American oil and gas wells, pipelines and compressors are spewing three times as much gas as the powerful heat-trapping gas methane the government thinks is causing $9.3 billion in climate damage annually, according to a comprehensive new study.
But since more than half of those methane emissions come from a very small number of oil and gas fields (1 percent or less), that means the problem is both worse than the government thinks and quite fixable, says one study’s lead author. Wednesday’s journal Nature.
The same problem is experienced globally. Major methane emissions events detected by satellites around the world increased by 50% in 2023 compared to 2022, with more than 5 million metric tons detected in major fossil fuel spills, the International Energy Agency reported Wednesday in its Global Methane Tracker 2024. was done. World methane emissions have increased slightly. The report stated that they will reach 120 million metric tons in 2023.
“This is really an opportunity to reduce emissions pretty quickly with targeted efforts where emissions are highest,” said lead author Evan Sherwin, an energy and policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who wrote the study at Stanford University. . . “If we can get roughly 1% of the sites under control, then we’re halfway there because that’s about half the emissions in most cases.”
Fugitive emissions start with the combustion of gas and spread throughout the oil and gas production and distribution system, Sherwin said. That’s when companies release natural gas into the air or burn it instead of capturing the gas from energy extraction. He said there were also significant leaks in the rest of the system, including tanks, compressors and pipelines.
“This is actually very easy to fix,” Sherwin said.
The study found that overall, about 3% of U.S. gas is wasted into the air, compared to the Environmental Protection Agency’s figures of 1%. Sherwin said this is a significant amount, about 6.2 million tons per hour in leaks measured during daylight hours. It may be lower at night, but they don’t have those measurements.
The study derives this figure using one million anonymous measurements taken over a decade from aircraft flying over 52% of American oil wells and 29% of gas production and distribution system fields. Sherwin said the 3 percent leakage figure was an average of the six counties they looked at and they did not calculate a national average.
Methane traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over the course of two decades, according to the EPA, but it only stays in the atmosphere for about a decade rather than hundreds of years like carbon dioxide.
Christophe McGlade, head of the IEA’s energy supply unit, said about 30% of the world’s warming since pre-industrial times was due to methane emissions. He said the United States is the No. 1 emitter of methane in oil and gas production and China pollutes more methane than coal.
Last December, the Biden administration issued a new rule forcing the US oil and gas industry to reduce methane emissions. At the same time, at the United Nations climate talks in Dubai, 50 oil companies around the world pledged to reach near-zero methane emissions by 2030 and end routine flaring in their operations. This Dubai deal will deliver a reduction of almost one-tenth of a degree Celsius. Future warming is two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit, a leading climate scientist told The Associated Press.
Monitoring methane from above rather than relying on field or company forecasts is a growing trend. Earlier this month, the market-based Environmental Defense Fund and others launched MethaneSAT into orbit. For energy companies, lost methane is valuable, according to Sherwin’s research, and it’s estimated to be worth about $1 billion a year.
The IEA’s McGlade said around 40% of global methane emissions from oil, gas and coal could be avoided at no extra cost, which was a “huge missed opportunity”. The IEA report said countries could cut half global methane pollution by 2030 if they did what they promised in Dubai, but measures put in place so far would only cut 20% instead, meaning “a very large gap between emissions and actions”. aforementioned.
“Reducing methane emissions is critical if the world is to meet climate goals,” said Cornell University methane researcher Robert Horwath, who was not involved in Sherwin’s study.
“Their analysis makes sense and is the most comprehensive study on the subject yet,” said Howarth, who is updating the figures in a future study to include the new data.
Flight data shows the largest spills are in the Permian basin in Texas and New Mexico.
“This is a region of rapid growth driven primarily by oil production,” Sherwin said. “So when drilling occurs, both oil and gas come out, but in many cases the main thing the companies wanted to sell was the oil. And there wasn’t enough pipeline capacity to take the gas,” and instead the gas gushes into the air.
Compare this to the small leak rates found in drilling in the Denver area and the Pennsylvania area. Sherwin said leaks in Denver are very low due to strict local regulations, and Pennsylvania is more gas-focused.
This illustrates a real problem with what Gabrielle Petron, a methane monitoring scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, calls “superemitters.”
“Reliably detecting and fixing superemitters is an easy outcome for reducing real-life greenhouse gas emissions,” said Petron, who was not involved in Sherwin’s study. “This is very important because these super-emitter emissions are ignored by most ‘official’ accounting.”
“A few plants are poisoning the air for everyone,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist who was not part of the study himself.
“We have been showing for over a decade that the industry has been emitting far more methane than they or government agencies have acknowledged,” Jackson said. “This study is extremely important evidence. And yet nothing changes.”
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