A news report from the first week of the leak. Since March 25,
the Elgin gas platform off the coast of Scotland has been
leaking 7 million cubic feet of gas a day. The natural gas,
mostly methane, doesn’t have the dark stain of oil and it hasn’t
inspired the news coverage of Deepwater Horizon. But that
doesn’t mean it can be ignored. Like carbon dioxide, methane is
a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. But
methane is much worse: the same amount of methane will have 25
times the warming effect of carbon dioxide over a 100-year
period. In the six months that it will take to stop the leak,
enough methane would have escaped into the atmosphere to equal
the annual global warning impact as 300,000 new cars, according
to a recent TIME article. The Elgin gas leakage is an extreme
example of how natural gas exploration and processing is always
beset by leaks. After all, the stuff is gas that wants to float
away. The TIME piece dissects a recent paper in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of