My hunch would be that abandoned wells are more responsible for this issue than better regulated new wells. Old wells are more likely to leak, as shown in the link below, are often never checked on, and were often drilled and shut-in when there was a lot less regulation. They can be venting directly to atmosphere, and since natural gas is naturally odorless and wells are often in remote locations, the potential for them to leak a lot of gas for a long time is high.
Texas has a lot more historical production of oil and gas, which should result in a lot more old and abandoned wells. That doesn't give them a pass, but if this hypothesis is true, this flaring regulation would not have a major impact.
Without the raw data from “Kayrros” to compare whether or not the methane emissions they found via satellite imagery is from active sites or abandoned wells. This is just pure speculation.
The photos depicted in The Guardian article show some site in Midland County, TX that appear active to me, but the images do not bear any road markings or distinct physical landmarks to logically place an address and cross reference with local and state data to determine if it’s an active site or not.
(Texas Railroad Commission has lat long of all wells, should be straightforward to overlay methane emission data with these points; a human or cheap satellite imagery like planet.com can always be used if there is some ground truth delta with GIS data)
Midland is a great example of tons of old and abandoned wells with active production right beside them, fwiw. The same can be said of Bakersfield, CA, though, and a direct comparison of those could be quite interesting.
unfortunately this isn't really the case. the industry knows its throwing away massive amounts of methane from the active fracking based wells. texas railroad commissioner is on the record defending it as carbon neutral because if you leak it or capture and burn it, it adds the same carbon footprint. methane flares are permitted at huge volumes. and if you drive i-10 between el paso and san antonio, its starkly clear
And to be clear (for anyone who doesn't know, I presume parent does and simply didn't think it necessary to explain), this "carbon neutrality" argument is entirely bogus, because one molecule of methane has far more climate impact than one molecule of carbon dioxide, even though they each contain a single carbon atom (CH₄ vs. CO₂).
Apparently, the underlying science is basically that "wigglier" molecules have more propensity to intercept photons, and that's why molecules like methane and refrigerants have more impact than the relatively simple CO₂.
And to be even more clear, if it is a statement about global warming, climate change, green energy or any thing along those lines coming from an official from Texas, you know it is just going to be "wigglier" than any molecule.
TX RRC is an elected, political position. Don't confuse who's in that office with anyone actually working in the industry. You might as well say "the TX lt governor" or something similar. It would have the same implication for familiarity with the office they're in, sadly.
Agree, and furthermore, the tech to detect these large point leaks is very available to those who care. Unlike diffuse sources, these concentrated leaks show up readily to ground, airborne or remote sensing instruments.
I’ve wondered how likely you’d be to face legal repercussions for going rogue and fixing old leaky wells. The main non-legal issue would be expertise and equipment. I’m thinking of organizations like wren.co that could do this.
Properly "fixing" leaking wells involves getting a workover rig on site and pumping 10-1000 barrels of cement. Not to mention developing a plan and submitting it to the state for the well work permit, which hopefully comes before the rig gets on site. Rigs will not do work without a valid permit. I used to be a PM for well abandonment.
Minimum cost would be in the $80k-100k range. Double or triple that if you run into any issues. My most expensive abandonment was around $400k, which was for a simple, vertical 5000ft well.
Would it make sense to force new wells to pay a $500K deposit (can vary depending on size) to be held in escrow by the state/federal government in case of abandonment?
That's already required, fwiw. Yes even in Texas. It's not the full costs, in practice, and ownership often gets tricky, but there are regulations to the effect. You have to put up a bond to operate oil and gas wells in TX and many other cases. That bond is seized and supposedly used to properly plug and abandon wells if you fail to do so, but it's not always sufficient.
Also, old infrastructure is really old. It's not things from 20 years ago. It's 50-100 years ago. The law requiring escrow or insurance (it has some holes) dates from the 70's.
Finally, it often isn't done properly. Either way, there are a ton of improperly plugged and abandoned wells and other leaky infrastructure that goes undetected.
The regulations you're describing have existed for a long time, but that's not enough to fix the full issue.
