Methane leaks: It's the little ones that'll get us in the end

These days, more than a dozen satellites can hunt for airborne methane, which is a fiercely-destructive greenhouse gas. As more methane-detecting satellites come online, you can easily find frightening images of gigantic emission plumes from all over the world.

These plumes are prominent in social-media conversations and news stories, as was a notable 32-km-long plume from a dozen sources in Turkmenistan, detected by NASA/JPL's Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) satellite in 2022:

Any methane satellite overhead when the gas was escaping saw the same plume. Its image—and images from other large plumes—have been widely shared.

News outlets, blogs, social media, and even scientific papers² often focus on such gargantuan plumes: they are big, shocking, and fit right in to the outrage-driven algorithms that dominate information distribution. County-sized plumes generate attention. They attract traffic and —for advertising-based sites— drive revenues up.

But here's the interesting part.

Yep, you've got that right. At least 70% of methane emissions come from small sites. While Figure 2 is built from continental US data, oil and gas production areas in other nations have this problem too. In some places, up to 90% of oil and gas methane emissions comes from low-rate sites.

How much methane are we talking about here? Roughly 15 million metric tonnes a year, just in the US.³

Many of the leaking sites are older: no longer in production but still emitting. Some of them are orphaned (nobody takes responsibility for them) or neglected. (We know who owns them, but they just aren't getting to the task of stopping the leaks).

Satellites like MethaneSat can tally up total regional emissions, but they can't always see precisely where the smallest leaks actually are...or even if the methane comes from oil and gas facilities or from something else entirely. The ability to pinpoint the source exactly depends on the satellite, depends on the terrain, and depends on the weather.

Software (including artificial intelligence) can make very good guesses about likely locations. If only one oil and gas component is in an area with no other activity, the problem may be easy to find. But when geography, hidden other sources, or a complicated equipment base make things more difficult, a team trying to find the leak may need to use drone-based or ground-based measurements.

These leaks may be small, but the overall job of stopping them is not. In the continental US, we're probably talking about half a million sites.³

However, leaks from orphaned or neglected equipment can be tougher. In some cases, facility owners or operators don't have the means to find and solve a problem, sometimes because sites have no lost revenue to recapture. In other cases— as when an operator has long ago declared bankruptcy or ceased operations —somebody else is going to have to do the work. Oh, and pay for it too.

Obviously, this is going to take a blend of operator and third-party resources. Experience so far suggests that we need a collaborative approach to combine regulations and funding in a framework operators like and that can also help address abandoned or orphaned sites⁶.

One such approach has been MERP, the Methane Emissions Reduction Program that was part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. So far, it has helped to fix leaks at about 9,000 sites.⁵ Although a lot of operators have been enthused about it, this program may not last into 2025.

On the bright side, even if MERP disappears, such efforts can generate revenue, create jobs, and contribute to price stability and energy security ... so operators may cause equivalent remediation efforts to re-appear in different forms. At least in part, markets may decide leak management is good business.

Oh, and it can help stop climate change. Almost forgot about that part.

Reading

1. “Methane ‘Super-Emitters’ Mapped by NASA’s New Earth Space Mission - NASA,” October 25, 2022. https://www.nasa.gov/earth-and-climate/methane-super-emitters-mapped-by-nasas-new-earth-space-mission/.
2. Carrington, Damian, and Damian Carrington Environment editor. “‘Mind-Boggling’ Methane Emissions from Turkmenistan Revealed.” The Guardian, May 9, 2023, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/09/mind-boggling-methane-emissions-from-turkmenistan-revealed.
3. Blogs, E. D. F. “STUDY: Smaller, Dispersed Sources Account for Majority of U.S Oil & Gas Methane Emissions.” Energy Exchange, February 4, 2025. https://blogs.edf.org/energyexchange/2025/02/04/study-smaller-dispersed-sources-account-for-majority-of-u-s-oil-gas-methane-emissions/.
4. Williams, James P., Mark Omara, Anthony Himmelberger, Daniel Zavala-Araiza, Katlyn MacKay, Joshua Benmergui, Maryann Sargent, Steven C. Wofsy, Steven P. Hamburg, and Ritesh Gautam. “Small Emission Sources in Aggregate Disproportionately Account for a Large Majority of Total Methane Emissions from the US Oil and Gas Sector.” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 25, no. 3 (February 4, 2025): 1513–32. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-1513-2025.
5. "U.S. Methane Action Plan 2024 Update." The White House, November 2024. https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/US-Methane-Action-Plan-2024-Update.pdf.
6. “Orphan Well Association | Home.” Accessed February 15, 2025. https://www.orphanwell.ca/.