New Yorkers are losing roughly $300 million worth of natural gas every single year, and it is not vanishing through cracked pipes under the street. A new Columbia University study points instead to something far closer to home: stoves, boilers and furnaces inside the city's own buildings that are not burning fuel as cleanly as they should.
The research, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics on September 14, found a methane loss rate of 1.7% across the New York City metropolitan gas system, with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.6%. That works out to about $300 million a year in natural gas that customers pay for but that never gets fully used, according to Gothamist. Researchers with Columbia University pegged the annual loss at $300 million, the outlet reports, framing the number as gas that is purchased by city customers and then escapes into the air rather than being put to use.
Why the Losses Are Coming From Inside Buildings
Lead study author Yuwei Zhao said the findings push the conversation away from decades of focus on underground pipeline leaks and toward how efficiently buildings actually burn the gas delivered to them. Zhao, per Columbia Climate School, said the research redirects attention toward how natural gas is used in buildings, particularly how efficiently appliances burn it. The city's thousands of miles of pipelines and its building appliances are both plausible sources of leaking, uncombusted gas, Zhao said, according to Gothamist's account of the study.
The data behind the finding came from hourly methane measurements collected at the Mineola Tower on Long Island between January 2023 and December 2024, the same Columbia Climate School writeup explains. Incomplete combustion, rather than unburned gas escaping straight into the air, was the dominant signal detected in both the heating and cooling seasons. Only 6% of the natural-gas plumes identified in winter and 7% in summer showed no combustion signature at all, meaning the overwhelming majority of the methane had passed through a flame of some kind before reaching the atmosphere.
A Seasonal Pattern Tied to the Thermostat
Methane emissions tracked the seasons closely, peaking during winter heating, dropping off through spring, and climbing again once air conditioners kicked in for summer. The same report found that natural gas accounted for 99% of total methane emissions in February and 98% in May, with that share dipping to between 85% and 88% during the summer cooling months. The Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics paper notes that natural-gas methane emissions were strongly correlated with consumption, meaning the more gas New Yorkers burned to stay warm or cool, the more methane slipped into the air alongside it.
That pattern matters because New York City draws more than 90% of its electricity from natural gas, per Gothamist's reporting on the study, and the fuel is mostly composed of methane, a gas more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide for warming the planet, though it breaks down in the atmosphere within roughly a decade. Study co-author Roisin Commane, a Columbia professor, said natural gas needs to be burned properly and fully to limit its climate impact, according to Gothamist. Commane also noted that because methane has such a short atmospheric lifetime, cutting emissions now could affect the pace of warming within about a decade, the outlet reported.
NYC's Outsized Role in Northeast Methane Pollution
The study describes the New York City metropolitan area as the largest area source of methane in the northeastern United States, a status that lines up with earlier aircraft-based research. A separate Columbia-linked paper covering 2019 through 2024 found that even a high-resolution regional methane inventory still underestimated emissions from the metro area, especially in winter, while earlier aircraft observations found the region emitted three to five times more methane than the federal government's national gridded inventory estimated for 2012.
New York is not alone in this gap between official inventories and what instruments actually detect in the air. A study of Boston found that city lost about 2.5% of the gas entering its urban region, with natural-gas emissions running roughly three times larger than usage-based inventory estimates suggested, according to PNAS. Across six U.S. cities examined in that research, total natural-gas supply-chain losses ran between 3.3% and 4.7%, well above the Environmental Protection Agency's estimate of 1.4%. Separate measurements cited by Earth.com put Boston's loss rate at 2.5% to 2.7%, Los Angeles at 1.3% to 2.3%, and the Baltimore-Washington area at 1.3%, underscoring that New York's 1.7% figure fits within a broader national pattern of underreported urban gas losses.
Pipelines, Policy and What Comes Next
New York City's own gas-leak record has drawn scrutiny before: the city logged 22,090 gas leak incidents in 2018, the most of any U.S. city in a comparison cited by Inside Climate News. Meanwhile, the Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline remains poised for construction in the region even as litigation stalls its New Jersey segment, Gothamist reports, and the federal government is separately trying to clear the way for the Constitution Pipeline over the objections of state environmental regulators.
Researchers describe cutting methane emissions from natural-gas use as low-hanging fruit for near-term greenhouse gas reductions, since buildings account for roughly two-thirds of New York City's greenhouse gas emissions through cooking and heating. The study warns that without a shift to cleaner energy, rising heating and cooling demand could push urban methane emissions even higher. City- and state-level legislation is already set to require buildings to phase out fossil fuel use, a shift that would address the very appliances this research flags as the driving force behind New York's $300 million methane problem. The study was supported by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.
