Harmful gas billowing from Texas and New Mexico comes mostly from smaller leaks, researchers say

The spot on the satellite image is a rainbow of colors. An analyst sharpens it digitally and there, highlighted in red, is the source: a concrete oil field spewing methane.

In the 194-square-mile Permian Basin that straddles Texas and New Mexico, the world’s most productive oil and gas region, vast amounts of the potent greenhouse gas are escaping from wells, compressor stations and other equipment.

Most efforts to reduce emissions have focused on so-called “super emitters,” such as those in the satellite image, which are relatively easy to find with improved satellite imagery and other techniques. aerial observation.

Now researchers say that many smaller sources are collectively responsible for about 72% of methane emissions from oil and gas fields in the contiguous US. These have often gone unnoticed.

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

Tackling methane is important because it is responsible for about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

Tackling methane emissions in the Permian is especially challenging because there are more than 130,000 active well sites owned by everyone from family operators to international conglomerates, experts say. Each location can have multiple oil wells.

“The Permian is in many ways the most complicated basin in the world; it’s incredibly dense there… with big, small and everything in between,” said Steve Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Furthermore, pipelines, processing and other operations are often owned by different companies – with tens of thousands of points where methane can escape, either through leaks or intentional venting.

An Israeli company that used satellite data and artificial intelligence to search for leaks in Midland County, Texas, the heart of the Permian Basin, discovered 50 separate plumes coming from 16 of the 30 sites it monitored. Most released more than 10,000 pounds of noxious gas per hour and five exceeded 10,000, well above the Environmental Protection Agency’s superemitter threshold of 200 pounds per hour.

But the biggest surprise “was seeing a lot of small emissions in this very busy place … so close together, so close to an area where people actually live,” said Omer Shenhar, vice president of product at Momentick, which offers satellite-based monitoring to oil and gas companies.

Methane traps more than 80 times more heat close to Earth than carbon dioxide, ton for ton. Moreover, concentrations have almost tripled since pre-industrial times.

A powerful new satellite called MethaneSAT, launched this year, will be able to detect small emissions over large areas that other satellites cannot detect. Researchers will also be able to track methane over time in all the world’s major oil-producing basins.

“We’ve never had that before,” says Hamburg of the EDF, who is leading the project.

Although the satellite can’t locate these smaller sources, “it’s not necessary” because operators on the ground can find the sources, Hamburg said.

In the US, oil and gas companies will have to routinely search for leaks at new and existing sites, including wells, production facilities and compressor stations under a new policy. EPA rule.

The rule also ends the practice of routinely burning excess methane, known as flaring, and requires upgrading devices that leak methane.

States have until 2026 to develop a plan to implement that rule for existing sources.

Oil and natural gas companies should do the same pay a federal fee per ton of methane leaked above a certain level under a final rule announced by the Biden administration last month, although the new Trump administration could eliminate that.

Methane — the main component of natural gas — is commercially valuable, yet many operators in the Permian consider it a nuisance byproduct of oil production and flare it because they haven’t built pipelines to get it to market, Duren and Hamburg said .

Neither the Permian Basin Petroleum Association nor US Oil & Gas Association responded to requests for comment.

Riley Duren, CEO of the nonprofit Carbon Mapperwho was not involved in the research, said it is always important to address super emitters because they have such an outsized impact. They are often fleeting, but not always. Some go on for weeks, months or years.

Everything is correct.

“I think … what percentage of the total comes from a large number of small sources versus superemitters is less important than what you do with the information,” Duren said. There are “literally thousands and thousands of devices and they can cause a leak at any time.”

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