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

Nature volume 627, pages 328–334 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

As airborne methane surveys of oil and gas systems continue to discover large emissions that are missing from official estimates1,2,3,4, 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.

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Fig. 1: Survey maps and methods summary.
Fig. 2: Estimated methane loss as a fraction of methane production.
Fig. 3: Cumulative well site methane emissions by region.

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Data availability

Anonymized emission and source data from the Kairos Fort Worth campaign are available at Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8302419 (ref. 51), from the Kairos Permian at Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10067753 (ref. 52). The remaining Kairos Aerospace data from this study are not available for open release due to confidentiality concerns. Kairos Aerospace is committed to working with research groups studying methane emissions. Access may be granted, but must be done directly through Kairos Aerospace. Interested researchers should contact research-collaborations@kairosaerospace.com. For sensitive Kairos and Enverus microdata, the published code contains aggregated summaries sufficient to reproduce key results in the paper: regional estimates of the magnitude and breakdown of methane emissions from oil and gas activity. In addition, our code repositories include all code used to aggregate these commercially sensitive microdata. All methane data from airborne campaigns led by the Carbon Mapper/JPL team since 2016 are available at https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1727 and from refs. 1,2,42,43. Data required to reproduce maps of national and state boundaries within the USA are available at https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/carto-boundary-file.html and from Esri, with national boundaries for Canada and Mexico at http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/, lakes and rivers from the United States Geological Survey at https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/4fb55df0e4b04cb937751e02 and ocean boundaries from the Flanders Marine Institute at https://doi.org/10.14284/542. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The data and code required to reproduce the key results of this article, as well as 100,000 random samples from each simulated emissions distribution in this study, are available at Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10064774 (ref. 53) and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10073882 (ref. 54).

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Acknowledgements

J. Kruguer of Kairos Aerospace provided data management support. T. Lauvaux, C. Giron and A. d’Aspremont provided satellite-derived data to support the analysis of power law behaviour. This work benefited from discussions with N. Boness, S. El Abbadi, B. Hmiel, E. Kort, G. Wayne, M. Omara, R. Gautam, D. Zavala-Araiza, S. Hamburg and R. Jackson. This study was funded by the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative, an industry consortium that supports independent research at Stanford University. Funding for AVIRIS–NG and GAO flight operations and/or data analysis referenced in this paper was provided by NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System and Advanced Information System Technology programmes, as well as by Carbon Mapper, RMI the Environmental Defense Fund, the California Air Resources Board, the University of Arizona and the US Climate Alliance. Funding for Colorado overflights was provided by the Mark Martinez and Joey Irwin Memorial Public Projects Fund with the support of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Portions of this research were carried out at JPL, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (no. 80NM0018D0004). GAO is managed by the Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science at Arizona State University, and is made possible by support from private foundations, philanthropic individuals and Arizona State University.

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Author notes

  1. Evan D. Sherwin

    Present address: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

  2. Jeffrey S. Rutherford

    Present address: Highwood Emissions Management, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Evan D. Sherwin, Jeffrey S. Rutherford, Zhan Zhang, Yuanlei Chen & Adam R. Brandt

  2. Kairos Aerospace, Sunnyvale, CA, USA

    Erin B. Wetherley, Petr V. Yakovlev, Elena S. F. Berman & Brian B. Jones

  3. Carbon Mapper, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Daniel H. Cusworth, Alana K. Ayasse & Riley M. Duren

  4. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Andrew K. Thorpe & Riley M. Duren

  5. Arizona Institutes for Resilience, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Riley M. Duren

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Contributions

Conceptualization was the responsibility of E.D.S., A.R.B., E.S.F.B. and B.B.J. Resources were handled by A.R.B., E.S.F.B. and R.M.D. E.D.S., E.S.F.B., E.B.W., P.V.Y., D.H.C., Z.Z., J.S.R. and Y.C. undertook data curation. E.D.S., J.S.R., Z.Z. and Y.C. were responsible for software. Formal analysis was carried out by E.D.S., J.S.R. and Z.Z. A.R.B. supervised the project. Funding was acquired by A.R.B., E.S.F.B. and R.M.D. Investigation was carried out by E.D.S., E.S.F.B., E.B.W., D.H.C., A.K.T. and A.K.A. E.D.S. and Z.Z. undertook visualization. E.D.S., J.S.R., E.B.W. and P.V.Y. performed methodology. E.D.S. wrote the original draft. The project was administered by E.D.S. and A.R.B. All authors wrote, reviewed and edited the article.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Evan D. Sherwin.

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Competing interests

E.S.F.B., P.V.Y., B.B.J. and E.B.W. are employees of Kairos Aerospace. R.M.D., D.H.C. and A.K.A. are employees of the University of Arizona and seconded to the non-profit organization Carbon Mapper. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

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Sherwin, E.D., Rutherford, J.S., Zhang, Z. et al. US oil and gas system emissions from nearly one million aerial site measurements. Nature 627, 328–334 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07117-5

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