Methane climate crisis requires more than satellites to stop emissions

New satellites alone won’t be enough to stop the methane climate crisis

By Justin Mikulka and Sharon Wilson

In March, a SpaceX rocket was launched MethaneSat, a joint initiative of the United States and New Zealand, which joined a satellite network already detects methane emissions from oil and gas production on Earth. The new satellite orbits the Earth 15 times a daydetecting discharges of the greenhouse gas from drilling sites and pipelines around the world.

But on the ground in the Texas oil fields, we’re seeing that the promise of this technology won’t match the rapid reductions in methane emissions needed to slow climate change.

America is the world’s leading country in the use of natural gas, burning nearly twice more a lot Russia is the second largest user. Natural gas is composed of 85-90% methane, which is mainly produced by Hydraulic fracking cracking deep underground shale rocks to release gas. The success of hydraulic fracturing has made the United States the world leader in export of liquefied natural gas (LNG)But this has a downside: in addition to releasing carbon dioxide when it burns, methane itself is much more polluting. more powerful greenhouse gas as it produces 80 times greater global warming impact of carbon dioxide (although over a much shorter atmospheric lifetime). This explains why methane contributed at least 30 percent of total global warming since the industrial revolution began. The American oil and gas industry is the upper transmitter methane, which makes it a major contributor to this global Methane emergency.

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In response, the United States implemented this year new federal regulation Methane emissions from oil and gas are designed to reduce. Unfortunately, the promises offered by these new regulations and by satellites like MethaneSat are unlikely to lead to these reductions and will instead delay the start of the fossil fuel phaseout, the only real way to limit methane emissions.

Current tools available to track major sources of methane emissions from oil and gas production already indicate that the Permian oil region of Texas and New Mexico, 86,000 square miles stretching from Big Spring, Texas, to Carlsbad, New Mexico, is a leading source methane emissions. We spent years tracking emissions on the ground Methane emissions are now being produced using optical gas imaging cameras. We know that even the great advances in the ability to track and identify emission sources have not ended the industry practice of releasing methane into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, strong economic incentives are prolonging this process.

When I visited the Permian in mid-March, near Midland, Texas, natural gas prices there were negative, meaning oil and gas producers must pay to have their gas taken away instead of sold, due to a fundamental supply-demand problem. Since Permian oil wells also produceincreasing amounts of gas, There’s more gas being produced there than there are customers willing to buy it. In the Permian this year, we’ve seen several major emission events Methane emissions from oil and gas production facilities had a negative economic value at the time. It was cheaper for companies to vent it than to sell it. This means that we are all paying the price for their pollution.

This is a serious and potentially fatal gap in efforts to reduce and stop methane emissions and flaring in the Permian. According to the report, up to 40% of methane emissions could be captured if the industry invested in new equipment. International Energy Agency and other groups. The IEA also estimated that for global industry, the money from selling this captured methane would fund infrastructure investments. Except that, given the gas prices constantly low In the Permian, this incentive does not exist in Texas and New Mexico.

Since the oil industry is driven by profit and has no financial incentive to capture methane, such a solution is unlikely. This has been confirmed by a study July 2023 study in the newspaper Atmospheric chemistry and physics, which used satellite observations of methane emissions and concluded that periods of rapid emissions growth correlated with “sharp drops” in local natural gas prices.

In theory, regulation should curb this behavior, but history shows that enforcing regulations against the powerful oil and gas industry rarely succeeds. In 2021, New Mexico passed a methane regulation banning the routine flaring and venting of natural gas, a measure that should theoretically have eliminated most methane emissions. an analysis by Capital and Main showed that in the years following the implementation of the regulation, methane emissions increased significantly.

Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency and the New Mexico Department of Environment published the results of a joint inspection of 124 oil and gas facilities in New Mexico and found violations at 60 percent of the sites, including those owned by Exxon subsidiary XTO and oil giant Chevron.

“The results of our federal and state oil and gas investigations are alarming, with a compliance rate of only 40 percent,” New Mexico Department of Environment Cabinet Secretary James Kenney said in a statement. “With the effects of climate change ravaging our state and air quality deteriorating, we have no choice but to increase penalties against polluters until we see a commitment to change behavior.”

The oil and gas industry has proven that it will continue to act as if nothing is wrong with methane emissions, continuing to pollute in exchange for greater profits. The public only now has access to satellite data on methane emissions, but the oil and gas industry has had this information from private companies for years. Instead of using this information to work with the government to stop pollution, the industry is simply using it to deal with pollution. support legal proceedings challenge the new regulations.

You don’t need a satellite to see the problem. In our many visits to the Permian this year, we’ve seen that what we’ve seen is worse than business as usual. We fear that current plans and policies to address this problem are doomed to failure, which is unacceptable for the global climate. The facts are clear: the only viable path to solving the methane emissions problem is strong, bold government action to rapidly develop clean energy resources while phasing out oil and gas production.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily those of American scientist.