climate activists as well) strongly oppose these choices since hydro is so incredible as a power source! So those are all potent reasons I'd be hesitant to accuse broad Green efforts of bad faith -- there are some genuine tradeoffs, and tech is constantly changing! Plus, a lot of people are (rightly) skeptical of fossil fuel company claims and arguments, because those same companies also have a (very, very strong) history of bad faith arguments as well as outright lying, both in the greenhouse gas realm as well as the pollution realm. I think these energy companies are improving, but slowly. The incentives are just very skewed.
Overall, the Green movement is a bit slow sometimes, but I wouldn't be surprised if as you say, clean coal becomes the new recommended so-called "bridge" recommendation. And in fact, there is some movement to do exactly what you suggest doing, which is step up data collection and analysis of leaks, and re-consider what to do as we seek to complement renewables, and presumably attempt to eventually do pure renewables.
I found this analysis and discussion to be highly interesting. Politics creeps into everything. That's not necessarily a bad thing, politics is just the natural human way of trying to sort through our different priorities, and subject to manipulation by those with power in all its forms. I think the conclusion is to accept the complexity of our world and the issues, rather than rail against everything as a tribalist and one-dimensional manipulation effort. It's not Crazy Greens vs Big Oil, existential battle, with everyone stuck in between. So to answer your question, yes, I'm actually totally amenable to going back to "clean coal" for a little while, and I suspect most Greens might start to feel similarly over the next 5 years as well. It's really a huge optimization problem, where you're trying to find some stable balance of greenhouse/warming timeline (tipping point climate arguments, current favor of a 20-year timeframe over longer ones), money efficiency (using existing infrastructure, cost of energy to consumers, effectiveness of federal incentives), pollution and health concerns (short term risks, longer ones like cancer, environment stuff, wildlife sometimes), technology advancements (can we predict what the final power generation mix looks like, can we mitigate the bad stuff, etc) and political feasibility (how cooperative are corporations, how persuadable are voters, how educated are lawmakers and the public).
On balance, it's probably actually a bad idea to trade less methane for more CO2, because methane remains effective for a far shorter time.
This is already accounted for in the 28x CO2 equivalent for methane. Technically speaking this is the 100-year CO2 equivalent.
Oh, I didn't know that! Wow, that suggests a surprisingly feasible method of warming Mars.
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Germany is the only country which believes in climate change.
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