In a recent CNN story about the study showing how natural gas is going to destroy our chances at a safe climate, we saw a curious statistic from the American Petroleum Institute. API’s defense against calls for shutting down the fossil fuel industry is that while oil and gas production in the US has increased by 50% since 1990, methane emissions have fallen 14%.
At first glance, this sounds like it could be a compelling defense. If there’s more gas but less methane now, that means more gas in the future will mean less methane!
This talking point seems to have started last September, in response to Trump’s announcement that the administration was going to roll back methane regulations. Since then, it’s appeared in API’s tweets, op-eds, and on one of the oil industry’s front-group blogs. But is it true? Or rather, is it an accurate and a legitimate counterpoint to the “Keep It In The Ground” campaign?
If you think it might be, you must be new to this!
First, there’s the obvious logical failing: just because methane emissions fell in the past doesn’t mean they’ll continue to fall if more gas is drilled. History may be precedent, but it’s not a predictor.
Second, as EDF’s David Lyon has covered, there are problems with the methane data going back to 1990 being incomplete and unreliable, a problem even the National Academies of Science has recognized. And in more recent years, we’ve seen a 40% increase in methane emissions since 2006. If there was a downward trend, it’s been reversed as fracking has exploded.
So what’s the real story? Well, back in the 1990s, drillers who could afford to do so patched up the big obvious leaks and otherwise designed and built less leaky systems. After all, they could capture and sell the methane, so there was a financial incentive to do so. That meant all the low-hanging fruit, as it were, was picked.
Since then, emissions have grown as fracking rigs spread across the country, and there are no more easy fixes. Sure, each rig may now be less leaky than on in the 1990s, but if there are a ton more, then that doesn’t really matter.
If the industry was committing to keep the rig count at 1990 levels, then their boasts of reduced emissions would make sense and be legitimate. But since they want nothing more than to keep drilling, and in fact their financial livelihood depends on ever-increasing levels of consumption, it doesn’t matter that each barrel produced pollutes less than it used to if they just end up increasing production.
And if methane emissions continue to grow at the rate they have been, API won’t be able to use that talking point for much longer.