Renewable Monday: America's Biggest Methane Plume

You might think that profit-driven oil and gas drillers would want to capture all of the methane they produce, either to sell immediately or to pump back down into oil wells to increase production. You would think wrong. You might think that they would build enough pipeline capacity to transport all of that methane. You would think wrong again, even though they continue to rave on about Clean Coal and pipelines for transporting CO₂ to pump down oil wells. No as you can see, they burn a lot of it, and as satellite imagery has revealed, they just leak it, and to Hell with you and the World Entire.

Using new satellite observations and atmospheric inverse modeling, we report methane emissions from the Permian Basin, which is among the world’s most prolific oil-producing regions and accounts for >30% of total U.S. oil production. Based on satellite measurements from May 2018 to March 2019, Permian methane emissions from oil and natural gas production are estimated to be 2.7 ± 0.5 Tg a⁻¹, representing the largest methane flux ever reported from a U.S. oil/gas-producing region and are more than two times higher than bottom-up inventory-based estimates. This magnitude of emissions is 3.7% of the gross gas extracted in the Permian, i.e., ~60% higher than the national average leakage rate. The high methane leakage rate is likely contributed by extensive venting and flaring, resulting from insufficient infrastructure to process and transport natural gas. This work demonstrates a high-resolution satellite data–based atmospheric inversion framework, providing a robust top-down analytical tool for quantifying and evaluating subregional methane emissions.