Oil and gas industry started this fracking boom
and at first, they were encroaching
into neighborhoods and into backyards.
Not in our backyard, not in anyone's backyard.
Get the frack out of our lives!
Now, their emissions,
their pollution that they release from these sites
is a problem for everyone around the globe,
because methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas.
The Permian Basin in Texas,
it's by far the most productive field in the country.
I think more than half the country's drill rigs
were operating there over the past few years.
And Sharon Wilson goes out there every couple of months
with this camera that can see methane,
this invisible pollutant.
If you could see the emissions with your naked eye,
there never would have been a fracking boom.
You cannot see it without this camera.
If you think about the fossil fuels
that are down in the ground,
one of the main ones is actually methane.
And what we refer to as natural gas
is essentially a combination of gases
that come up from the ground that are mostly methane
with a few other gases thrown in there.
Methane is a super powerful greenhouse gas.
It has about 80 times the global warming potential
of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
Scientists think that about a quarter
of all the human-caused warming
that we've experienced to date
is because of methane emissions by humans.
We do a lot of different things
to put methane in the atmosphere.
Raising livestock is a big contributor.
Growing rice is another one.
Landfills, sewage, there's all different kinds of things.
And then of course, oil and gas.
There's a new unconventional process
for extracting natural gas from shale.
In the early 2000s,
there were these combination of innovations
in how we drill for oil and gas.
We sometimes refer to it as fracking.
We drill way, way deep, past the water table,
as far as two miles,
and we drill horizontally through that shale.
And one of the things that did
was it caused natural gas to be way more abundant and cheap
than it ever was before.
We're pulling almost three quarters of a billion
cubic feet of natural gas a day.
Fracking has revolutionized the U.S. energy market.
Natural gas, if you burn it in a power plant,
it emits about half the carbon of coal.
So that kind of looks like a real positive
for the environment.
The risk with that is that we didn't really know
how much methane might be escaping
prior to being burned in a power plant.
So now we know that the Permian,
the basin as a whole, is emitting
about 2.9 million metric tons of methane a year.
If you think about how much warming that gas is causing,
it's about the same as the entire state of Florida,
all the human-caused emissions
in one of our most populous states.
I was curious about finding some of the lowest hanging fruit
in terms of climate action.
Some of the things that the world is going to have to do
to slow the pace of global warming are difficult.
The methane problem in the oil and gas industry
is relatively tractable.
It involves essentially preserving something
that the industry's wasting,
that it could be selling for money.
So I went out to the Permian Basin in May
and I drove around for a few days with Sharon Wilson.
Uh-oh, these guys are gonna be pissed.
Because I am gonna get out
and take a video of their site.
I'm a certified optical gas imaging thermographer,
and a field advocate for Earthworks.
I use an optical gas imaging camera.
It's manufactured by FLIR,
which stands for Forward Looking Infrared.
It's a $100,000 camera that uses infrared sensors
to produce an image that shows methane.
I'm make visible the invisible emissions out here
to prove that the oil and gas industry
is not containing their methane gas.
I'm seeing a lot of emissions coming from the tank valves.
Sometimes the industry will say that's steam.
That's just an excuse industry makes;
they use the same camera that we use.
They don't use it to go find steam.
Sharon was not really an environmentalist.
She used to work for an oil services company
back in the day.
She had this beautiful place out in the country,
she was raising her boys there,
and she really blamed fracking
for ruining the air and water in her area.
So she became sort of mobilized to do something about it.
When my water turned black, no one came,
because if it has to do with oil and gas,
no one's coming, you're on your own.
So I didn't want other people to go through that.
We went out towards Pecos, Texas,
which is near the heart of where the oil boom
has been happening the last few years.
A lot of the Permian is just
miles and miles away from a public road
and the roads are just built by the oil companies
and off limits to the public.
So there's a lot of driving around,
figuring out how to get places.
I don't see a sign that says "No trespassing".
I don't know, what do y'all think?
All they can do is come at us
on their four-wheeler, with a rifle.
I didn't know whether we would find any methane.
I mean, most of these emissions
are evidence of something going wrong.
Maybe we'd strike out.
But you know, Sharon has done this a lot,
she was pretty confident,
and we found lots of events every day.
Methane, it's just kind of everywhere.
So we're out here in the Permian Basin at night.
We're not far from Pecos, Texas,
and across the street from us is a well site.
To the unaided eye, it looks pretty normal.
Give you a look.
Now we'll show you what Sharon Wilson sees
through her optical gas imaging camera.
That's what the camera sees.
Just coming up from the top of the flare,
an unlit flare.
It's confounding because, of course, natural gas
is a useful fuel that people pay money for.
