A billion cubic feet of the potent greenhouse gas were spewed into atmosphere in rural Pennsylvania amid state’s fracking boom
It was an ordinary autumn afternoon pottering around the back yard for Doug Harrison when an engine-like roar suddenly drowned out the sound of the leaf blower.
“It sounded like two jets were directly above my house,” said Harrison, 50, a former steelworker from Jackson Township, a rural community in Pennsylvania. “I swear to God I thought this is it, those jets are going to crash into my property.”
Residents for miles around exchanged frantic messages while scouring flight radar and emergency service scanner apps for clues, as the township’s volunteer firefighters sped past, sirens blazing.
But this was no terrorist attack or aviation calamity. The deafening noise and the foul smell of rotten eggs that followed was a massive methane leak at a nearby gas storage facility, an unfolding climate catastrophe captured by satellites in space.
Over the next few weeks, more than a billion cubic feet of methane and other toxins were spewed into the atmosphere from a failed storage well at an ageing fossil-fuel facility operated by Equitrans Midstream Corporation on Rager Mountain.
This sleepy community, surrounded by rolling hills and forests, was the scene of the biggest gas leak in Pennsylvania’s history – and one of the worst ever detected in the US.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that warms the Earth’s atmosphere much faster than CO2, and today is responsible for about 25% of the heat trapped by all greenhouse gases. The oil and gas sector is the largest industrial source of methane, an invisible gas that can also cause a myriad of medical complications, fires and even engine failure leading helicopters to fall out of the sky.
According to some calculations, the Jackson Township leak was equivalent to planet-warming emissions from burning more than 1,080 rail cars of coal or from running 360,000 cars for a year. The incident triggered a bomb scare at one school after a student overheard a bus driver talking about the risk of explosions.
The relentless racket and stench caused people to suffer severe headaches, lightheadedness, sore throat, burning nose, nausea and sleep deprivation as the company struggled to plug the leak. Harrison’s wife, Tammy, 49, missed several days of work. For some residents – already fed up with the proliferation of fossil fuel pipelines and power plants – this was the final straw. “I have to get out,” said Beth Shoff, 52, a college professor.
The Pennsylvania climate disaster was among more than 1,000 super-emitter incidents in 2022 revealed by the Guardian’s investigation into global methane leaks. Satellites captured 154 mega-leaks in the US, with Turkmenistan, Russia, Algeria, China, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Iran and Iraq among the world’s other worst emitters.
“These leaks represent the tip of the iceberg of methane emissions, the super-emitters, for which there is no justification – these could be radically reduced at little or no net cost,” said Steve Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defence Fund.
The Rager Mountain leak was huge. The estimated flow rate on 7 November, the day after the leak sprung, was 120 tonnes of methane an hour, according to satellite data analysed by the company Kayrros. By this measure, it was only the second largest onshore leak in the US last year, surpassed by one near San Antonio, Texas in March which discharged 147 tonnes of methane an hour.
After two weeks, the company announced the leak had finally been plugged. But according to Harrison, the jet-like noise continued on and off for several more weeks. The state regulator, the department of environmental protection (DEP), which was initially denied access to the site, has cited the company for multiple maintenance violations since the leak, though it did not find cause for concern during routine inspections last June and October. State and federal investigations are continuing.
“Right from the start the company tried to underplay the magnitude but we don’t feel safe in our own home any more, they’ve taken away our sense of security. They promised us restitution but that’s not happened. I would like some truthful answers,” said Harrison.
The truth about this leak is part of a bigger story about the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania – and across the country – that is unlikely to help anyone sleep easier at night, according to David Hess, former head of the DEP.
“We have major gas infrastructure built out all over the place but don’t have the powers or resources to regulate everything that’s going on; this is the wild west. It was just a matter of time before something like the huge Rager Mountain leak happened, and it’s just a matter of time before the next big one,” said Hess.
Jackson Township is a majority-white Republican-leaning community with just more than 4,000 habitants in Cambria county, a former coal and steel heartland in western Pennsylvania which promotes itself as the state’s energy county. Pipelines, power plants and wells – active and abandoned – are scattered throughout the community, and local people are proud of the region’s industrial heritage.
After years of decline in coal and conventional oil and gas drilling, the state has been at the heart of the US fracking boom thanks to the mineral and gas-rich sedimentary rock formation known as the Marcellus Shale – 26m hectares (65m acres) that stretches across the Appalachian Basin from upstate New York to western Virginia.
Separate data obtained by the Guardian’s methane investigation revealed more than 50 “methane bombs” – fossil-fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions.
The Marcellus Shale is the world’s second-biggest methane bomb. Its estimated future emissions from methane leakage alone – without taking into account use of the extracted gas – is equivalent to 17bn tonnes (Gt) of CO2, more than triple the US’s current total annual emissions. Four of the top 10 methane bombs are in the US.
Fracking has led to a proliferation of new and repurposed fossil-fuel infrastructure to extract, process, transport and store previously unreachable shale gas – infrastructure which can, and frequently does, leak methane and other toxins into the air, land and water. Old and poorly maintained infrastructure is prone to leaks, but most methane is discharged during normal operations at every stage from extraction to transmission and is systematically undetected and underreported.
More than 1.5 million Pennsylvanians now live within half a mile of active oil and gas facilities and the fracking boom has been linked to a rise in asthma attacks and lyme disease. Last year, a grand jury investigation found that Pennsylvania failed to protect people during the fracking boom because state public health and environmental laws were too weak.
It has become too much for Beth Shoff and her older sister Amy Boring, who grew up in these mountains and whose family has fought – and lost – battles to stop strip mining, highway expansion and the fracking expansion.

Theguardian