Oil and gas producers in major oil fields across the United States may be emitting three times as much methane as official estimates, according to research published March 13 in the journal, Nature. It was the latest study to suggest that emissions from the fossil fuel sector may be grossly undercounted.
Methane, a colorless and odorless gas, is the main ingredient in natural gas, which is burned in power plants and factories around the world, as well as in homes. ‘It’s notoriously leaky,’ Hiroko Tabuchi reported in The New York Times. “It seeps from oil and gas drill sites. It escapes from pipelines that carry the gas where it needs to go. And some operators simply release it into the air instead of investing in the infrastructure to capture all of it.”
Methane can warm the planet more than 80 times as much as the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, and scientists estimate that human-caused methane emissions are responsible for up to 30 percent of the global warming being experienced today.
In a separate analysis released the same day, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that methane emissions from the energy sector remained near record highs in 2023. But it also struck a hopeful tone, saying new steps announced in recent months could soon put those emissions in decline. For now, global methane emissions remain “far too high” to meet international climate targets, the IEA said.
The study published in Nature found that methane emission rates varied widely across regions, from 0.75 percent in Pennsylvania to more than 9 percent in parts of New Mexico.
One takeaway from this and previous studies was “just how concentrated emissions are in a very small fraction of sites,” said Evan D. Sherwin, who led the research at Stanford and now works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “That’s the silver lining,” he told The Times. “If we can figure out what’s happening at these small fraction of sites, we’re halfway toward solving the methane problem in oil and gas,” he said. Axios noted that only 0.05 to 1.66% of well sites contribute the majority of well site emissions.
Nearly 200 governments agreed at last year’s global climate talks in Dubai to “substantially” reduce methane emissions by 2030. Major oil and gas companies have also signed onto the Global Methane Pledge to rein in their emissions. Meantime, the Biden administration is moving ahead with rules that require oil and gas producers to detect and fix leaks of methane.
All of the pledges made by countries and companies, implemented in full and on time, would cut methane emissions from fossil fuels by 50 percent by 2030, the IEA’s new analysis found. However, the agency pointed out that most pledges were not yet backed by concrete plans.
Moreover, it’s been hard to track companies’ progress. As Nicolas Rivero wrote in The Washington Post, there are thousands of oil and gas facilities around the world with countless pieces of equipment that can leak or malfunction and release methane. Companies and regulators can measure some emissions by installing methane detectors or using planes or drones to fly sensors over a facility, but the data is incomplete and hard to compare between companies.
Now, a new generation of satellites, led by MethaneSAT, produced by researchers at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Harvard University, promises to give a more complete picture of the oil and gas industry’s global methane emissions. The satellite launched March 4 on a SpaceX rocket and will begin transmitting data later this year.
MethaneSAT aims to “see” about 80 to 90 percent of global oil and gas production as it does its daily 15 rotations around the Earth. That should cover a significant chunk of human-caused methane emissions. (Other big sources of methane release are landfills and cow burps.)
Another satellite, designed by NASA, a satellite maker called Planet and a greenhouse gas tracking nonprofit called Carbon Mapper, is set to launch this year. Japan will send another emissions-tracking satellite into space this year, and the European Space Agency plans to launch two more in 2026.
“Soon, there will be no place to hide,” Ben Cahill, a climate expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Rivero. “There’s going to be a lot of public data on methane emissions, so companies will have very strong incentives to figure out the problem and fix it.”