Wilson and her crew at advocacy non-profit Oilfield Witness are called “methane hunters” – but she simply points her camera at an oil and gas facility and can see a black cloud on-screen as the instrument picks up hydrocarbons absorbing infrared in real time. “The oil and gas industry says, ‘Look, you can see our site – you can’t see anything,’” she said. “Well, yeah, you can with one of those cameras.”

In recent years, a growing number of non-profit organizations and non-governmental initiatives have turned to advancing technologies to document methane emissions on their own. As methane emissions pose an increasing threat to the climate amid the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks and attempts to gut federal emissions tracking, those groups are grappling with what their work will mean in the years to come.

Scientists and government bodies say that reining in methane releases from fossil fuel facilities, which make up about a third of global methane emissions from human activity, is crucial to limiting irreversible climate change. Methane is a powerful climate pollutant – more than 80 times more potent at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide over the span of 20 years.

Methane emissions long underestimated

Across the United States, methane is emitted from an ever-expanding web of oil and gas projects, including nearly a million active oil and gas wells, along with pipelines, compressor stations, export facilities, and underground storage and transportation lines. One of the biggest sources is abandoned coalmines and oil and gas wells, according to the latest Global Methane Tracker report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Although countries and companies have the tools to reduce methane emissions at low or no cost – and many have pledged to do so – the implementation of mitigation measures is “weak,” and record fossil fuel production has kept those emissions high, the IEA found. The agency further noted that “without targeted action on methane, the risks of severe climate damage increase considerably.”

We have to continue to fight back against the industry’s ongoing propaganda about how they have reduced emissions.

– Sharon Wilson, methane hunter, Oilfield Witness

Part of the problem is that methane emissions have long gone undercounted: oil and gas companies may be emitting up to three times the amount of methane estimated in records they provide to federal regulators. Under the Trump administration, those companies could be exempt from having to provide any records at all.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to get rid of most reporting requirements under the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, which once obtained publicly available data from thousands of polluting facilities across the country. For the first time in nearly three decades, the EPA did not publish its mandatory annual report on national greenhouse gas emissions this year.

Independent methane trackers step up

Now, some of the third parties tracking methane emissions are optimistic that they are well primed to help fill in those gaps and work with companies to change their ways. Other watchdogs are expressing alarm over the implications of evaporating federal standards and oversight, which some say were already inadequate to manage pollution from increasing fossil fuel projects.

As the EPA stops tracking greenhouse gas emissions, state and local regulators may have no choice but to turn to independent emissions databases for information. One example is Climate Trace, a global non-profit coalition that uses satellites and other remote sensing technologies to provide an emissions inventory for states, municipalities, sectors and corporations worldwide. “Climate Trace is increasingly going to be able to continue to provide emissions estimates for every facility in America if other data sources shut down,” said Gavin McCormick, one of the coalition’s founders.

McCormick said his group works with big tech and car companies looking to reduce emissions in their supply chains, and anticipated more interest in his database from private companies across polluting sectors. “There are more and more emissions-reducing opportunities that are actually really good business,” he said, adding that methane leaks in particular are an easy fix. “The ongoing increase in oil and gas has a very different carbon footprint depending on what we do with methane.”

Advanced techniques create new pressure

The technology for pollution tracking is more sophisticated than ever, with new satellite programs like the Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) MethaneSAT and Carbon Mapper able to measure methane emissions and leaks from wide regions and specific infrastructure across the globe. At the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in April, scientists from EDF and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) spoke to reporters about the advancing ability of those satellites to document companies’ changing methane emissions over time.

“In order to address methane emissions we needed to understand where those emissions were and how much those emissions were, and we had no data – nobody had data,” said Steve Hamburg, the lead scientist for MethaneSAT at EDF. With satellites tracking methane pollution, he explained, “we don’t have to take anyone’s word for it; we can independently validate it. Every major company knows that’s going to be happening whether they want it or not, around the world.”

Deborah Gordon, senior principal in RMI’s Climate Intelligence Program, who began her career at Chevron, said she believed that better methane tracking would lead oil and gas companies to fix their leaks. “Gas is a commodity,” she said. “They don’t want to leak the product that they can sell. There’s real value in these companies understanding what they’re losing and burning up in smoke, and also reputational risk.”

