NETL, ONE Future partner to study methane emissions in natural gas life-cycle

A partnership between the Office of Fossil Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and natural gas industry consortium Our Nation’s Energy (ONE) Future has identified opportunities to reduce methane emissions and make the delivery of natural gas more efficient.

Working with ONE Future, NETL energy analysis experts conducted multi-disciplinary investigations of energy supply security, environmental performance, and the nation’s energy economy. The experts suggested three steps to improve natural gas sustainability: better collective understanding of methane emissions, better evaluation of the effectiveness of emission reduction strategies; and identification of new ways for operators to improve system efficiency.

NETL experts used life-cycle analysis (LCA) to compare the methane performance of a member of ONE Future to the methane performance of the industry’s U.S. national average. The LCA included environmental, economic and social attributes of energy systems throughout the lifecycle of the product.

“Results are used to evaluate energy options from a national perspective,” an NETL release stated. “NETL uses LCA as a tool for evaluating energy technology and policy options such as the environmental burdens of converting fuel to useful energy, infrastructure construction, extraction, and transport of the final energy product to the end user.”

Tim Skone, a member of NETL’s Energy Systems Analysis Team, said few public-private partnerships have provided information on methane emission mitigation opportunities. He added that the analyses had provided NETL a better understanding of processes and key contributors to energy consumption in the supply chain, product losses and the impact of system variability on supply chain efficiency.