It would have been really nice had they bothered to include a summary article on their page instead of expecting everyone to sit through the videos.
Anyways, this isn't a new concern by any means. It's been under discussion for years, and part of general atmospheric studies (research not related to climate change) for quite a few decades. We know how atmospheric methane levels have changed in the industrial era, we know the production levels of fossil fuels that contribute to atmospheric methane (not just from natural gas production), and there's even been extensive study of how much of it is likely due to fossil fuels versus other sources like agriculture and landfills, which can in part be studied because fossil sources have no carbon-14 while non-fossil sources do. This is what the IPCC refers to as a top-down estimate.
There also have been bottom-up estimates based on attempting to determine what each category of human activity produces (like well leakage) on average, and multiplying those rates by how much of that activity we do.
The IPCC climate change assessments factor both of those analysis types into their work, and although the numbers have a fair amount of uncertainty, they do provide a good sense of the relative magnitudes. There's seems to be a fair amount of consistency in the estimates that fossil fuels account for about 1/3 of human-caused methane emissions (
IPCC 5th Assessment Physical Sciences Report, Page 507)
And methane as a whole accounts for about 16% of the estimated human-caused global warming potential, while CO2 from fossil fuel use is about 65%. I don't have time right now to drill further down to try to split out the more complete natural gas versus coal warming potentials including both CO2 and methane, but it looks to me very much like natural gas does have a real potential as a transitional fossil source with lower warming potential than coal.
Which is basically what most others seem to be concluding, despite the noise from the media trying to cloud the public understanding of the issue:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014...climate-trade-despite-leaks-researchers-argue
Also, it doesn't get discussed nearly as much, but the industry is interested in reducing gas leakage, because it's basically lost money. Unfortunately, during boom periods, the pressure to increase production is greater than the pressure to improve production efficiency. A slow and steady transition is better than one filled with boom and bust cycles.
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