Skepticism that the oil and gas industry will respond

Other groups in the methane-tracking space are more skeptical that documenting emissions alone could lead the fossil fuel industry to adequately police itself. “[Satellite] data is sold to the industry,” Wilson, of Oilfield Witness, wrote in a blog post. “So if they were going to stop methane by using satellite data, methane levels would be going down right now, as the industry has access to the best data available. Unless we stop drilling new holes, satellites are just another delay tactic.”

The companies are “not necessarily bound to social responsibility, and never were,” said Josh Eisenfeld, oil and gas research and accountability manager at Earthworks, a non-profit group that advocates for communities affected by fossil fuel pollution.

Like Oilfield Witness, Earthworks uses optical-gas-imaging cameras to capture methane emissions and other toxic pollutants at oil and gas facilities across the country, then uses its data to submit complaints to the relevant regulatory authority. According to Eisenfeld, state regulators often have limited resources to monitor the complex web of polluting fossil fuel infrastructure in so many communities. On-the-ground monitoring can help them precisely detect a faulty point at a facility where methane is leaking. “We like to think we’re helping them be more efficient,” he said.

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While Earthworks is working to alert state regulators, the group is limited in what it can do without cooperative federal oversight. The Trump administration is undoing Biden’s federal fee on methane emissions and requirements for addressing leaks and phasing out routine flaring, which would have created uniform, stricter standards across the country. “The same companies that said they supported methane rules that were introduced by the Biden administration are now silent as these rules are rolled back and as their requirements to report how much they pollute are nixed,” Eisenfeld said.

The American Petroleum Institute, meanwhile, has reversed its earlier support for the rule – calling it a “punitive tax on American energy production that stifles innovation” after it was repealed by a newly Republican-controlled Congress in February.

More than half of the hundred largest onshore oil and gas producers in the United States have no public commitments to reducing methane pollution, while others have quietly delayed or rescinded those commitments, according to a recently updated database by Earthworks and the advocacy non-profit Gas Leaks. Exxon, for instance, dropped references to absolute methane emission reductions in its latest corporate reporting after claiming two years earlier that it planned to achieve an “absolute reduction in methane emissions by 70%” by 2030. “Even the commitments that they claimed in the past had no real legal requirements attached to them,” said Eisenfeld.

Certification projects seek to incentivize leak reductions

The gap in federal oversight could also be filled by third-party monitoring initiatives with very different motivations from those watchdogs. Oil and gas companies are now working with firms to monitor and “certify” their gas as low on methane emissions, allowing it to be sold by gas utilities at a premium. But their methodologies – which can include continuous-emission-monitoring systems – can vary vastly in effectiveness, depending on connectivity issues and the number and placement of monitors a firm chooses to use on site.

One of those firms is Project Canary, a leading gas certification company whose CEO has stated that “we are going to be able to solve climate change with measurement.” The company sells its own continuous-emission-monitoring systems to the companies it certifies.

According to two reports published by Earthworks and environmental advocacy non-profit Oil Change International, Project Canary’s monitors in Colorado regularly missed methane pollution events from oil and gas operations because of their placement and their tendency to be offline. Project Canary claimed it was not certifying the sites referenced in the reports. Earthworks stands by its findings, and says it is still awaiting data from Project Canary to support that claim. Earthworks also says its report appeared to prompt revisions to air quality rules in the state.

Another gas certification initiative launched in partnership between RMI and developer Systemiq, MiQ, aims to create “a financial incentive” for producers to reduce their methane pollution by generating different price levels for oil and gas based on adherence to MiQ’s standard of methane emissions management. “The future must be powered by 100% clean energy. MiQ’s mission is to reduce the climate impact of methane emissions from the oil and gas sector until we get there,” said Georges Tijbosch, MiQ’s senior adviser, at the time of its launch.

Declining pressure on the oil and gas industry

Even if methane emissions from the oil and gas sector were drastically reduced – they can’t be eliminated entirely, as methane is the primary component in so-called natural gas – the extraction and burning of fossil fuels creates a host of other public health and environmental hazards. Just this week, a new analysis found that Colorado oil and gas companies have secretly pumped at least 30 million pounds of chemicals into the ground over the past 18 months.