I'd be more worried about safety. Cattle can be dangerous when they don't know you - most are not, just enough to make you forget to be careful. If you damage anything you are in trouble for it.
That said, if you can find the land owner most will be willing to give you permission and warn you about hazards to worry about. Figure out how to do it right and for free - with a good insurance that you won't harm their land and you will have more work where you can get permission than you lifetime will allow you to fix.
I'd think that if you touched old wells without permission or government support, you'd end up owning the well caps and future emissions, so if your "fixed" well is discovered to be leaking next year, the owner is going to say "We capped it off properly, those guys must have caused the leak when they "fixed" it, now it's their problem".
Natural gas (which is of course composed primarily of methane) free takeaway capacity from West Texas is super low. Pipelines are booked solid and and 1-2 new ones are being commissioned yearly (google search for 'Permian natural gas pipeline projects').
Oil/gas companies generally never want to straight up vent (i.e. release directly into the atmosphere) natural gas. It gives no economic value. However, natural gas production is an inevitable byproduct of oil production, especially in the Permian basin shale plays, which can lead to either having to shut-in your oil well, or flare, or vent.
I work for an oil/gas company that operates in the Permian. Our wells range from ~3000 standard cubic feet per barrel of oil to 10000. Some of our bigger wells produce >1000 barrels of oil per day, which corresponds to 3-10 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. We do not vent unless an emergency situation arises. Even for pigging and other procedures (blow downs, etc.), we capture the natural gas. We do flare if needed, but that is limited. Small amounts of gas gather at the top of oil tanks and rather than risk an explosion (due to lightning and other unpredictable things like that), the small amount of gas is flared. The state of TX has flare limits per day and per month on both a pad and well level.
We have also electrified a very large portion of our operations, reducing the amount of natural gas burned to generate electricity (this happens all over the basin). All of our large gathering facilities but one are electric powered. This can be a challenge with gas compressors, which have traditionally been gas powered. Gas compressors are commonly in the 1500-3000 horsepower range each, and there are 4-12 per facility. That's a lot of electricity. One facility does have a gas generator powered component, which can be used to kick-start other facilities to get things going again in case of a major, multi-facility shutdown.
Long story short - gas doesn't have a ton of value in the Permian basin. In decreasing order of preference, operators will want to 1) sell gas, 2) use it to run gas compressors or generators, 3) flare it, or 4) vent it.
Some enterprising people have constructed trailers with natural gas generators powering bitcoin miners. This option can be appealing to operators who would otherwise be flaring/venting the natural gas. Not sure of the contract commercial terms but presumably it benefits both parties. Straight up burning methane is the same whether it is via flare or generator. Both are better than venting due to the increased greenhouse gas potential of methane vs CO2.
Even if you can make flaring more efficient, you're going to need a fairly hard stick to keep oil producers in line because flaring efficiently is a pure cost. On the other hand, running it through a generator presumably earns money, so is a carrot that businesses can pursue.
The big stick approach might work fine in the US with a strong handed state, but methane emissions are a global problem, and most poor oil producers in regions with no big stick may not even bother flaring at all and just vent, whereas they might pursue more money.
Interesting, I was not aware of the 91% vs 98% flaring vs combustion efficiency. Seems like a relatively recent finding based on the Ars article date.
You are correct in that many countries DGAF and just flare/vent the combined equivalent of multiple Texas's. Iraq, for example, flared 16.8 bcm (= 593 billion cubic feet) in 2018.
> Together, the two fields released emissions equivalent to 366m tonnes of CO2, more than the UK’s annual emissions, which are the 17th-biggest in the world.
Turkmenistan has 1/10th the population of the UK and 1/6th the GDP per capita.
One big stick is to measure the methane/carbon emissions via satellite etc. and then add that as a carbon fee to exports (of both oil/gas and anything else made using energy) from that region.
The practices you're describing largely seem sensible, but I think they are also beside the point made by the article, namely that Texas seems to emit more gas per unit of production than a neighbor.
> gas doesn't have a ton of value in the Permian basin.
