By MICHAEL BIESECKER and HELEN WIFERING
July 28, 2022 GMT
https://apnews.com/article/science-texas-trending-news-climate-and-environment-0eb6880f7c4532a845155a3bd44c2e4b
LENORA, Texas (AP) — To the naked eye, the Mako Compressor Station outside the dusty crossroads of Lenora in West Texas looks unremarkable, like tens of thousands of oil and gas operations scattered across the oil-rich Permian Basin.
What is not visible through the chain-link fence is the plume of invisible gas, mostly methane, spiraling from the gleaming white storage tanks up into the cloudless blue sky.
The Mako station, owned by a subsidiary of West Texas Gas Inc., was observed releasing about 870 kilograms of methane — an extremely potent greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere every hour. That’s the equivalent climate impact of burning seven tank trucks full of gasoline every day.
But extremely large Mako emissions are not illegal or even regulated. And it was just one of 533 methane “super emitters” discovered during an aerial survey of the Permian in 2021 by Carbon Mapper, a partnership of university researchers and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The group documented vast amounts of methane released into the atmosphere by oil and gas operations across the Permian, a 250-mile-wide dry expanse along the Texas-New Mexico border that a billion years ago was the floor of a shallow sea. Hundreds of these sites have been seen spewing gas over and over again. Continued leaks, gushing water, failure to repair.
“We see the same sites active year after year. It’s not just month to month or season to season,” said Riley Duran, a researcher at the University of Arizona who runs the Carbon Mapper.
Carbon Mapper identifies spitting sites by their GPS coordinates alone. The Associated Press took the coordinates of 533 locations with “super emissions” and matched them with state drilling permits, air quality permits, pipeline maps, land records and other public documents to piece together the corporations most likely responsible.
Just 10 companies owned at least 164 of those sites, according to an AP analysis of Carbon Mapper data. West Texas Gas owned 11.
The methane released by these companies will disrupt the climate for decades, contributing to more heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires and floods. There is almost three times more methane in the air now than there was before industrial times. 2021 saw the worst one-time increase on record.
The global warming power of methane is about 83 times stronger over 20 years than carbon dioxide, which comes from car tailpipes and power plant smokestacks. Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency have largely failed to regulate the invisible gas. That leaves oil and gas producers — in some cases the same companies fighting the regulations — to reduce methane emissions on their own.
“Methane is a super pollutant,” said Cassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. “If carbon dioxide is our planet’s fossil fuel broiler for heating, methane is the burner.”
PERMANENT, NOT JUST PERIODIC EMISSIONS
Methane emissions are notoriously difficult to track because they are intermittent. An old well may smell methane one day, but not the next.
But last October, AP reporters visited more than two dozen sites flagged as persistent methane superemitters by Carbon Mapper with a FLIR infrared camera and recorded video of large plumes of hydrocarbon gas containing methane leaking from pipeline compressors, tank batteries, flare stacks and other production infrastructure. Data from Carbon Mapper and the AP’s camera work show that many of the worst emitters are continuously charging Earth’s atmosphere with this extra gas.
In addition to West Texas Gas’ Mako site, AP observed a large plume of gas leaking from tanks at a WTG compressor station about 15 miles away in the Sale Ranch oil field. Carbon Mapper estimated that emissions from this site averaged about 410 kilograms of methane per hour.
The AP found that Targa Resources, a Houston-based natural gas storage, processing and distribution company, is the closest operator to 30 sites that release a combined 3,000 kilograms of methane per hour, with plumes coming from pipelines, wells, tanks and compressors. stations worldwide. the company’s extensive footprint in Texas.
Targa did not respond to a detailed list of questions from the AP.
Another 21 sources of excess emissions were found at facilities owned by Navitas Midstream, a pipeline company based north of Houston that has since been sold to Enterprise Products Partners. The equipment belonging to Navitas is estimated to emit a total of 3,525 kilograms of methane per hour.
