This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Methane emissions from the oil and gas sector held steady in the United States even as oil and gas production increased during a recent period of heightened regulations, according to new research from Johns Hopkins University. One reason: companies have built more infrastructure needed to better capture methane—a vital component of natural gas—and transport it for sale as fuel, providing a financial incentive to limit the amount escaping into the atmosphere.
The study, published in Communications Earth & Environment, is part of an effort to determine whether federal greenhouse gas legislation and mandates have meaningfully decreased methane emissions. "This is a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that emissions have not markedly increased, as many scientists feared would happen after an enormous increase in natural gas production in the decades following the hydraulic fracturing boom," said senior researcher Scot Miller, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University who studies greenhouse gases.
"The bad news is that oil and gas production is still a large percentage of U.S. methane emissions, and we do not find any evidence that a flurry of federal legislation had an impact on emissions." Nearly 30 times more potent and with a shorter lifespan than carbon dioxide, methane is widely regarded as the second most important greenhouse gas to target for emissions monitoring and reduction, Miller said. In 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency restarted the process of developing rules to address methane emissions under the Clean Air Act. Congress later enacted the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which established fees for methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and allocated more than $1 billion in technical support to the oil and gas sector.
While short-lived, the regulations were an unprecedented push toward reducing one of the major contributors to climate change, the researchers said. To assess the efficacy of the policies, the researchers combined satellite data with atmospheric modeling to estimate where emissions from the oil and gas sector occurred in the U.S. and how large they were for the years bookending the legislative activity: 2019–2024. The researchers used data from Europe's space-based TROPOMI instrument and GOSAT satellite, which observe the amount of methane in the air at many locations across the globe.
Then, because methane can be blown around by wind and other elements, the researchers developed an algorithm that traced the gas in the atmosphere back to its sources on the ground. Total methane emissions from oil and gas activities for the contiguous U.S. remained between 9.3 teragrams and 10.4 Tg each year. Emissions decreased by 0.58 Tg from 2019–2023, but rose slightly from 2023–2024.
However, the intensity of emissions—the amount of methane emissions relative to oil and gas production—decreased by about 11%, representing the continuation of a decades-long trend rather than a significant drop in emissions, the researchers said. "We don't see a detectable decrease in emissions after the Inflation Reduction Act," said Ao Chen, a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins and first author of the paper. "Of course, there's no way to test the counterfactual.
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