Friday 2 December 2011

Shale gas is clean - new Cornell University study rebuts a previous study

Flashback April 11,  2011:

Cornell University researchers say that natural gas pried from shale formations is dirtier than coal in the short term, rather than cleaner, and "comparable" in the long term.
The New York Times

Earlier this year most MSM media, among the the New York Times, were eager to publish stories about a Cornell University study purportedly showing that shale gas was dirtier than coal.

However, a soon to be published new Cornell University study completely refutes the findings of the earlier  widely cited study:

A research team from Cornell University finds that shale gas is better for the climate than coal, a conclusion that rebuts the earlier findings of other Cornell scientists.
During a Nov. 29 roundtable discussion with industry experts hosted by the American Clean Skies Foundation, Cornell's Lawrence Cathles III outlined the findings of a soon-to-be published study asserting that shale gas has a greenhouse gas footprint half or perhaps a third that of coal.
The Cathles study identified three errors in the widely cited study by Cornell's Robert Howarth, Renee Santoro and Anthony Ingraffea. Cathles and other researchers said Howarth's findings were "seriously flawed" because of erroneous methane leakage data, a too-short methane global warming potential and because it compared coal and gas in terms of heat rather than electricity generation.
Specifically, Cathles and others have criticized Howarth's assumption that up to 7.9 percent of methane produced from a shale gas well is vented into the atmosphere. "That's such a huge and valuable volume of gas. To say that is the norm ... just isn't plausible," Cathles said.
Carnegie Mellon University's Paulina Jaramillo with similar research that debunked the earlier study, echoed much of Cathles' assertions and elaborated on others. Jaramillo joined Cathles earlier in the day to brief lawmakers in the Natural Gas Caucus about their findings

It is no use trying to find anything about this new study in the New York Times or most other mainstream media. The results of the new study do not fit into their fake environmentalist global warming agenda.

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