FILING OF SOLD PRODUCT
One of the unusual things about this kind of climate pollution is that operators lose the very product they work to extract. Methane is not a waste product; it is the target gas that operators drill for, process and sell around the world.
But fracking has unlocked such vast quantities of natural gas from the Permian shale that the basin’s ever-expanding network of pipelines doesn’t have enough capacity to collect and transport it all. As a result, natural gas is still routinely flared, even though billions have been invested in new terminals along the Persian Gulf Coast to transport the abundance of American gas to overseas markets.
Still, companies say they’re doing better.
Houston-based Enterprise Products, which owns the former Navitas assets, said it was retaliating. “We are in the process of integrating the acquired assets and are committed to ensuring they are operated safely and responsibly,” spokesman Rick Rainey said.
He did not answer specific questions about what the company would do to reduce methane emissions.
In a statement, Midland-based West Texas Gas said it routinely flies its own gas-detection equipment and in the past six months has “repaired or upgraded” nine of the over-emitting sites the AP asked about, including the Mako. The company was “actively engaged” with another site, but declined to provide details on what improvements were made and when. WTG said it checked the last location and found no leak.
“West Texas Gas is deeply committed to environmental stewardship and is continually strengthening the company’s processes and procedures to ensure we operate in a manner consistent with this commitment,” the statement said.
YEARS OF INACTIVITY
In May 2016, President Barack Obama announced a Climate Action Plan that included new federal rules requiring the oil and gas sector to reduce methane emissions by 40 percent by 2025.
But President Donald Trump, who has derided climate change as a hoax perpetrated by China, canceled those policies before they took effect.
Trump’s climate denial and staunch support for fossil fuels drew campaign contributions from industry. It also won him widespread support in the Republican-dominated cities and towns of the Permian, where pumping oil and gas is considered both vital and a birthright.
At Big John’s Feedlot, a burger and barbecue shack in Big Spring, the parking lot one day last fall was packed at noon with American-made pickup trucks guzzling gas. Inside, multiple portraits of John Wayne and a mounted deer wearing a cowboy hat await diners who chow down on gravy-slathered beef ribs and crack poppers, a house specialty of bacon-wrapped cream cheese-stuffed peppers.
“Can you imagine anyone here driving an electric car?” asked Brenda Stansell, the owner, who insisted Trump is still the rightful commander-in-chief. Asked if she believed in climate change, Stansell said, “I believe in God.”
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden ordered the EPA to write new rules to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, and Congress reinstated some Obama-era restrictions on methane from new oil and gas facilities. Proposed rules to address emissions from hundreds of thousands of existing facilities are still under review.
Thomas Carbonell, the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for stationary sources, told the AP that reducing methane emissions is urgent.
“Reducing air emissions from the oil and natural gas sector is a top priority for the administration and for the EPA,” Carbonell said. Methane, he added, “helps drive impacts that communities across the country already see every day, including heat waves and wildfires and sea-level rise.”
UNKNOWN QUANTITY
To track the problem, the US government keeps an inventory of methane released into the atmosphere. These figures are used by politicians and scientists to calculate how much the planet will warm in the coming decades.
But the AP found that the government database often misses the true rate of emissions seen during the Permian period.
The EPA requires companies to report to its reporting program greenhouse gas emissions above the equivalent of 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year. Only a few dozen sites in the Permian say they exceed that methane threshold.
However, the AP analysis found that more than 140 of the high-emitting facilities identified by Carbon Mapper are on track to exceed the reporting limit.
For example, Carbon Mapper estimated that Mako emitted an average of 870 kilograms of methane per hour for each of the four measurements. Over the course of a year, that would be 7.6 times the federal reporting threshold.
In 2020, the latest year for which data is available, the West Texas Gas subsidiary that operates Mako reported that methane emissions from all of its boosting and gathering operations combined were just one-twelfth of what Carbon Mapper documents only emanating from the Mako site.
Other companies have also reported methane emissions at levels far below those observed by the Carbon Mapper aircraft, even…
Add Comment