#methane emissions

From the article:

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

While working to expand the nation’s oil and gas production, President Donald Trump’s administration has maintained that drilling in the U.S. is cleaner than in other countries due to tighter environmental oversight. To mark Earth Day, for example, the White House boasted in a statement that increased natural gas exports meant the U.S. would be “sharing cleaner energy with allies” and “reducing global emissions.”

But Texas, the heart of America’s oil and gas industry, tells a different story.

Texas regulators tout their efforts to curtail oil field emissions by requiring drillers to obtain permits to release or burn gas from their wells.

Yet a first-of-its-kind analysis of permit applications to the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s main oil and gas regulator, reveals a rubber-stamp system that allows drillers to emit vast amounts of natural gas into the atmosphere. Over 40 months—from May 2021 to September 2024—oil companies applied for more than 12,000 flaring and venting permits, while the Railroad Commission rejected just 53 of them, a 99.6 percent approval rate, according to the data.

Natural gas is composed mostly of climate-warming methane but also contains other gases such as hydrogen sulfide, which is deadly at high concentrations. Gas escapes as wells are drilled and before infrastructure is in place to capture it. It also can be intentionally released if pressure in the system poses a safety risk or if capturing and transporting it to be sold is not profitable. Typically, drillers burn the gas they don’t capture, converting the methane to carbon dioxide, a less potent greenhouse gas, in a process called flaring. Sometimes, they release the gas without burning it, in a process called venting.

The world’s worst mega-leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane in 2025 have been revealed by an analysis of satellite data. The super-polluting plumes from oil and gas facilities have a colossal heating impact on the climate but often result from poor maintenance and can be simple to fix. The assessment found dozens of mega-leaks, each having the same global heating impact as a coal-fired power station. The researchers said it was “maddening” that such easy action to fight the climate crisis was not being taken, and said people should be angry. Stopping the leaks can even be free, given that captured gas can be sold – methane is the “natural gas” that fires power stations. The mega-leaks occur across the world, but the top 25 list, produced by the Stop Methane Project at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is dominated by facilities in Turkmenistan. The scale of methane leaks in the secretive and authoritarian state has previously been described as “mind-boggling”. Super-polluting plumes were also seen in the US, the largest detected in 2025 occurring in Texas and leaking 5.5 tonnes of methane per hour, equivalent to running about a million fuel-guzzling SUVs. Venezuela (five) and Iran (three) also had multiple mega-leaks from state-owned facilities. The Stop Methane Project also analysed super-polluting plumes from landfill sites, where rotting organic waste can release huge volumes of methane when not well managed. The worst sites ranged across the world, from Turkey to Algeria and Malaysia to the US. Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today, and there has been a “scary” surge since 2007, according to scientists. They have warned that this acceleration seriously risks triggering catastrophic climate tipping points. However, cutting methane emissions has a rapid impact, because the gas is naturally removed from the atmosphere far quicker than carbon dioxide. Some experts call cutting methane the climate “emergency brake”.

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Apart from Earth, the only other world in our solar system that experiences rain is Titan, Saturn's largest moon. However, instead of water, Titan is showered with liquid methane.

Former officials in the UN’s farming wing have said they were censored, sabotaged, undermined and victimised for more than a decade after they wrote about the hugely damaging contribution of methane emissions from livestock to global heating.

Team members at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tasked with estimating cattle’s contribution to soaring temperatures said that pressure from farm-friendly funding states was felt throughout the FAO’s Rome headquarters and coincided with attempts by FAO leadership to muzzle their work.

The allegations date back to the years after 2006, when some of the officials who spoke exclusively to the Guardian on condition of anonymity wrote Livestock’s Long Shadow (LLS), a landmark report that pushed farm emissions on to the climate agenda for the first time. LLS included the first tally of the meat and dairy sector’s ecological cost, attributing 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions to livestock, mostly cattle. It shocked an industry that had long seen the FAO as a reliable ally – and spurred an internal clampdown by FAO hierarchy, according to the officials.

“The lobbyists obviously managed to influence things,” one ex-official said. “They had a strong impact on the way things were done at the FAO and there was a lot of censorship. It was always an uphill struggle getting the documents you produced past the office for corporate communications and one had to fend off a good deal of editorial vandalism.”

Serving and former FAO experts said that between 2006 and 2019, management made numerous attempts to suppress investigations into the cow/climate change connection. Top officials rewrote and diluted key passages in another report on the same topic, “buried” another paper critical of big agriculture, excluded critical officials from meetings and summits, and briefed against their work.

"There was substantial pressure internally and there were consequences for permanent staff who worked on this, in terms of their careers. It wasn’t really a healthy environment to work in,” said another ex-official.

Scientists also expressed concern about the way the FAO’s estimate of livestock’s overall contribution to emissions is continuing to fall. The 18% number that was published in 2006 was revised downwards to 14.5% in a follow-up paper, Tackling Climate Change Emissions in 2013. It is currently being assessed at about 11.2% based on a new “Gleam 3.0” model.

Tasmania-based Sea Forest—one of a flurry of startups producing feed supplements from Asparagopsis seaweed to curb livestock methane emissions—has teamed up with Uganda-based agtech co NileOrbital Aerospace to feed its wares to cattle in East Africa.

Stage one of the partnership will begin early next year with 30,000 cattle across 15 farms in Uganda and Kenya. Noa’s Herd—an app developed by NileOrbital Aerospace—will measure the resulting reductions in methane, supported by GreenFeed devices, portable feeding stations that capture and analyze gases produced by ruminants.

Sea Forest CEO Sam Elsom told AgFunderNews: “[We’re supplying] a lick that will be used in grazing systems with methane measurements taken via GreenFeed devices which will arrive in January 2025.”

“Farmers can try and sequester more soil carbon, they can plant trees, they can do manure management, but none of those things can deliver the level of abatement that Asparagopsis can. It’s a case of for how long can you kick the can down the road?”