Oil and gas production in Texas produces twice as much methane as in New Mexico

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".

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.

There's a non-profit that does this:

https://welldonefoundation.org/faq/

Seems like the old wells effectively get defaulted to state ownership once the last owner goes bust.

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.

https://data.permianmap.org/pages/operators ("Permian Methane Analysis Project")

https://www.mrt.com/business/oil/article/RRC-unveils-map-of-... ("Railroad Commission unveils map of well plugging sites")

https://www.rrc.texas.gov/resource-center/data-visualization... ("Federally Funded (IIJA) Well Plugging")

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2023/orphan-wells-... ("Are there orphan wells near your home? Map shows locations around Houston")

(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)

US dataset: https://www.usgs.gov/data/united-states-documented-unplugged... ("United States Documented Unplugged Orphaned Oil and Gas Well Dataset")

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.

> carbon neutral because if you leak it or capture and burn it, it adds the same carbon footprint.

That's a very... ummm... interesting definition of "carbon neutral".

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.

Yes driving the i10 down there is straight out of some apocalyptic sci-fi world, but it's happening.

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.

Unfortunately, they will require very pure methane. Methane purification probably won't be easy to do at well sites.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/natural-gas-p...

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.

Flaring != venting. Venting would be releasing unburned methane/natural gas directly into the atmosphere.

~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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

the OP author, Oliver Milman's math is horrendous. Needs more peer reviews.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I consider the distraction theory a folk theory without any evidence, although it is very commonly advanced.

> 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?

Wrong.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/jpl/methane-supe...

Ah missed that, thanks.

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.

i'm not sure you fully read my comment.

my example posted is an example of how business interests are relevant to how livable the planet is for humans.

and then my quote is almost word for word what they said in the article.

their quote: "It seems the regulation in New Mexico has had an impact without hurting business"

my paraphrase: "yeah it seems like New Mexico doin real good with more laws"

They need to provide much, much much more proof because as regulation can have net negative affect then the burden is on them.