Energy & Science
Decaying Urban Gas Lines Are Fueling Global Warming
Researchers in Europe have devised a way to find methane leaks hidden in crumbling infrastructure. It’s part of a little-known race to slash greenhouse gases.
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About two hours into our drive around Utrecht, a city of 358,000 near the center of the Netherlands, the display providing a real-time readout of ambient methane levels begins to freak out.
The Samsung tablet was consistently showing concentrations close to the atmosphere’s background level of around 2 parts per million. But suddenly, the chart’s scale expands in order to follow a sudden spike to 300 ppm. Behind the wheel, Hossein Maazallahi, a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, says the reason is clear: A natural gas pipeline has sprung a leak.