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Methane emissions from America’s biggest oilfield have fallen sharply as producers ratchet up efforts to find and plug leaks in response to President Joe Biden’s sweeping clampdown on the potent greenhouse gas.
Emissions of the gas in the sprawling Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico — home to almost half of US oil production — plunged 26 per cent last year, according to a new study.
Producers in the oilfield spilled about 96bn cubic feet of methane into the atmosphere in 2023, versus 131bn cu ft in 2022, according to the report from consultancy S&P Global Commodity Insights and Insight M, which carries out aerial detection surveys.
“Companies are taking action and it’s working,” said Raoul LeBlanc, vice-president of upstream at S&P. “People have gotten after [methane] because of the societal impetus and because of the regulatory pressures — and they now have the tools and the data.”
The steep fall in emissions in the basin — the centre of US oil and gas production, stretching across an area bigger than Britain — suggests a crackdown pursued by Biden is bearing fruit.
Methane has a much higher warming potential than carbon dioxide in the short term, but its emissions — typically from leaky infrastructure or the venting of excess gas into the atmosphere — are seen as an easier problem to tackle.
Methane is the main component of natural gas, so producers also have an incentive to capture the fossil fuel to sell into the US market or to exporters. When burnt, methane turns into CO₂, which also warms the atmosphere, but less quickly than methane.
Biden has said that cutting emissions of the gas is “one of the most important things we can do in this decisive decade” to keep global warming in check and pushed the oil industry to address the pollution.
On his first day in office, Biden ordered the federal government to draw up new rules on leaks. Later that year he signed up the US to a pact committing it to cutting emissions of the gas by 30 per cent by 2030.
Rules recently finalised by the US’s Environmental Protection Agency forced producers to find and plug leaks in existing infrastructure and tighten requirements on new facilities. A separate “methane fee” slaps polluters with a fine if they are found to exceed certain thresholds.
But measuring emissions of the gas has proved difficult. A recent study by the Environmental Defense Fund found the industry was pumping out four times the volume of methane estimated by the EPA.
Test data suggests progress is being made. The 2023 reduction reported by S&P and Insight M is equivalent to about 18.5mn tonnes of CO₂ — or the entire annual emissions of Croatia.
That progress could come under threat as Donald Trump takes office with a vow to roll back much of Biden’s regulatory agenda. Green groups expect Biden’s methane fee, which has been criticised by some in the oil industry and Republicans in Congress, to be unpicked.
But analysts are hopeful that producers will have other incentives to uphold the progress, including new EU rules on the methane footprint of fossil fuel imports and investor-driven environmental targets.
“I don’t think that the industry is going to go backwards from what they’ve learned and put in place,” said Kevin Birn, an analyst at S&P. “The pressures are not solely isolated or coming from the US government.”
“The pressures are also international as well. They’ve made commitments to their shareholders, they’ve set a plan in place, they’ve allocated capital,” he said. “They’re going after it, and I think that trend will be continued.”