At the moment, there is a decline in pressure on the industry to curb its climate pollution in the United States. The European Union is exploring loopholes for U.S. gas exports to comply with its methane emissions standards in order to avoid trade disputes with Trump. The U.S. Interior Department is planning to fast-track oil-and-gas project permitting procedures that could take multiple years to a maximum of 28 days. Even before the change in administration, oil companies headquartered in and outside the United States were “retiring” their climate commitments while ramping up fossil fuel production.

Eisenfeld warned that while “we need all of the tools in the toolbox to combat climate change, we also need to be honest about what each of those tools can do. Voluntary efforts by the fossil fuel industry, no matter what third party creates them, will always be limited by what the industry is willing to do voluntarily.”

Wilson, a fifth-generation Texan, worked an office job as a contractor with major oil and gas operators for more than a decade before she quit and moved to Wise County, the birthplace of fracking. She began submitting open records requests to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) – and eventually bought her own optical-gas-imaging camera to document the pollution coming from oil and gas wells next to homes and schools. Wilson has faced ire from the industry after speaking out on her blog against the impacts of fracking – in one case, hundreds of her private emails were subpoenaed by oil and gas company Range Resources in a high-profile defamation lawsuit against a Texas couple who accused the company of polluting their groundwater.

“I’ve been sitting on the side of the road watching oil and gas make big messes for almost 30 years,” Wilson said. “We have to continue to fight back against the industry’s ongoing propaganda about how they have reduced emissions.”

Wilson estimates having made nearly 500 complaints to the TCEQ, using the footage from her cameras as evidence. But the agency largely stopped responding to her requests, she said, even before the change in administration. The state doesn’t have a specific rule targeting methane releases from oil and gas infrastructure and sued the Biden administration for its methane rule when it was first published.

By documenting invisible pollution, Wilson hopes to expose what she sees as the biggest impediment to action: the industry’s deceit about the harm its operations cause. “I think that most people, if their lover lied to them at this level, their clothes would be out in the front yard on fire, and I think that that’s where we need to get with the American public – they need to break up with the oil and gas industry,” she said. “The best way for them to be empowered to do that is to understand the extent of lying and to actually see the pollution they are breathing, and it’s everywhere.”

This article by ExxonKnews is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. You can read the original here. 

The post Methane trackers pick up the slack as U.S. regulatory pressure evaporates appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The rejection was the second time this year that the Supreme Court refused to wade into the lawsuits, which accuse oil companies of deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels. “It’s pretty clear that the Supreme Court is not going to get involved until there’s a final judgment in one of these cases, and that’ll be after trial,” said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor and senior fellow at Vermont Law School.

While Big Oil companies recently won some lower-court battles in lawsuits brought against them by state and local governments, experts say the Supreme Court’s actions, along with positive rulings for communities in other cases, make it increasingly likely that fossil fuel companies will eventually stand trial in multiple courtrooms across the country.

Now that the Supreme Court has denied repeated attempts by the companies and their red state allies to have the cases tossed out of court, the day of reckoning is fast approaching.

– Pat Parenteau, Senior Fellow, Vermont Law School

The fossil fuel industry has itself admitted it could face “massive monetary liability” from the lawsuits. After another failed effort by industry allies to stop those cases at the Supreme Court, supporters of the cases are sounding alarms about the possibility that oil companies will turn to a Republican-controlled federal government to gift them a political escape hatch.

Minnesota lawsuit targeting ‘campaign of deception’ moves forward

One of the lawsuits the Republican attorneys general had targeted was brought by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison against ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and Koch Industries. Last month, in a victory for Minnesota, Judge Reynaldo Aligada upheld nearly all of the state’s claims accusing the companies and trade group of violating state laws through a “campaign of deception” about their products’ harm to the climate.

The lawsuit seeks to make Exxon, Koch and the API fund a corrective public education campaign about the link between fossil fuels and climate change, publish all the research they conducted on the subject, and disgorge the profits they made through false advertising, among other remedies.

Minnesota’s win followed a series of dismissals of climate-deception lawsuits in New Jersey and Maryland, where state court judges sided with oil companies in their characterizations of the cases as efforts to reduce global emissions, and determined that the states’ claims were preempted by federal law.

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Aligada called that argument “unpersuasive,” concluding that federal laws “would not preempt the State’s claims because those claims do not aim to restrain pollution or regulate emissions,” and that Minnesota’s complaint is about “state law consumer deception and failure-to-warn claims that have never been subject to federal common law.”

