TX Oil Industry Doing Great Job Controlling Methane Leaks, Says TX Oil Industry, Citing TX Oil Industry-Funded Study

[hatrack]

ODESSA — Less methane escaped into the atmosphere from certain oil and gas equipment and oil wells in 2023, according to a report released earlier this month by an energy analytics firm that industry leaders promoted. Environmental experts said more information was needed.

Equipment used to find and produce crude oil, including those that control the pressure and flow of natural gas, pumps and pipes, leaked 25% less methane than in 2022. The report's findings, published by S&P Global, a New York-based company, also included information on the methane leaking from the 162,000 oil wells, from which emissions also decreased. The report focused only on the stage of oil production where companies search, drill and draw crude oil, known as upstream.

EDIT

The report sheds light on the industry's efforts to pollute the air less. Still, it's far from a full understanding of how much methane escapes oil field operations, said Jon Goldstein, vice president of energy transition at the Environmental Defense Fund. Goldstein said emissions under 10 kilograms, which the sensors could not detect, also account for a significant portion of air pollution, even if it is harder to track. He said that, as a result, the conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt. For equipment releasing less than 10 kilograms of methane an hour, researchers used wind gauges detecting plumes of methane in the wind. This method provided an estimate of how much methane certain equipment released.

EDIT

Goldstein said that oil and gas operators could be working to comply with methane reduction regulations set by the federal government in 2024, which the industry supported and contributed. Oil and gas companies can be fined if they breach the amount of methane they are allowed to leak. Texas does not require operators to capture methane emissions in their field operations. “There's no consistency. We're talking about an industry that's incredibly diverse, hundreds and hundreds of companies in the U.S. alone that are engaged in oil and gas development,” Goldstein said. “Each one may have a different voluntary program (to reduce methane emissions) that they're implementing with different technologies, and so it's really hard to have an apples-to-apples comparison.” Virginia Palacios, executive director of Commission Shift, an oil and gas watchdog group in Texas, said regulatory agencies should be more active in emission reductions. She said that putting rules that push for monitoring, like satellite and aerial technology, could reduce waste.

EDIT

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/21/west-texas-oil-gas-methane-reduction-report/

[surfered]

1. Nothing to see here...

[Think. Again.]

2. And then there's this...

-snip-
"In the 75,000-square-mile (194-square-kilometer) Permian Basin straddling Texas and New Mexico, the most productive oil and gas region in the world, huge amounts of the powerful greenhouse gas escape from wells, compressor stations and other equipment.

Most efforts to reduce emissions have focused on so-called “super emitters” like the one in the satellite image, which are relatively easy to find with improving satellite imaging and other aerial sensing.

Now researchers say much smaller sources are collectively responsible for about 72% of methane emissions from oil and gas fields throughout the contiguous U.S. These have often gone undetected.

“It’s really (important to) approach the problem from both ends because the high-emitting super emitters are important, but so are the smaller ones,” said James Williams, a post-doctoral science fellow at the Environmental Defense Fund and lead author on a new study that took a comprehensive look at emissions within the nation’s oil and gas basins. "
-snip-

Source: https://apnews.com/article/methane-gas-texas-permian-basin-satellite-climate-81b9cfea311275806c6fbf8621f821c2

[hatrack]

3. Precisely. The oil companies will never do the kind of intensive survey accuracy demands

Because that would cost money, and that would be baaaaaaaaad.