‘Methane police’ on patrol as EPA ramps up oil company scrutiny
WASHINGTON — Earlier this year, a satellite commissioned by the United Nations flew over West Texas searching for so-called super emitters, oil and gas sites with outsized emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane.
On Jan. 20 it identified a plume of methane 20 miles south of Midland that was growing at a rate of eight tons per hour, uploading the images along with the coordinates of the plume to a United Nations website for public view. The satellite, which has been surveying the world’s oil and gas fields since 2022, identified 17 separate sites in West Texas and New Mexico’s Permian Basin that were emitting methane at a rate of more than one ton per hour over the course of a day — 10 times the level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines as a super emitter.
With nonprofits Environmental Defense Fund and Carbon Mapper also running satellites and the EPA hiring planes for flyovers, oil companies are coming under a level of surveillance unlike anything they have experienced before, said Gregg Rotenberg, CEO of Insight M, a California-based data company that monitors emissions for oil companies.
“It’s like the methane police,” he said. “They’re coming over your facility every week or several
times a week and notifying EPA. And if they flag you, the burden of proof is on you to show when it started. And if you don’t have documentation, they’ll just assume it’s 182 days.”
That could add up to more than $20 million in penalties for a single well site under the EPA’S new methane fee, enacted in 2022 under the Inflation Reduction Act. The federal government is scheduled to start collecting next year.
Along with tougher regulations around how operators monitor their equipment and repair methane leaks, the prospect of a new round of fees is driving oil companies large and small to quickly try and get their systems in order, from buying infrared cameras to hir
ing airplanes to fly over their operations to identify leaks before someone else reports it to EPA.
In West Texas, Jim Wilkes, the owner of Fort Worth-based Texland, has already replaced his old natural gas flaring equipment with more efficient combusters and is considering whether or not to keep paying outside consultants to monitor his 1,200 oil wells or buy the equipment himself and hire someone fulltime.
“We’ve been going over every piece of equipment we have, like tanks and compressors, to make sure we have our calculated emissions right,” he said. “We’ve been preparing for this. We haven’t been sitting around waiting for these new rules to take effect.”
Methane is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the atmosphere, according to the EPA. And while scientists have a general sense of how much methane is emitted into the atmosphere each year, pinpointing where exactly that methane is coming from and what rate remains vague.
Government agencies largely rely on oil companies to report their methane emissions, primarily through estimates based on what equipment they’re using and their volume of oil and gas production. Those estimates are notoriously unreliable, with the International Energy Agency estimating governments worldwide are undercounting methane emissions by 70%.
While large oil companies such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron maintain they are reducing methane emissions, that has been difficult to prove, said Matt Watson, a vice president at the Environmental
Defense Fund.
“It’s difficult to say because of the issues around the data and the lack of real understanding,” he said. “Now we’re headed towards a world where there better access to transparent data about what’s really going on, so we’ll be able to say this year was better than last. We need to wait and see what the data says.”
Oil companies have only been required to monitor for methane leaks on new wells, but that is about to change. The EPA in the process of developing methane leak requirements for virtually all oil and gas wells, to be enforced by state environmental agencies by the end of the decade.
Large oil and gas companies, which have been under pressure from investors for years to reduce their impact on climate change, are already spending billions of dollars to improve their leak detection technology.
Exxon Mobil, for instance, is experimenting with continuous monitoring sites in the Permian Basin through sensors and fixed cameras, as well as hiring planes and highaltitude
balloons to survey operations in Texas, North Dakota and Pennsylvania, as well as in Australia and Germany, with the goal of getting to near zero methane emissions by 2030.
Still, the technology is in its early stages and remains notoriously unreliable. Satellites and aerial surveys don’t work very well on offshore wells. On land, cloud cover, high winds or just a few inches snow on the ground can interfere with sensors’ ability to accurately identify the source of a leak.
Vanessa Ryan, who Chevron dubs its “methane hunter,” said while the company uses satellites and aerial surveys, the best option for monitoring many well sites remains people on the ground with infrared cameras. The company monitors third party methane data for possible leaks in its system, but the information is not always that helpful, she said.
“Some of these satellites have a very large pixel size,” Ryan said. “In some areas it’s easy to figure out the source of the emissions, but in a lot of places there’s a lot of operations
in close proximity, and it’s difficult to determine whose emissions they may be.”
As federal requirements on methane emissions ramp up in the years ahead, scrutiny on oil and gas companies is only expected to grow.
In New Mexico, which has some of the strictest methane rules in the country, state environmental officials are already cracking down. Last summer they fined one Texas company $40 million for allegedly drilling an oil well without any means to transport the associated gas, resulting in 3.2 billion cubic feet of gas being flared.
Those actions, and similar steps by state officials in Colorado, have been getting the attention of oil and gas companies wherever they operate, said Grant Swartzwelder, a consultant with Dallasbased OTA Environmental Solutions.
“We’re definitely getting more calls because the awareness of the (EPA) rules has finally awoken,” he said. “There were a lot of folks thinking if I don’t say anything they’ll forget about us.”