Emissions of coalbed and natural gas methane from abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recent work indicates that oil and gas methane (CH 4 ) inventories for the United States are underestimated. Here we present results from direct measurements of CH 4 emissions from 138 abandoned oil and gas wells, a source currently missing from inventories. Most abandoned wells do not emit CH 4 , but 6.5% of wells had measurable CH 4 emissions. Twenty‐five percent of wells we visited that had not been plugged emitted > 5 g CH 4 h −1 . Stable isotopes indicate that wells emit natural gas and/or coalbed CH 4. We estimate that abandoned wells make a small contribution (<1%) to regional CH 4 emissions in our study areas. Additional data are needed to accurately determine the contribution of abandoned wells to national CH 4 budgets, particularly measurements in other basins and better characterization of the abundance and regional distribution of high emitters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".