You note this, but the assertion that selling or using the gas to run generators are top preferences for producers seems contradictory, or perhaps a bit oversimplified.
If gas is abundant and has little value, I would expect there would also be little incentive to sell it when it isn't trivially easy to do so, or to store it for later use running compressors or generators. Cheap gas would mean venting or flaring are the least expensive option in more situations.
You're exactly right. I used to be a production engineer for an O&G company and new wells were usually ready to begin producing oil before the gas pipeline company had finished construction of the pipeline or the compressor station to operate it.
Because of the time-value of money, they want to produce the oil ASAP so that they can reinvest the proceeds to drill new wells. This meant that we had to flare gas the maximum legal amount every day for months until the pipelines were completed. I had to keep track of how much we flared and tell them to shut the well in if we were getting close to the legal limit.
Oil companies will ALWAYS pollute the maximum amount they are allowed by regulations when that is the most profitable solution.
The fact that the economics of not-venting gas aren't great for operators is precisely an example of externalities and why they can't be handled effectively without financial incentives or equivalent regulation.
Either you buy gas from Permian basin operators at inflated prices to make it worth capturing, or you make the cost of not capturing it high enough that it becomes worthwhile to capture. The latter is a classic Pigouvian tax. The former would be unpalatable to most voters (but a delicious opportunity for the oil and gas companies).
There are a lot of nuances to assign the gas a value. Our electricity is apparently in the 5-6 cents per kWh range. I did the math recently and running a generator on site can cut that in half. But then you're in the business of running a fleet of hundreds of generators. Is it cheaper per kWh? Yes. But then factor in the cost of mechanics, techs, maintenance, etc. and that bring it close to even. You've also locked yourself into a bad spot if the price of natural gas spikes 3x like it did in summer 2022 with the Russia/Ukraine war and all of a sudden your self-generated electricity is far more expensive than utility and you can't sell any of your gas because you never build the gathering lines to get it to a pipeline.
If you're self-generating from gas you'd otherwise just release to the air, your generation costs aren't changing from the spike in markets you're not even participating in. You're not buying the gas, you're getting it directly from the ground.
If you have a water well on site, does a drought far away change the cost for you to get water from the ground? One could argue you're not realizing the gains in the market by bringing your water to sale and losing out on opportunity, but those are theoretical dollars you're losing. Your actual costs stayed the same.
Most companies have a pot of money they can put across multiple projects and will typically put that money towards projects that are going to profit the most. If you have a well near a major transmission pipeline, that's where you're going to invest most of your time and effort.
Self-generating still means your turning power over to the market, and in long runs of sunny/windy days power prices may go negative for some amount of time.
It's a lot of risk, hence why the oil/gas industry has lots of booms and busts.
> You've also locked yourself into a bad spot if the price of natural gas spikes 3x like it did in summer 2022 with the Russia/Ukraine war and all of a sudden your self-generated electricity is far more expensive than utility and you can't sell any of your gas because you never build the gathering lines to get it to a pipeline.
The war in Ukraine spiking natural gas prices aren't increasing your costs if you're using waste gas. Your costs are the same regardless of whatever the global market of gas prices are, because you're not selling this gas on the market nor are you buying from the market. And for the vast majority of markets the war led to utility rates increasing, not decreasing, so chances are your self-generation rate was less than the grid not more.
> Self-generating still means your turning power over to the market
That's an assumption, but depending on the setup it might be true or it might not be true. One could self generate just for their own local usage and not be tied to the grid.
I agree with the idea of it potentially not being competitive with renewables, once again you're talking potential lost opportunity when talking about renewables coming in cheaper. But the fact renewables came in cheaper some days doesn't make your costs increase, it just makes it less competitive than the grid power. The grid going negative doesn't change your costs if you're not connected to the grid, it just means you're spending more than you potentially needed to. And I agree its this risk of the price of electricity going lower than the costs of actually gathering and burning this gas for electricity that leads to it being flared and vented instead of put to something useful.
