Energy Exchange

To get anything accomplished, you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. One unsung story buried in last week’s release of EPA’s new source methane rules may make good options even better – driving innovation and offering industry more options to meet the methane challenge.

The new rules target a pervasive problem: methane – the primary component of natural gas – leaking throughout the oil and gas value chain. Methane emissions represent a waste of saleable resources, a reputational risk, and a contributor to both poor local air quality and climate change.

Under the EPA’s framework, oil and gas operators must take steps to minimize  emissions from new and modified sources – from finding and fixing equipment leaks to swapping out equipment to reduce methane vented from pneumatic controllers and pumps,. Companies in Colorado working to comply with the state’s similar rule have reported that putting similar measures in place are cost-effective, even generating positive returns from selling the captured gas.

But what should an agency do when the solutions available now are reasonable but not perfect? Existing strategies don’t monitor all the time—only a few days a year. So leaks and malfunctions can be missed, or leak for months before they are fixed. Read More »

By Ilissa Ocko and Steven Hamburg

A new study published in Nature Climate Change has caused some misunderstanding about the role short-lived climate pollutants like methane play in climate action, with some going as far as to argue that people are placing too much emphasis on methane. In fact, the analysis does far less to disrupt current thinking than these observers have suggested.

The study led by Myles Allen of the University of Oxford with five colleagues from around the globe is entirely consistent with the substantive scientific view that our best chance to limit warming and reduce its damages is to aggressively reduce emissions of both long-lived (i.e. carbon dioxide) and short-lived (i.e. methane) climate pollutants simultaneously, in order to reduce both the magnitude and the rate of warming.

The study focuses only on the first of these two metrics of climate change, the long term magnitude,  based on the authors’ stated assumption that the primary goal of climate policy is to limit “peak” warming (consistent with the Paris Agreement to keep global average temperature change well below 2ºC). Because carbon dioxide determines peak warming, the study is an important reminder that stabilizing climate requires progressive reductions of CO2 and other long-lived climate pollutants. Read More »

A massive wave of market and societal forces is changing the oil and gas industry. Low commodity prices are driving out weaker players with excessive debt, and forcing those that remain to become leaner and more efficient. As climate change effects worsen and countries move to fulfill their commitments from the Paris climate agreement, public scrutiny of oil and natural gas and their impacts only intensifies.

The question is not will industry change to meet these challenges — it’s how. It’s about what opportunities can propel industry to come back stronger out of the depths of the commodity slide, as a leaner, cleaner industry standing on firm ground that it can play a meaningful role as societies work to transition to lower-carbon economies.

While natural gas remains a fact of life, and switching from coal to natural gas has helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions, scientific research has demonstrated that potent methane emissions from the oil and gas system are undermining that climate benefit. The latest U.S. inventory shows over 9 million metric tons of oil and gas methane emissions, packing the same climate impact over a 20 year timeframe as over 200 coal-fired power plants. That’s a lot of methane no matter how you slice it. Read More »