A tiny oil and gas facility in Texas spewed methane into the atmosphere with the same earth-warming power as burning seven tanker trucks of gasoline every day. It was one of 533 so-called “super emitters” found in the biggest U.S. oil field.
“We see the same sites active from year to year. It’s not just month to month or season to season,” said Riley Duren, a research scientist at the University of Arizona who leads Carbon Mapper.
“Methane is a super pollutant,” said Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. “If carbon dioxide is the fossil-fuel broiler of our heating planet, methane is a blowtorch.”Methane emissions are notoriously hard to track because they are intermittent. An old well may be wafting methane one day, but not the next.
But fracking has unlocked such massive amounts of natural gas from the Permian’s shale deposits that the basin’s ever-expanding web of pipelines don’t have enough capacity to gather and transport it all. As a result, natural gas is still routinely burned off even as billions have been invested into new terminals along the Gulf Coast to ship the glut of American gas to overseas markets.Houston-based Enterprise Products, which owns the former Navitas assets, said it was cracking down.
Trump’s climate denial and die-hard support for fossil fuels attracted campaign contributions from the industry. It also won him widespread support in the Permian’s Republican-dominated cities and towns, where pumping oil and gas is considered both lifeblood and birthright. Tomás Carbonell, EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for stationary sources, told AP that reducing methane emissions is urgent.
For example, Carbon Mapper estimated that Mako emitted an average 870 kilos of methane per hour over each of the four times it was measured. Over the course of a year, that would be 7.6 times the federal reporting threshold.
A spokesperson for Devon said the company is committed to reducing its methane emissions and being transparent about its progress. The company has joined a U.N. partnership for oil and gas companies to report methane. Flares burns off methane and other hydrocarbons as oil pumpjacks operate in the Permian Basin in Midland, Texas, Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021. If the federal government is behind the curve on how much methane emissions have escalated with the fracking boom, Texas is even more hands off.
A champion of the fossil fuels industry, Perry served a record three terms as Texas governor before becoming President Donald Trump’s energy secretary. He is now a partner and board member at Energy Transfer, one of the nation’s largest oil and gas pipeline companies. Enterprise Products, which acquired the Navitas pipelines underlying more than a dozen methane plumes in AP’s analysis, was fined $46,000 last year for flares and valve malfunctions at its Texas facilities. The company is valued at more than $50 billion. Targa faced state fines of $100,000 for carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide emissions. Neither company was cited for emitting methane.
Each new well, which takes about two weeks to drill, represents millions in capital investment — corporate bets that demand for oil and gas will continue for decades to come.
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