LENORAH — To the naked eye, the Mako Compressor Station outside the dusty West Texas crossroads of Lenorah appears unremarkable, similar to tens of thousands...
Congress and the EPA have largely failed to regulate the greenhouse gas, which over the long term is 83 times stronger than the carbon dioxide from tailpipes and smokestacks. That leaves it to producers to police themselves.
But Mako’s outsized emissions aren’t illegal, or even regulated. And it was only one of 533 methane “super emitters” detected during a 2021 aerial survey of the Permian conducted byThe group documented massive amounts of methane venting into the atmosphere from oil and gas operations across the Permian, a 250-mile-wide bone-dry expanse along the Texas-New Mexico border that a billion years ago was the bottom of a shallow sea. Hundreds of those sites were seen spewing the gas over and over again.
Just 10 companies owned at least 164 of those sites, according to an AP analysis of Carbon Mapper’s data. West Texas Gas owned 11. But last October, AP journalists visited more than two dozen sites flagged as persistent methane super emitters by Carbon Mapper with a FLIR infrared camera and recorded video of large plumes of hydrocarbon gas containing methane escaping from pipeline compressors, tank batteries, flare stacks and other production infrastructure. The Carbon Mapper data and the AP’s camera work show many of the worst emitters are steadily charging the Earth’s atmosphere with this extra gas.
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. On the first day of his administration, President Joe Biden ordered EPA to write new rules to reduce the oil and gas industry’s methane emissions, and c reinstated some Obama-era restrictions on methane from new oil and gas facilities. Proposed rules to address emissions from the hundreds of thousands of existing sites are still under review.
AP’s analysis, however, found that more than 140 of the super-emitting facilities identified by Carbon Mapper were on track to exceed the reporting limit. Motorman Danny Perez and forehand Kory Mercantel work on Latshaw oil drilling rig #43 in Odessa. Most rigs run day and night, with crews of roughnecks rotating in 12-hour shifts.
In a statement to AP, Lucid said it had a “best-in-class" leak detection program and that any emissions at its plants “are typically non-methane.” The company also questioned the science behind how Carbon Mapper measured its methane emissions rates, claiming “no camera image can provide an accurate concentration of a pollutant.”instrument used by Carbon Mapper is not a camera.
“They don’t go look for anything,” said Doty, who now works as a private consultant for clients that include environmental groups. Doty said the Texas environmental agency has cameras capable of detecting air pollutants leaking from oil and gas facilities, but after he and other staff began documenting huge methane plumes about a decade ago they were told to keep the cameras locked away.
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. Biden said last week the Earth is running out of time, calling the climate crisis a “code red for humanity.”
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