Satellite-based survey of extreme methane emissions in the Permian basin

Creators: Irakulis-Loitxate, Itziar; Guanter, Luis; Liu, Yin-Nian; Varon, Daniel J.; Maasakkers, Joannes D.; Zhang, Yuzhong; Chulakadabba, Apisada; Wofsy, Steven C.; Thorpe, Andrew K.; Duren, Riley M.; Frankenberg, Christian; Lyon, David R.; Hmiel, Benjamin; Cusworth, Daniel H.; Zhang, Yongguang; Segl, Karl; Gorroño, Javier; Sánchez-García, Elena; Sulprizio, Melissa P.; Cao, Kaiqin; Zhu, Haijian; Liang, Jian; Li, Xun; Aben, Ilse; Jacob, Daniel J.

Abstract

Industrial emissions play a major role in the global methane budget. The Permian basin is thought to be responsible for almost half of the methane emissions from all U.S. oil- and gas-producing regions, but little is known about individual contributors, a prerequisite for mitigation. We use a new class of satellite measurements acquired during several days in 2019 and 2020 to perform the first regional-scale and high-resolution survey of methane sources in the Permian. We find an unexpectedly large number of extreme point sources (37 plumes with emission rates >500 kg hour⁻¹), which account for a range between 31 and 53% of the estimated emissions in the sampled area. Our analysis reveals that new facilities are major emitters in the area, often due to inefficient flaring operations (20% of detections). These results put current practices into question and are relevant to guide emission reduction efforts.

Additional Information

© 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). Submitted 27 October 2020; Accepted 13 May 2021; Published 30 June 2021. We thank R. Colombo from the University of Milano—Bicocca (Italy) for initial assistance to request PRISMA data. Funding: I.I.-L., L.G., J.G., and E.S.-G. are partly funded by an UPV-GFZ Potsdam EnMAP collaboration contract. Yuzhong Zhang is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (project 42007198) and foundation of Westlake University. Author contributions: Conceptualization and methodology: L.G. and I.I.-L.; formal analysis: I.I.-L., L.G., D.J.V., J.D.M., Yu. Z., A.C., S.C.W., A.K.T., R.M.D., D.H.C., K.S., J.G., and E.S.-G.; investigation: all authors; resources: Y.-N.L., A.C., S.C.W., Yo. Z., K.C., H.Z., J.L., and M.P.S.; supervision: L.G., C.F., D.J.J., D.R.L., and I.A.; writing—original draft: L.G.; writing—review and editing: all authors. The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Data and materials availability: Images of the detected plumes overlaid onto high-resolution images can be accessed through the online Geographic Information System https://qgiscloud.com/Itziar_Irakulis/PERMIAN_CH4_MAP_LARS/. All data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the Supplementary Materials. The raw methane plume datasets used in this analysis can be found in https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/K8SN73.

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