So, all right.
Here's the deal.
Welcome to Triple Crown.
But you will follow our safety policies, okay?
You will have a representative with you at all times.
If you decide to wander off,
it's gonna make me very unhappy.
And you don't wanna make me unhappy, okay?
Here in West Texas,
in the middle of one of the biggest
oil and gas fields in the world,
people take their safety extremely seriously.
At least, until I show up.
So safety wise, we have these, goggles,
and then you have the- An H2S monitor.
So when does the farting on this thing
and seeing if it beeps wear out?
If I worked here,
as soon as I had one of those monitors,
I'd just be like...
And just like test it compared to...
I cannot confirm or deny it.
Okay, fine, fine.
Yes. I'm here to talk about gas.
Specifically, methane.
As the main component of natural gas.
Methane plays a big part in heating homes,
fueling stoves, and making electricity,
while releasing a lot less CO2 than coal.
And the Permian Basin,
a huge region that overlaps Texas and New Mexico
is absolutely crushing the natural gas game.
Producing more than any other part of the US.
Unfortunately, the Permian Basin
is also a major source of methane leaks
which is not as good of a thing to be winning at.
We're releasing a ton of methane
which makes for a lot of climate change.
It could mean that natural gas is actually worse
for the climate than coal.
All this brings us to why we're featuring
an oil and gas company of all things,
on a show about climate solutions.
Triple Crown Resources run by Ryan here.
Is a small company that's bucking oil industry trends
and using new technologies
to get its methane leaks under control.
Oil filled with freaking laser beams.
Yeah, cool.
And it's something they think everyone else can do too.
For one simple reason,
curbing their pollution is making them millions.
First, a quick primer on methane.
Methane is really, really, really, really bad.
Oh, you want more? Okay.
I guess I'd better talk to an expert.
Here's Bloomberg's, Josh Saul.
Methane's a gas.
And it's similar to carbon dioxide
and that it warms the earth that it causes climate change,
but the problem is that it's a lot more powerful
over the short term than carbon dioxide.
Methane is about 80 times more powerful
than carbon dioxide over the first couple of decades
from when it's released at heating the earth
that causing all these effects of climate change,
like, flooding, and forest fires,
and all these things that we worry about.
So stopping and plugging the release of methane,
is like one of the best things,
and easiest things that humans can do
to stop the worst...
To stop climate change.
So who's leaking all that methane?
Well, it's hard to tell since methane is an invisible gas
that you can't actually see,
without a special infrared camera.
But clearly, there's a lot of leaking going on
and not enough being done to stop it.
Enter Triple Crown Resources,
the tree hugging hippies of the Texas oil industry.
One of the pillars on which we were founded
was being a good steward of, you know,
of the environment, you know, water recycling.
We're really proud of our water recycling,
building good grassroots support in the community.
We're a little bit of an odd duck, but that's okay.
We're proud of it.
And you do something, I don't know if it's unique or not,
but something with methane capture?
Is that the right term for it?
Yeah, we wanted to minimize our methane emissions.
And that's something we did according to an EPA formula.
Okay. So this EPA thing is a theory,
versus what you did which was actually measured it
in practice, is that correct?
Exactly right.
It's just a bunch of formulas.
We multiply the type of equipment we have,
and the number of those, you know, types of equipment
by something called an emissions factor.
And that's how we get our calculated methane intensity.
So not very accurate. Yeah.
Companies rely on this formula for a quick
and dirty estimates of their emissions.
But critics say it's not much better than a wild guess.
The method that the EPA uses
just takes into account sort of a perfect system.
Like the platonic ideal of a natural gas system.
That calculation produces a pretty small number.
And experts we've talked to,
say that the actual number's a lot higher than that.
So, okay, so the EPAs formula said
how much methane was leaking?
.2 to 0.3%
0.2 to 0.3% of what you produced?
Yes, yes.
And then, you went out and measured it yourselves
and found how much was actually leaking?
3.5%
Okay, that's not an inconsequential difference.
Oh, it's not. 3.5% of what you're making.
So that's a lot of money lost too,
in addition to the environmental.
It is a ton of money lost.
Our jaws dropped.
We're like, "How could this possibly happen?"
So yeah, we spent a lot of time figuring out
how it happened, and how to fix it.
Triple Crown got to work fixing their leaks,
and quickly realized something kind of amazing.
What were the economics of capturing that extra methane
that you found out was leaking.
To quantify the value of the gas
we've captured since that first survey,
about three and a half million dollars.
Wow. Compared to...
Say, three to $400,000 all in costs.
