U.S. oil and natural gas wells, pipelines and compressors spew out three times as much of the powerful heat-trapping gas methane as the government thinks, causing $9.3 billion in climate damage annually, a new comprehensive study calculates.
But because more than half of these methane emissions come from a small number of oil and gas sites, 1% or less, it means the problem is both worse than the government thought but also quite solvable, said the lead author of a study in Wednesday magazine Nature.
The same problem exists worldwide. Major methane emission events around the world detected by satellites increased by 50% in 2023 compared to 2022, with more than 5 million tonnes discovered in major fossil fuel leaks, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday in its Global Methane Tracker 2024 World methane emissions are expected to rise slightly in 2023 to 120 million tonnes, the report said.
“This is really an opportunity to reduce emissions quite quickly with targeted efforts in these highest-emitting locations,” said lead author Evan Sherwin, an energy and policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who wrote the study while he was at Stanford University. . “If we can get this approximately 1% of locations under control, then we are already halfway there, because in most cases that is about half of the emissions.”
Sherwin said the fugitive emissions occur throughout the oil and gas production and delivery system, starting with gas flaring. That’s when companies release natural gas into the air or burn it instead of capturing the gas released from energy extraction. There are also significant leaks in the rest of the system, including tanks, compressors and pipelines, he said.
“It’s actually easy to fix,” Sherwin said.
Overall, about 3% of U.S. gas produced is lost to the air, compared with the Environmental Protection Agency’s figure of 1%, the study found. Sherwin said this is a significant amount, about 6.2 million tons per hour of spills measured during the day. It may be lower at night, but they don’t have those measurements.
The study bases this figure on one million anonymized measurements from aircraft that have flown over 52% of U.S. oil wells and 29% of gas production and delivery systems over a decade. Sherwin said the 3% leak rate is the average for the six regions they looked at and that they did not calculate a national average.
Methane traps about 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, but only lingers in the atmosphere for about a decade instead of hundreds of years like carbon dioxide, according to the EPA.
About 30% of the world’s warming since pre-industrial times is due to methane emissions, says Christophe McGlade, head of the IEA’s energy supply unit. The United States is the largest emitter of methane in oil and gas production, while China pollutes even more methane from coal, he said.
Last December, the Biden administration issued a new rule that forced the U.S. oil and natural gas industry to reduce its methane emissions. At the same time, 50 oil companies around the world pledged at the United Nations climate negotiations in Dubai to reach near-zero methane emissions by 2030 and end routine flaring in their operations. That deal in Dubai would reduce temperatures by about a tenth of a degree Celsius. two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit, of future warming, a prominent climate scientist told The Associated Press.
Monitoring methane from above, rather than at sites or relying on company estimates, is a growing trend. Earlier this month, the market-based Environmental Defense Fund and others launched MethaneSAT into orbit. For energy companies, the lost methane is valuable; by Sherwin’s estimate, it is worth about $1 billion a year.
About 40% of global methane emissions from oil, gas and coal could have been avoided at no additional cost, which is “a huge missed opportunity,” said the IEA’s McGlade. The IEA report says that if countries do what they pledged in Dubai they could cut half of global methane pollution by 2030, but that actions taken so far would instead only reduce 20%, “a very big gap between emissions and actions,” McGlade said.
“Reducing methane emissions is critical if the world is to meet climate goals,” said Robert Horwath, a methane researcher at Cornell University who was not part of Sherwin’s research.
“Their analysis makes sense and is by far the most comprehensive study on this topic,” says Howarth, who will update the figures in an upcoming study to include the new data.
Flight data shows the largest spills are in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico.
“It’s a region of rapid growth, driven primarily by oil production,” Sherwin said. “So when drilling happens, both oil and gas are released, but the main thing that the companies want to sell in most cases is the oil. And there wasn’t enough pipeline capacity to carry the gas away,” so it spewed into the air.
Compare that to the small leak rates found in drilling in the Denver area and Pennsylvania. Denver’s leaks are so low because of strictly enforced local regulations and Pennsylvania is more gas-oriented, Sherwin said.
This shows a real problem with what Gabrielle Petron, a methane monitoring scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, calls “super emitters.”
“Reliably detecting and fixing super emitters is a low-hanging fruit for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in practice,” says Petron, who was not part of Sherwin’s research. “This is very important because these super-emitter emissions are ignored by most ‘official’ accounting.”
Climate scientist Rob Jackson of Stanford University, who was also not part of the study, said, “A few facilities are poisoning the air for everyone.”
“For more than a decade, we have shown that the industry is emitting far more methane than they or government agencies admit,” Jackson said. “This study is the final piece of evidence. And yet nothing changes.”
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