StateImpact Pennsylvania is a collaboration among WITF, WHYY, WPSU, and The Allegheny Front. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. It took comment this spring from industry and other stakeholders, and commission Chairman Wayne Christian has set a timeline of this fall to adopt new guidelines. , said the analysis confirms other studies showing official federal and state inventories underestimate how much methane is escaping the natural gas production system. New Mexico Gov. She says part of the reason for this is that the formulas companies use don’t account for abnormally leaky wells, so-called ‘. "The government's job is to protect its people, and that's what we're asking of the EPA and of our state government in the creation of methane rules.". Site Map They should "shut the goddamn thing in and wait until you've got a pipeline or prices are up or what have you," Singer said. "The optimum result would be reasonable regulation that would incentivize early action," stated the Texas-based company. Allen Robinson, professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, who reviewed the analysis for EDF, said the leak rates found in the study were still low enough to make using natural gas better than using coal from a global warming perspective. Many of the Permian Basin's top performers on methane, like Pioneer Natural Resources Co., have advocated for industrywide regulation. That study put the rate of methane emissions from domestic oil and gas operations at 2.3 percent of total production per year, 60 percent higher than the EPA’s estimate. Energy companies have launched a slate of voluntary initiatives in response to demands that they take more seriously the threat of climate change. What do you want elected officials to do about climate change? Singer said the panel's work of compiling recommendations for the state agency was technical, not political. The latest study found twice the amount of gas leaking out of production in the state — over 1 million tons, or 57 billion cubic feet, which is around 1 percent of the gas produced in the state. As oil and gas companies eventually begin to ramp up their production on the other side of the pandemic, they can expect to find that financial firms increasingly will seek to limit their investments in the sector to those companies that have adopted aggressive goals for reducing emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases.
The commission is now eyeing tweaks to the way it grants permits to flare, but it's unclear how extensive those changes will be. According to a report issued on September 25 by S&P Global Ratings, the decrease in economic activity brought about by the pandemic has resulted in a substantial decrease of global greenhouse gas emissions, although not nearly enough of a decrease compared with what would be needed to meet targets under the Paris climate accord. , that drew from more than a dozen other peer-reviewed studies. Rolling back methane measures now is “dangerously reckless,” Howarth said. All told, the EDF analysis found oil and gas industry leaks 16 times more methane than state figures show, though more than half of that came from shallow, or conventional, gas producers who aren’t required to report their methane emissions to the state. Reid R. Frazier / StateImpact Pennsylvania. Reporters Anne Danahy, Reid Frazier, Rachel McDevitt and Susan Phillips cover the commonwealth’s energy economy. MONITOR Program Overview The projects that comprise ARPA-E’s Methane Observation Networks with Innovative Technology […] And there's ample data to suggest the Permian spews more methane than any other U.S. oil field, and twice as much as shown in EPA's greenhouse gas inventory, which is not based on direct measurements.
"So I would say you have a convergence of priorities around this issue that maybe we just didn't see previously," he said.
“We’re making progress by going from coal to gas, with this leakage rate,” Robinson said. Reid R. Frazier is an energy reporter for The Allegheny Front, a Pittsburgh-based public media outlet covering the environment in Pennsylvania.
"The federal rollbacks certainly make the rule development more urgent," Maddy Hayden, a spokeswoman for the New Mexico Environment Department, said in an email to E&E News. The state currently has seven oil- and gas-producing counties that are close to exceeding EPA standards for ambient air quality, Hayden noted. Pennsylvania’s prolific natural gas industry has made the state the No. Scientists say that any methane leaked into the atmosphere detracts from the climate benefits of the natural gas industry, whose growth has largely been credited with reducing the country’s dependence on carbon-intensive coal. But a final rule now at the White House and due for release this month would replace that with a much more limited standard that doesn't control methane directly. While international regulators, environmental groups and the public at large are pushing the industry to adopt more climate friendly policies, the biggest drivers of the change are likely to be banks and other financial institutions that provide the industry with the capital it needs to thrive.
Lujan Grisham has vowed to put in place methane regulations by the end of this year. “That’s one reason there’s a lot of attention on methane. It’s because it’s a relatively easier target for control of climate than CO2,” said Davis, who was not involved with the EDF’s latest analysis but who did contribute to the 2018 Science paper. "I think what they've realized is that the social license to operate is won or lost at the level of the industry, and not at the level of individual companies," he said. Geophysical Research Letters, 40 (16), 4393-4397. All Rights Reserved, This is a BETA experience. James Wilcox Project Manager . Read their reports on this site, and hear them on public radio stations across Pennsylvania. International banking institutions such as Australian multinational independent investment bank Macquarie Bank are examining how to use the wealth of methane emissions data that is beginning to come on line to develop derivative financial products, Taku Ide, principal at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) said in an interview. In March, Denver-based Jonah Energy became the first producer to be awarded the IES’s TrustWell Low-Methane Verified Attribute. "It looks like infrastructure is on its way," she said. The analysis follows a similar analysis of Pennsylvania emissions the group conducted two years ago. “There’s strong pressure on the oil and gas industry to reduce methane,” said Pete Roos, president and CEO, Bridger Photonics, an engineering company that produces sophisticated methane-detection equipment used by the industry. “Methane is a type of climate risk that hasn’t been taken into account, because this information wasn’t available before. Flaring converts the methane that is the chief component of gas into carbon, which is less heat-forcing. The formulas estimate how much gas a well will leak based on what kind of equipment the company is using. Even if the changes this fall are an improvement, he said, they won't be a substitute for methane rules that would bring down the whole industry's methane footprint.
“The association will be commenting on DEP’s upcoming rulemaking on behalf of its members,” spokesman Dave Mashek said in an email.