So this is a wildly profitable project.
Our as measured emissions now equal the calculated emissions
from the EPA.
And we think our experience
means it's not an insurmountable problem.
Since first measuring their emissions,
Triple Crown has installed some nifty devices
to keep an eye out for leakage.
Like this laser tower,
which detects methane with lasers.
So we're up on a plateau here.
What we have here is a piece of technology
from a company called Long Path.
They use lasers so we can monitor
a lot of our equipment,
and a lot of our wells from one spot.
It keeps costs down.
So we'll get about five to 10 sweeps per day.
So it's almost real time.
So if you do have a leak,
do you have to shut everything down or...
Most leaks,
we absolutely do not have to shut down.
Most of the time the guys can come out here
and it's a relatively simple fix.
About an hour to fix or so. Nice.
It's not just about catching and fixing leaks, though.
Methane can escape in a lot of different ways.
So Triple Crown had to make some upgrades
to make sure it was capturing as much as possible.
So in 2021, we did six total flyovers
studied where most of the emissions were coming from
on Triple Crown's assets.
And we found the top emitter
was these tanks that you're looking at.
And so we invested heavily
in trying to capture those emissions.
We upgraded the tanks so we could hold more pressure on 'em,
and drive that gas to these two engines
that you see behind you.
Those are tank vapor recovery units.
So those recover the vapors, compress it,
send it into that same pipeline to sales,
to be processed and power homes.
And obviously, there's the environment
but there are large financial incentives to do this too.
We can be sustainable,
we can align ourselves with the values of society,
and still, you know, make money with, with those operations.
Sustainable might be a bit of a stretch,
we're still talking about fossil fuels.
But getting these leaks fixed really matters for the planet.
By some estimates,
more than a quarter of human caused warming,
comes from methane alone.
But to really move the needle,
it's Triple Crown's big time competitors
that are gonna have to get with the program.
Companies like ExxonMobil,
which produces more than a hundred times
as much natural gas as Triple Crown.
One of the biggest driving factors
in any entity wanting to stop these leaks.
Yeah, so I mean, there's a...
You know, I mean, there's a big public push.
So any companies that are public facing,
or that have investors, or that are publicly traded,
there's some pressure on them to have, you know,
to have a net zero goal, to have a methane pledge.
So companies like Duke,
you know, there's pressure on them to be better on climate.
Why aren't more companies doing this
with greater frequency?
I think just inertia.
I think companies, you know,
we've done this way for a long time.
Maybe we don't think our emissions that bad.
"Hey, look, the EPA itself says,
according to its calculation that our emissions
are not that bad."
A lot of folks, it might just be a matter of like,
especially, the bigger oil and gas companies.
These disciplines are different departments
and they might not be talking to each other in a way
to actually look at the full cycle.
Oh, interesting.
Economics of these things.
We have an advantage of what...
We're a smaller operator.
All the decision makers are often in the same room together.
We're a lot more agile.
And there's also a little bit of a...
It's politicized.
There's an almost defensive knee-jerk defensive reaction,
when it comes to things like this,
because it's kind of a lose-lose situation
for them often to acknowledge this.
Right or wrong, that's been a culture
that's being reinforced over many decades.
What's the EPA doing right now?
Are they changing their method of measurement?
The EPA defended the current calculation system.
They said that, you know, this is made,
and this calculation was designed with...
You know, climate advocates and experts had input.
And EPA has proposed new rules
that would require oil and gas operators
to have cameras that monitor their operations
and then that they would promptly fix any leaks.
So that's good. That's better than nothing.
There's a lot of companies that are working on this now.
Because there is money in it,
because there's investor pressure.
Investors want to see companies
have lower carbon emissions, you know, from Walmart to Ford.
But now, it's now methane is kind of on that same list.
So to that end, there's companies like Kross
that use satellite imagery
to basically have an eye in the sky
and spot methane releases around the US
and around the world.
These things that we wouldn't have known before.
You know, it's like we never would've known that,
you know, some pipeline going through
the swamps of Louisiana,
or the deserts of Texas,
you know, had some bigger hole in it
and was releasing some massive amount of methane.
But now there's satellites flying over there
looking at methane emissions.
So we actually see all these releases,
and at least some companies are then using that information
and going and plugging those leaks.
So here's hoping the fossil fuel industry
gets its act together and realizes that,
one of the fastest and most effective ways
to slow down global warming,
could also be one of the most profitable.
Because look, as much as I wanna believe
that even the oil industry cares about saving the planet,
a little financial incentive never hurt.