But still, from the perspective of self-generation your costs aren't changing from grid conditions. Say it costs you like $0.05/kWh to self generate with the waste gas. The grid goes down to only $0.02/kWh. Did your costs to generate go up? No, its still $0.05/kWh. Sure, you're overpaying by $0.03/kWh compared to just using the grid power but your costs were still the same.
Flying over the Persian Gulf at night - from Europe to the Middle East or India - is an extraordinary sight. You fly for over an hour, and the only lights you see on the ground are from flares.
It's not easy to in general. Gas plants typically operate via cryogenic processes. The boiling point of ethane at standard pressure is -128.2F, so you need to get below that to get everything but the methane to liquefy. -128.2F by itself isn't terribly difficult but doing so on a highly variable flow, at a well site with questionable power, with 100% reliability will be difficult.
Gas plants typically also operate above atmospheric pressure because the boiling points are higher (meaning less cooling required). That, also by itself, isn't difficult, but does add complexity and cost.
~500 miles from the nearest liquification facility? no. they need to compete with all the other producers to get gas on a pipeline that goes to the Gulf coast to a liquification plant.
Extracting that part here because it's really buried:
> Satellite imaging of methane leaks across the Permian basin, a vast geological feature at the heart of the US oil and gas drilling industry, show that sites in Texas have emitted double the amount of the gas than in New Mexico, per unit of production, since 2019.
> Methane is emitted from various activities, such as from the raising of livestock, but oil and gas production is the biggest source of the pollutant in the US ...
The other confounder that came to mind quickly is that Texas is generally hotter than New Mexico. Even though methane is a gas regardless, I would expect this to have an effect, since diffusion processes generally happen faster when it's warmer.
in addition there is a scaling factor. it's easy to control mistakes when you have 1 well. hard to control mistakes when you have 10,000,000 wells. thus the regulation has to be mapped appropriately.
also, I'd be interested in seeing p90, p99, etc. to see if outliers affect the average that is reported -- because as texas probably has larger 100x production, average is exposed to more large incidents.
i would be MOST interested to compare against other similar "sovereign entity" with comparable production scale and comparable challenges e.g. geography and infra.
the US has a huge environmental benefit in producing oil vs entity's like China, Saudi Arabia, because as a transparent democracy we are able to hold our producers accountable to regulation where offshore producers have no transparency and accountability.
This is definitely in the EPA's purview to regulate and monitor better. I don't believe the framing at all that this is industry standard venting practices, the excess methane is from leaks. I would bet anything that as we get higher resolution satellite monitoring, most of the excess methane will come from a few "super-leakers" who haven't kept up on their maintenance.
And before anyone gets all upset about the Commerce Clause and the boundary of the authority of the EPA: air quality does not respect state boundaries, and is therefore a matter of interstate commerce.
Unless you are yourself a majority of the Supreme Court, I don't see how you can make such a flat claim. The plain language of the law and the intent if the people who enacted it notwithstanding, the Supreme Court could just come out and say they can't regulate this.
As you know, every single progressive effort begets a much larger reactionary effort to undo it.
The EPA in particular has been under continuous assault. Apparently a liveable planet is fractionally less profitable for a handful of incumbents, which is intolerable.
When tortured rationalizations (perverting the commerce clause, equal protection, precedent, the actual unambiguous language and stated intent of any given law, and simple logic) prive insufficient, our reactionary SCOTUS will divine nonsensical plot devices like the "major questions doctrine" to get their predetermined outcome.
First accept reality: yes, this is really happening (despite corporate media concern trolling, err, denials from op-eds and pundits); there is no "winning", nothing is ever settled; we must always defend democracy.
Next step is work towards a multi-racial majoritarian democracy.
It took generations and billions in dark money to unwind the New Deal, Great Society, environmentalism, etc. Hopefully getting back on track won't take quite so long.
Figure out how to make it common sense, if possible. E.g. spending bills tend to fail… except when they obviously save more money than they spend on net.
Cow farts are less bad as that methane is from current carbon (the grass or grain that the cows eat). It breaks down to water and CO2 in the atmosphere after about a decade at which point it's carbon-neutral. Methane from oil wells is additional carbon even after it breaks down.
