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Production and consumption of natural gas is increasing nationwide, but as the stuff increasingly displaces coal as a fuel supply, some scientists are worried that the amount of natural gas that leaks out of delivery infrastructures outweighs the environmental advantages it has over dirtier resources. And, in recent tests of D.C.’s natural gas delivery system, a group of researchers found thousands of methane leaks lurking beneath D.C.’s streets.

The Washington Post reports that during a research trip in January, a team from Duke University measured the amount of methane seeping out of the city’s thousands of miles of gas piping:

Bob Ackley spent January driving the city for 10 to 12 hours a day, usually with a researcher riding alongside. Ackley, who runs a methane-detection company, is part of a six-person group financed by Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment that has collected data on thousands of methane leaks under Washington’s roads.

On a recent trip through the city, Ackley took the wheel while Duke professor Robert Jackson tracked real-time methane concentrations that an instrument stashed in the car’s trunk fed into a computer. Periodically the readings would spike to unsafe levels, with as much as 32 percent methane escaping from a single manhole.

Methane, the key ingredient of natural gas, traps far more heat in the Earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Ackley’s team studied gas leaks in Boston last year, and found 3,356 in that city’s infrastructure. And the situation in D.C., a similarly sized city, could be even more severe. “It looks like it has both more leaks and bigger leaks than Boston,” Jackson told the Post.

The D.C. Public Service Commission is open to a rate increase to pay for upgrading the aging network of cast-iron pipes, but with a 12,800-mile distribution system, the head of Washington Gas tells the Post “it is not realistic to ever state that there are no leaks in our gas pipe system.”