Yes, A Voluntary, Poorly Benchmarked And Riggable Carbon Market For Plugging Abandoned Oil Wells Will Turn The Tide!!
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As for calculating the amount of methane pollution avoided when a leaky well is plugged, each standard setter has a different approach. This leads to different assessments of the number of credits that can be issued for a particular project. A key difference lies in each setter’s assessment of methane’s potential to heat the planet. Once it’s in the atmosphere, methane degrades into less potent greenhouse gases in about a decade. That means that its warming power, compared to that of carbon dioxide, is highly dependent on the timescale one chooses: Methane’s warming potential is about 80 times greater than carbon dioxide’s over a 20-year timeframe, but roughly 27 times greater over a 100-year timeframe. In calculating methane’s potential to warm the planet, BCarbon uses a 20-year timeframe while the Registry and CarbonPath use a 100-year timeframe. Because it’s using a shorter time horizon, BCarbon issues more credits.
The standard setters also use different time horizons to estimate the period over which methane emissions are avoided as a result of a well plugging. CarbonPath assumes that by plugging a well, the developer helped protect the planet from up to 50 years of methane emissions. The other two standard setters use a period of 20 years. Brad Handler, a researcher and program director of the Energy Finance Lab at the Colorado School of Mines, suggested that the methodologies might come closer together as more data is gathered. “I can’t sit here and tell you that one is wrong,” he said. “As buyers get more educated about all of it, the methodology may be refined.”
In the meantime, it’s entirely possible that developers are overestimating the planetary benefits of plugging wells — and in turn helping corporations overstate their progress on their climate goals. Peltz, the Environmental Defense Fund attorney, said there was little reasoning behind assuming that emissions were avoided over 50 years rather than 20 years. “I’m hard-pressed to see a basis other than generating more credits for the same activity,” he said.
Concerns about overcrediting are already circulating about at least one project. Last year, a company called Rebellion Energy Solutions plugged six orphaned wells in Oklahoma and estimated that the wells leaked between 2.7 and 285 kilograms of methane per hour. Based on two measurements taken 30 days apart, Rebellion calculated an average methane leak rate of 68 kilograms per hour. Those numbers are orders of magnitude higher than the values measured by researchers. Most studies have found that unplugged orphan wells emit 10 to 30 grams of methane per hour. One study in Colorado estimated an average leak rate of 586 grams per hour and identified one instance of a super-emitting well releasing 76 kilograms per hour.
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https://grist.org/solutions/voluntary-carbon-market-orphan-oil-wells/