Huh? No it means there are more regulations that seem to strike a better trade off than Texas; the article claims that New Mexico’s rules don’t seem to cut down on business growth but do result in less methane emissions.
The article also links to another article that states New Mexico hasn’t funded additional inspectors needed to enforce their rule. A simple analysis would be to tally up granted permits in each state and compare with satellite data to quantify impact and unlawful emissions. If that was done, the data isn’t shared in this article. I don’t think a press release from before a law went into effect is strong enough evidence for the conclusions presented here.
Weirdly I'm actually happy to hear about stuff like this. It means there are ways we can slow down the pace of global warming a bit without having to confront the really hard civilizational change issues (which we of course also should, but it's daunting).
Mitigating fugitive methane emissions isn't a particularly difficult problem to solve.
From an emissions reduction point of view, it is really low hanging fruit. The US has said that they are going to do it, but Biden has waited so long to implement the regs, it will likely get rolled back before it comes into effect.
Have to associate a cost to this or it’s never going to get fixed. Every bit of pollution put out into the environment should come with a price. You want to emit X tons of pollution? Ok. Pay Y dollars to the government.
> double the amount of the gas than in New Mexico, per unit of production, since 2019.
when we look at data at scale, we use p99 metrics to get more insight into the average. because this article, i'm assuming, is just using average, the metric here does not have enough information. There could be just one incident in texas over 4 year period that affects the average per unit of production.
> Despite increasing its own oil production in recent years, New Mexico has no site with repeated methane leaks, unlike in Texas,
Why not deep dive into root cause of a few of these abusers? Blameless post mortem to assess what must be changed with very specific examples of issues.
Are we wrong to request a higher bar for journalism / research from Kayrros?
> Texans generally do not give a shit about anyone but themselves
They don't seem to care about themselves either. It's their own land/water/air they pollute by letting corporations exploit them. It's their own people who freeze to death when their shitty power grid can't keep up with extreme weather, or who die from overheating while at work. It's their own family members who die in fertilizer plant explosions. Their own kids who are being mangled at trampoline parks. They're the ones living in the state with the highest population without heath insurance in the country.
Companies have convinced Texas that regulations are from the devil so that they can make money hand over fist at the expense of Texans and the people of Texas fell for it. They figured out a lot time ago that if you can convince a Texan that you're giving him freedom from The Man, you can bend that Texan right over and have him thank you for sticking it wherever it pleases you.
If Texas wasn't aggressively anti-regulation they wouldn't constantly suffer from those problems all of which are caused directly by the lack of regulations that would have prevented them.
In your 17 years of experience were Texans demanding regulations to protect themselves, their environment, and their families? Were they refusing to elect officials who would allow corporations to exploit them?
Regulations demanding you run your power like you live in Anchorage, which had warmer temps than Houston during the storm, has other effects. Such as raising power prices and harming other customers and robbing their families of food and other necessities that money can buy. Only retroactively after this record breaking storm can you decide it wouldn't cause net harm.
If Texas wasn't so anti-regulation they'd have been on the regulated national grid and wouldn't have had much problem when the unusual cold came. The entire rest of the country isn't robbed of their food and other necessities. We're also mostly not freezing to death. There's no "net harm" being done to the entire country (except for Texas) caused by making sure that power companies are held to better standards.
You're arguing for more distribution of Texas power sources, which is the real benefit of tying into a wider grid. They achieve elements of this by tying into Mexico. Perhaps feds should deregulate the grid and allow Texas to connect rather than holding Texas hostage to follow regulations before connecting.
Id argue regulations blocking deregulated connection to fed grid as at least arguably as valid an opinion as the regulated one. Regulations killed Texans because they are so obsessed with their fed grid rules theyd rather Texans die than grant ERCOT unregulated access.
The national grid works because it is regulated. If you allow states to hookup their garbage unregulated systems to it, there would no longer be a regulated grid and the entire system would be made vulnerable.
It was the refusal to follow the same rules everybody else plays by that caused the problem for Texans, not the fact that rest of the country has standards and insists that they're followed.
