The Biden-Harris administration, that is, has mostly stuck to the long-standing Democratic Party line: that there’s no contradiction between reducing emissions to meet climate targets and boosting domestic fossil fuel production. That stance is premised largely on the idea that the oil and gas industry will clean up its act, using funds provided through the Inflation Reduction Act to develop technologies to draw down excess carbon emissions and stop methane leakage. Yet mounting evidence from the past month suggests the oil and gas industry will do no such thing. As tech companies’ power-hungry A.I. data centers fuel a new building binge for gas-fired power plants, corporate pledges to reduce emissions have never looked flimsier.
At least two-thirds of global methane emissions are now produced by human activity, as opposed to ambient sources like wetlands. Much of that comes from agriculture; animal agriculture is an especially large contributor. But worldwide, fossil fuel production is responsible for about half as many methane emissions as food production—which is still a hell of a lot of methane. Because methane isn’t emitted by the combustion of oil and gas, energy producers have long made the case that they can easily get their methane emissions under control by patching leaks from pipelines and storage facilities and curbing routine practices like venting and flaring, which are used to release methane companies can’t sell into the atmosphere. During last year’s U.N. climate talks, 50 oil and gas producers—including some of the world’s largest private and state-owned producers—pledged to curb their methane emissions to “near zero” by the end of this decade. The United Nations Environment Program’s International Methane Emissions Observatory, or IMEO, the International Energy Agency, and the Environmental Defense Fund, or EDF, all vowed to help companies meet those goals.
This week, the EDF—which has been helping to monitor methane emissions using planes outfitted with special cameras designed to detect methane—found that progress has been slow. EDF imaging and modeling shows that drillers in the continental U.S. have been releasing up to four times as much methane as they’ve reported to federal regulators. Under the methane pledge oil and gas producers signed, “near-zero” methane emissions are defined as a 0.2 percent “loss rate.” In other words, the target would be to release only 0.2 percent or less of the total volume of methane that’s produced as emissions. The Appalachian Basin, which includes large parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio, has the country’s highest loss rates, at nearly 1 percent.