US oil and gas system emissions from nearly one million aerial site measurements

Evan D Sherwin; Jeffrey S Rutherford; Zhan Zhang; Yuanlei Chen; Erin B Wetherley; Petr V Yakovlev; Elena S F Berman; Brian B Jones; Daniel H Cusworth; Andrew K Thorpe; Alana K Ayasse; Riley M Duren; Adam R Brandt

doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07117-5

US oil and gas system emissions from nearly one million aerial site measurements

Nature. 2024 Mar;627(8003):328-334. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07117-5. Epub 2024 Mar 13.

Authors

Evan D Sherwin^{1

2}, Jeffrey S Rutherford^{3

4}, Zhan Zhang³, Yuanlei Chen³, Erin B Wetherley⁵, Petr V Yakovlev⁵, Elena S F Berman⁵, Brian B Jones⁵, Daniel H Cusworth⁶, Andrew K Thorpe⁷, Alana K Ayasse⁶, Riley M Duren^{6

7

8}, Adam R Brandt³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. evansherwin@lbl.gov.
² Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA. evansherwin@lbl.gov.
³ Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
⁴ Highwood Emissions Management, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
⁵ Kairos Aerospace, Sunnyvale, CA, USA.
⁶ Carbon Mapper, Pasadena, CA, USA.
⁷ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA.
⁸ Arizona Institutes for Resilience, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.

PMID: 38480966
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07117-5

Abstract

As airborne methane surveys of oil and gas systems continue to discover large emissions that are missing from official estimates^1-4, the true scope of methane emissions from energy production has yet to be quantified. We integrate approximately one million aerial site measurements into regional emissions inventories for six regions in the USA, comprising 52% of onshore oil and 29% of gas production over 15 aerial campaigns. We construct complete emissions distributions for each, employing empirically grounded simulations to estimate small emissions. Total estimated emissions range from 0.75% (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.65%, 0.84%) of covered natural gas production in a high-productivity, gas-rich region to 9.63% (95% CI 9.04%, 10.39%) in a rapidly expanding, oil-focused region. The six-region weighted average is 2.95% (95% CI 2.79%, 3.14%), or roughly three times the national government inventory estimate⁵. Only 0.05-1.66% of well sites contribute the majority (50-79%) of well site emissions in 11 out of 15 surveys. Ancillary midstream facilities, including pipelines, contribute 18-57% of estimated regional emissions, similarly concentrated in a small number of point sources. Together, the emissions quantified here represent an annual loss of roughly US$1 billion in commercial gas value and a US$9.3 billion annual social cost⁶. Repeated, comprehensive, regional remote-sensing surveys offer a path to detect these low-frequency, high-consequence emissions for rapid mitigation, incorporation into official emissions inventories and a clear-eyed assessment of the most effective emission-finding technologies for a given region.