A new study reveals a 26% drop in methane emissions from the Permian Basin, the largest oilfield in the US, attributed to increased efforts by producers to plug leaks following President Biden's initiative to curb the potent greenhouse gas.
Methane emissions from the US’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 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 he has 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 203
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