The regulated grid works. The "we don't need rules" grid failed, and it will continue to fail Texans until they care about themselves and families enough to demand better. They don't even have to demand connection to the national grid, Texans could just demand regulations for their own grid that are even stricter than the national grid's rules and stay separate. Texas could create a system of regulations that make their grid the most well-run grid in the country.
Valid point. The above is in my experience living in Texas, having lived in some and visited all the other major cities in Texas, plus lots of talking online with texan as well.
Pretty dang obvious I dont know 30m people, but statistics tells you only need to sample 100s to get great information about a population.
Article doesn't really clarify if this is "twice as much per capita" or just "twice as much." If the latter, I'd say no duh, Texas has a much bigger oil and natural gas industry than New Mexico does.
It clarifies this in the 2nd paragraph:
"sites in Texas have emitted double the amount of the gas than in New Mexico, per unit of production, since 2019"
I know the hackernews crowd is very pro-regulation, so before downvoting please consider responding so we can have a discussion and share experience together.
"It seems the regulation in New Mexico has had an impact without hurting business"
Assuming that oil has some net affect on humanity -- pros and cons. Then we need to consider the net affect of oil produced by texas on humanity, and consider how that net affect is changed with more regulation.
Simply saying "yeah it seems like New Mexico doin real good with more laws" is extremely dangerous, because most regulation DOES harm and destroy market affects and competitive businesses. The authors on the study here should AT LEAST report with due diligence on this before requesting for increased regulation and attempting to sway public opinion -- potentially having a net NEGATIVE affect on humanity.
One possible example of not considering the net negative affect of regulation, is, for example, if there are many competing energy companies in texas, and there is a consumer demand for more responsible operations, then those competing energy companies are forcing each other to tighten their operations wrt environmental impact. However, if regulation destroys small producers and benefits big corporations, then we would see LESS competition and LESS Priority from companies to tighten their operations, negatively affecting the environment.
I don't think "hackernews is pro-regulation" is accurate, but that might be an easy mistake if you are "anti-regulation". I'm neither thing. I like regulation that works well and dislike it if it doesn't, which I dare say is the rational POV. I'm going to repost my comment from a thread on a recent story flagged as dupe:
It's not the amount of regulation that matters, it's the intent. Is it written to benefit a greater good, or written to benefit a political party's benefactor? The same applies to removing regulations. Where did the intent lie? New regulation and repeal are most often shades of grey --bad mixed with good in terms of overall consequences. Many changes disproportionately help a few at some expense to the many. That's what happens when minority interests with a lot of money are overrepresented in government, lobbyists write bills, etc.
My conclusion on hackernews being "pro-regulation" is based on observance that posts discussing the downside of regulation are often downvoted.
I agree with what you said. Knowing that repealing regulation is much less frequent than producing new regulation -- we should assume all new regulation is high risk, since its' impact is known to have tradeoffs, is to some degree created from perverse incentives and minority interests, and once in place is immutable. Regulation can be good and it can be bad.
So if we know that regulation carries high risk, we need to be very apprehensive to anyone calling for more regulation such as this article via "https://www.kayrros.com/". We don't know who they are, what they want, and what their suggested change in policy affects in net to humanity over time.
I guess what I want is for companies like "https://www.kayrros.com/" to be held to a higher bar and be more responsible for the outcome of their research and conclusions.
> because most regulation DOES harm and destroy market affects and competitive businesses
I don't see that as a problem, when the alternative seems to be essentially zero oversight over people who don't care if they -- through their own negligence -- release chemicals into the atmosphere that contribute to the destruction of our planet's biosphere.
"Business interests" are irrelevant if our planet becomes unlivable for humans.
Regardless:
> Simply saying "yeah it seems like New Mexico doin real good with more laws" is extremely dangerous
Is anyone actually saying that, though? Sounds like a straw man to me.
Texas has a lot more historical production of oil and gas, which should result in a lot more old and abandoned wells. That doesn't give them a pass, but if this hypothesis is true, this flaring regulation would not have a major impact.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-drilling-abandoned-sp...