The U.S. is emitting more methane from oil and gas production than previously thought – and it’s causing billions of dollars in environmental damage per year, according researchers.
The majority of methane emissions around the world originate from landfills, agriculture and farming, and from coal mining, but new research is showing that scientists and the federal government have severely underestimated how much of the powerful greenhouse gas is being emitted through the processing of fossil fuels in the U.S., according to a study published Wednesday in Nature.
Oil and gas production in six regions of the U.S. – including the Permian Basin spanning parts of Texas and New Mexico; the San Joaquin Valley in Central California; the Denver-Julesburg Basin in eastern Colorado; the Uinta basin in Utah; the Fort Worth Basin in Texas; and the Appalachian region in Pennsylvania — may be emitting an average of 2.95% of its own fossil fuel production into the atmosphere as methane. That’s three times the estimate previously made by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The regions observed may have contributed an estimated 6.2 million tons per year of methane emissions, causing about $9.3 billion a year in environmental damage, according to the study.
The rates of emission vary widely by sample area, with methane emissions ranging from 0.75% in a high-productivity area of Pennsylvania in 2021, to 9.63% in a high-productivity area in New Mexico between 2018 and 2020, the researchers found.
The survey areas only account for 52% of U.S. onshore oil production and 29% of U.S. gas production, meaning the amount of methane emitted from U.S. oil and gas production is much higher than what was observed for the study, Evan Sherwin, an energy policy analyst who conducted the research with Stanford University, told ABC News.
A wide array of technologies exist today that allow scientists to detect methane emissions more accurately.
The study’s researchers gathered data by combining aerial infrared spectroscopy from the six regions – taken by flying planes over huge areas and reflecting sunlight to rapidly detect the largest emissions – with simulated field measurements from potential sources of methane emissions. Limitations in technology previously prevented an accurate assessment of these emissions, the authors said.
“Once we started to get data from both of these systems, we started seeing emissions much larger than we had really ever seen in the past,” Sherwin said, adding that this is the largest study of the sort to ever be conducted, incorporating more than one million measurements at oil and natural gas production sites.
Companies and governments are also using specialized satellites and ground-based systems drones – technologies that did not exist 10 years ago – to understand how much methane is being emitted, and to pinpoint those emissions and fix them.
Most of the methane emissions are coming from a select few sites, Sherwin said. The study found that about one-tenth of one percent of the 1,000 surveyed sites were responsible for more than half of the total recorded methane emissions.
“You can actually see hotspots over parts of the Dakotas and West Texas, and it’s a very considerable amount,” Frank Mitloehner, an air quality specialist at the University of California, Davis, told ABC News.
The most common source of the methane leaks were unlit flares, Sherwin said. Flaring is the process of burning natural gas that escapes from oil and gas wells, with the intent of combusting methane to minimize emissions.
In areas focused on producing oil, oftentimes the methane gas will leak out of the ground, Sherwin said. It also can get mixed in with the oil as it is siphoned out of the liquid storage tanks, he said.
In some cases, the methane gas can be sold, but it’s difficult to do if there is not an existing pipeline to accommodate it, Sherwin said.
The new study sheds light on the amount of waste of a non-renewable natural resource, Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told ABC News.
“If you vent or flare it into the atmosphere, you are losing the economic value,” he said. “…If you capture that gas, you can actually use it and sell it as energy rather than just simply waste it.”
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