The ruling added Minnesota to a list of climate accountability plaintiffs – including Massachusetts, Honolulu, Vermont and Boulder – that have prevailed over fossil fuel defendants’ motions to dismiss their cases, some of which dealt with the same question of preemption and what the cases seek to achieve.

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a ruling from the Hawai‘i Supreme Court that rejected Big Oil’s federal preemption arguments against Honolulu’s case. The Colorado Supreme Court will soon decide whether to uphold a similar ruling that allowed Boulder’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy to proceed toward trial.

Puerto Rico takes a page from court victories against Big Tobacco

In Puerto Rico, a newer legal theory for climate-deception cases is poised to get a green light to move forward in federal court.

Puerto Rico municipalities were the first to charge fossil fuel companies with violating the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, arguing in their lawsuit that oil majors engaged in a “multi-year, multi-million-dollar, multi-organization propaganda deception campaign designed explicitly to undermine climate science.” Those RICO charges have now “survived the first test,” Parenteau said, after a magistrate judge recommended in February that the 37 municipalities’ racketeering and antitrust claims be upheld.

Racketeering and antitrust charges may be new for climate litigation, but they were leveraged by the U.S. Department of Justice against major tobacco corporations, which in 2006 were found guilty of coordinating to deceive the public about the link between smoking and cancer. State-level racketeering claims have also been added to the complaint filed against fossil fuel companies by Hoboken, New Jersey.

In his recommendations to the federal district court judge on how the case should proceed, Magistrate Judge Héctor Ramos-Vega in San Juan said he would grant oil companies’ motions to dismiss Puerto Rico law-based claims including fraud, public nuisance and failure to warn, finding that they were inadequately laid out in the complaint. Yet he joined Aligada and other state court judges in rejecting the companies’ arguments that the lawsuits are aimed at reducing emissions and should be tossed out.

Local officials involved in the case are seeking to make Big Oil help pay for their communities to recover from a series of fatal hurricanes in 2017, including Hurricane Maria, and to adapt to future threats. Those disasters were in part the result of the companies’ campaigns “to convince consumers that their fossil fuel-based products did not – and would not – alter the climate, knowing full well the consequences of their combined carbon pollution on Puerto Rico,” according to the complaint.

“At the heart of Plaintiffs’ claims for relief is a purported decades-long misinformation and propaganda campaign,” Ramos-Vega wrote. “Thus, the culprit is Defendants’ words, not their emissions.”

Oil industry allies reach for Republican support

There are growing signs that industry allies are not resting on their laurels as cases against Big Oil continue to inch forward.

Last month, an industry front group called American Energy Institute launched a new campaign bemoaning “coordinated lawfare from radical climate groups” as “the biggest risk” to President Trump’s energy agenda. In The Guardian, Dharna Noor reported that a truck parked outside a major conference of oil and gas executives in Houston was broadcasting that “lawfare and anti-energy laws are threatening America’s pro-consumer energy dominance” and linking to an op-ed by another front group, Alliance for Consumers.

The groups have ties to conservative billionaire Leonard Leo, who was also linked to allied interest groups that unsuccessfully pushed Supreme Court justices to take up the cases. In response to the justices’ latest denial, Minnesota Attorney General Ellison also drew a connection: “The Republican Attorneys General Association takes its marching orders from its largest donors: fossil fuel interests and Leonard Leo.”

Advocates now fear that this same network and others, having failed to persuade the justices to step in, could turn to Congress to provide immunity to the industry. Last week, nearly 200 advocacy groups urged Senate Minority LeaderChuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to preemptively oppose any liability waiver for fossil fuel companies.

Tom Pyle, president of the industry-aligned think tank Institute for Energy Research, told E&E News that advocates’ concerns were “complete and total paranoia.” But there’s a well-documented history to back them up. An immunity provision for Big Oil has twice made its way into other proposed pieces of legislation, in 2017 and 2020.

With more cases poised to reach trial, Parenteau said, the industry might not pass up the opportunity to “seek protection from the Republican-controlled Congress.”

“Now that the Supreme Court has denied repeated attempts by the companies and their red state allies to have the cases tossed out of court, the day of reckoning is fast approaching,” he said.

This article by ExxonKnews is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. You can read the original here. 

The post Big Oil faces ‘massive monetary liability’ as U.S. climate lawsuits move forward appeared first on Corporate Knights.