It’s been nearly a month since Robert Howarth’s paper claiming that shale gas was worse for climate change than coal made its big splash in the New York Times. I expressed quite a bit of skepticism at the time – and readers of this blog proceeded to dissect the paper in the comments. Now, the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) has applied ISO standard methodology, and a substantial understanding of industry operations, to do the calculation itself (PDF of a presentation last week at Cornell). Its conclusion? Used to generate electricity, natural gas – conventional or not – results in far less emissions than coal.