With all the bleating about methane emissions and hare-brained schemes to reduce them the main anthropogenic sources of methane have been largely ignored.

To the naked eye, there was nothing to be seen at a natural gas well in eastern Texas but beige pipes and tanks baking in the sun.

But in the viewfinder of Terry Gosney’s infrared camera, three black plumes of gas gushed through leaks that were otherwise invisible.

“Holy smoke, it’s blowing like mad,” said Mr. Gosney, an environmental field coordinator for EnCana, the Canadian gas producer that operates the year-old well near Franklin, Tex. . . Within a few days the leaks had been sealed by workers.

Efforts like EnCana’s save energy and money. . .

some three trillion cubic feet of methane leak into the air every year, with Russia and the United States the leading sources, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s official estimate. (This amount has the warming power of emissions from over half the coal plants in the United States.) And government scientists and industry officials caution that the real figure is almost certainly higher. . .

“We spend a lot of money to get gas to the surface,” Mr. Smith said. “It makes a huge amount of sense to get all of it through the sales meter.”

The good news is that the value of the methane saved from leaks can offset the cost of fixing leaks. What is three or four trillion cubic feet a year of natural gas worth? How much would it cost to develop new sources with that kind of yield? It would seem that this is a problem that should be fixed even if the climate is cooling since it reduces profits from operations. We can find some other way to increase GHGs if that becomes necessary.

Update: Roger says:

At $8 per 1,000 cubic feet three QUADs of natural gas equates to about $24 billion. So if I've done my math right, uncaptured methane globally is like letting $24 billion float up into the air. . . . If it was dollar bills floating away rather than methane molecules I'd have to think that somebody would be building a big net.