HEET (Home Energy Efficiency Team) is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based non-profit organization with a mission to cut carbon emissions by driving systems to change. In 2008 HEET was co-founded by Audrey Schulman, also co-Executive Director. Schulman created the first-in-the-nation statewide zoomable public map of utility-reported gas leaks and started the Large Volume Leak Study, which discovered a way for gas utilities to identify and repair super-emitting gas leaks. As a data-based company that intends to help communities cut carbon emissions, they care about reaching people who want to get involved in volunteering. They are available through info@heet.org and (516) 900-HEET. Also, they share their geocoded-leaks data under a Creative Commons license; hence, they recommend contacting them directly if you are interested in a copy.
HEET established a new method in 2020 to collect a high-quality geocoded set of gas leak data from annual utility reports and then distribute and map it. For example, in 2021, they recorded that gas leaks were responsible for an estimated 6,734 metric tons of methane emissions, 579,138 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or $6.9 million in spilled gas (based on the EIA’s average price of natural gas delivered to residential Massachusetts customers in 2021). But this, according to the LAUF gas laws, demands utilities report to the DPU standardized estimates of their yearly statewide methane emissions from leaks. So they utilized this information to calculate the average quantity of gas leaked by each utility’s leaks. Then, they multiplied this by the number of leaks reported by each utility in each municipality and neighborhood in Boston. This dataset may be used for geographic analysis in research, such as Dr. Marcos Luna and Dominic Nicholas’ recent peer-reviewed publication, An environmental justice study of distribution-level natural gas leaks in Massachusetts, USA. In addition, organizations or the public may utilize the data in any mapping platform that can ingest geocoded data and be used to produce this map. HEET, for instance, cooperated with the Town of Salem in 2021 to create its own Understanding Natural Gas Leaks webpage. Furthermore, a general audience can find any local gas leaks using the map to zoom in on their homes, schools, and businesses.
Ultimately, it is essential to highlight that HEET data has been continuously updated since 2008 to keep track of the reported open leaks, repaired leaks, estimated emissions, and equivalencies by both town and Boston neighborhoods. However, they invite people to keep in mind that despite the accuracy of the reports, there is a time between report to report that can show a slight outdated on fix leaks and new ones. Besides, Independent researchers generally discover 1.5 to 3 times the number of leaks reported by utilities. And based on the provided addresses in the yearly reports, only a tiny percentage (36 out of 23,840) of all reported leak locations could be geocoded and plotted. These were typically caused by cross streets not connecting and street names that did not exist.
Previously posted in Medium by Sara Valentina Alvarez Echavarria:
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