I’d like to mention a likely under considered factor that may play into this new awareness and act to broaden it.

In the American West and increasingly across areas of the North-East, unconventional natural gas mining is complicating geologic conditions through a myriad of impacts such as: hydraulic fracturing, high-pressure drilling encounters, and de-pressurization of gas and groundwater.

As this practice is conducted under dense (10 acre) down-hole density, there is a much greater likelihood of non-predictive production modeling and formation failure – which, in turn, certainly changes predictive modeling for the formation’s contributions to green house gases.

Here, where drilling is particularly intense (60 wells within a mile of one another), methane and its attendant constituents express to the surface.

Additionally, in an effort to prevent further formation degradation during natural gas production in highly pressurized areas, excess pressure on the bradenheads of wells will be openly vented to the atmosphere, contributing undisclosed volumes of methane into the air (here there are at least 9 such wells at any given time). So this practice provides an unquantified expressway for methane gas emission that should be considered in the greenhouse gas equation.

More on hydraulic fracturing and other natural gas related geologic interactions can be viewed at my website: http://www.journeyoftheforsaken.com

Thanks for this wonderful article.