It's not really in anyone's interest to waste it,
but gas is very difficult to handle.
It's hard to store.
It's hard to transport.
It's easy for pressure to build up somewhere
and you have to release it somehow.
So in places like the Permian Basin,
you see a lot of giant flares that are burning natural gas.
It sounds kind of like a jet engine.
If you burn the gas,
obviously that's not great for the environment
because you're putting carbon dioxide into the air,
but releasing it without burning it
is something like 16 times as bad,
because then you're releasing methane rather than carbon.
When a flare goes out, it just becomes a big vent pipe
and it vents methane gas to the atmosphere.
We found leaks both from places she'd been to before
that were still problematic
and new places we just stumbled across.
There's pretty significant emissions
coming from the top of this row of tanks
that you see behind me.
Volatile organic compounds and methane gas.
I wouldn't want to live downwind.
So we put a lot of miles on today,
drove around to a lot of sites
and it turns out it's actually pretty easy
to find these emissions
if you just look around this part of the country
with a camera that can see them.
Once we have the footage,
we submit complaints to the TCEQ,
the Texas regulatory agency.
I've made over 240 complaints,
and, even if they take action, it doesn't last.
But until something changes, we'll keep doing this.
Sharon has probably done more than anyone else
to publicize the problem in the Permian.
But Sharon's work is kind of scattershot in a way
because her goal is to find problems and publicize them.
A lot of other people out there
are focused on what can we do to clean it up.
So Environmental Defense Fund,
you could think about what they're doing in the Permian
as like dispatching like 1,000 Sharon Wilsons,
hitting hundreds and hundreds of sites in a systematic way
to try to put some kind of scientific credibility
behind their findings.
So in this case, it potentially could be a safety hazard
in addition to...
So I went to Austin, Texas, to visit David Lyon,
who's running EDF's Permian project.
What have you found so far?
We found that emissions in the Permian are very high.
We find that about 5% of these flares
are unlit and venting all the methane to the atmosphere
and about another 5% have combustion problems.
I did expect some flares to be unlit,
but was shocked that, consistently,
we're finding at least 5% are unlit and venting.
So showing that this is a ubiquitous
major problem in the basin.
What's the hope that you'll be able to accomplish?
So really we have two goals.
One is to have the data inform regulators
so they can design effective policies.
We also want to have actions by the operators
in the Permian, so they would make changes to their sites,
which would minimize the occurrence
of those kinds of issues in the future.
The industry is kind of under attack
from all sides right now.
Last year, the French government
essentially vetoed a $7 billion deal
to import liquefied natural gas from the Permian
because of concerns about the greenhouse gas profile.
And that really sent a shockwave
through the energy industry.
And at the same time,
these companies are catching it
from their investors and lenders.
So Wall Street banks and asset managers
are really pushing these companies
to do something about their emissions profile.
If you look at what oil companies are saying publicly,
they are saying, almost uniformly,
that they're very focused on this problem.
We're wide awake about the dangers of climate change.
We've put very stringent targets on methane.
It's absolutely critical
that we as a company get this right,
and frankly, we as an industry get this right.
We are ready to curb our emissions
and we will do it together,
for a better and sustainable future.
So BP, they've been doing a lot
to change up how their whole infrastructure works there
to reduce the amount of methane that they are leaking,
reduce the amount of gas that they're flaring.
They say that this changeover is going to cost
upwards of a billion dollars,
but that it will ultimately pay for itself
through additional sales of gas.
For oil and gas, the pollutant is the product.
So that's one of the reasons that EDF
focuses on oil and gas methane emissions.
It's a win-win situation.
The planet benefits from less greenhouse gas emissions,
but at the same time, the operators benefit
because they have more efficient operations
and can often sell more product.
The industry is in a period of retrenchment right now.
There was just an absolute boom times a few years ago
when people were just drilling like crazy.
And that kind of rush contributed to the scale of the waste
and emissions that we saw.
The pandemic and lower oil prices have slowed that down.
The historic drop in crude oil prices,
at one point, the price fell
to a shocking negative $37 a barrel.
And even as prices now climb back up,
the industry is pledging not to go crazy again.
But in a few years when the next boom happens,
either in the Permian or somewhere else,
and there's real money to be made,
are they gonna show the same restraint
that they're pledging right now?
Or are they gonna focus on the short term bottom line,
which is, let's just drill as fast as we can
and who cares if some methane leaks into the air.
People in the industry
often say that they're actually
working on this methane problem.
Does that make you feel better?
Do you feel like we're on the right track?
No, I've been hearing that for over a decade now.
I've been hearing their promises for over a decade.
It's like forgiving your cheating lover, one more time.