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Texas Oil Country Has An Invisible Secret - YouTube
Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake: Originals
[3]
Oil and gas industry
started this fracking boom
[8]
and at first, they were encroaching
[10]
into neighborhoods and into backyards.
[13]
Not in our backyard, not
in anyone's backyard.
[16]
Get the frack out of our lives!
[19]
Now, their emissions,
[21]
their pollution that they
release from these sites
[24]
is a problem for everyone
around the globe,
[26]
because methane is a very
powerful greenhouse gas.
[32]
The Permian Basin in Texas,
[35]
it's by far the most productive
field in the country.
[38]
I think more than half
the country's drill rigs
[41]
were operating there
over the past few years.
[44]
And Sharon Wilson goes out
there every couple of months
[47]
with this camera that can see methane,
[50]
this invisible pollutant.
[52]
If you could see the
emissions with your naked eye,
[55]
there never would have
been a fracking boom.
[58]
You cannot see it without this camera.
[79]
If you think about the fossil fuels
[81]
that are down in the ground,
[85]
one of the main ones is actually methane.
[90]
And what we refer to as natural gas
[93]
is essentially a combination of gases
[96]
that come up from the ground
that are mostly methane
[99]
with a few other gases thrown in there.
[102]
Methane is a super
powerful greenhouse gas.
[105]
It has about 80 times the
global warming potential
[108]
of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
[112]
Scientists think that about a quarter
[115]
of all the human-caused warming
[117]
that we've experienced to date
[118]
is because of methane emissions by humans.
[122]
We do a lot of different things
[124]
to put methane in the atmosphere.
[126]
Raising livestock is a big contributor.
[129]
Growing rice is another one.
[131]
Landfills, sewage, there's
all different kinds of things.
[135]
And then of course, oil and gas.
[138]
There's a new unconventional process
[140]
for extracting natural gas from shale.
[144]
In the early 2000s,
[146]
there were these
combination of innovations
[149]
in how we drill for oil and gas.
[151]
We sometimes refer to it as fracking.
[153]
We drill way, way deep,
past the water table,
[156]
as far as two miles,
[158]
and we drill horizontally
through that shale.
[161]
And one of the things that did
[163]
was it caused natural gas to
be way more abundant and cheap
[168]
than it ever was before.
[169]
We're pulling almost three
quarters of a billion
[173]
cubic feet of natural gas a day.
[175]
Fracking has revolutionized
the U.S. energy market.
[179]
Natural gas, if you burn
it in a power plant,
[182]
it emits about half the carbon of coal.
[185]
So that kind of looks like a real positive
[187]
for the environment.
[188]
The risk with that is
that we didn't really know
[191]
how much methane might be escaping
[194]
prior to being burned in a power plant.
[197]
So now we know that the Permian,
[199]
the basin as a whole, is emitting
[200]
about 2.9 million metric
tons of methane a year.
[205]
If you think about how much
warming that gas is causing,
[208]
it's about the same as the
entire state of Florida,
[211]
all the human-caused emissions
[212]
in one of our most populous states.
[217]
I was curious about finding
some of the lowest hanging fruit
[221]
in terms of climate action.
[223]
Some of the things that the
world is going to have to do
[226]
to slow the pace of global
warming are difficult.
[231]
The methane problem in
the oil and gas industry
[235]
is relatively tractable.
[236]
It involves essentially
preserving something
[239]
that the industry's wasting,
[241]
that it could be selling for money.
[245]
So I went out to the Permian Basin in May
[248]
and I drove around for a
few days with Sharon Wilson.
[253]
Uh-oh, these guys are gonna be pissed.
[256]
Because I am gonna get out
[258]
and take a video of their site.
[262]
I'm a certified optical
gas imaging thermographer,
[266]
and a field advocate for Earthworks.
[269]
I use an optical gas imaging camera.
[272]
It's manufactured by FLIR,
[274]
which stands for Forward Looking Infrared.
[278]
It's a $100,000 camera
that uses infrared sensors
[282]
to produce an image that shows methane.
[286]
I'm make visible the
invisible emissions out here
[290]
to prove that the oil and gas industry
[292]
is not containing their methane gas.
[295]
I'm seeing a lot of emissions
coming from the tank valves.
[300]
Sometimes the industry
will say that's steam.
[302]
That's just an excuse industry makes;
[305]
they use the same camera that we use.
[309]
They don't use it to go find steam.
[312]
Sharon was not really an environmentalist.
[316]
She used to work for
an oil services company
[318]
back in the day.
[320]
She had this beautiful
place out in the country,
[323]
she was raising her boys there,
[324]
and she really blamed fracking
[326]
for ruining the air and water in her area.
[330]
So she became sort of mobilized
to do something about it.
[334]
When my water turned black, no one came,
[340]
because if it has to do with oil and gas,
[344]
no one's coming, you're on your own.
[347]
So I didn't want other
people to go through that.
[354]
We went out towards Pecos, Texas,
[357]
which is near the heart
of where the oil boom
[359]
has been happening the last few years.
[368]
A lot of the Permian is just
[370]
miles and miles away from a public road
[373]
and the roads are just
built by the oil companies
[375]
and off limits to the public.
[379]
So there's a lot of driving around,
[380]
figuring out how to get places.
[383]
I don't see a sign that
says "No trespassing".
[386]
I don't know, what do y'all think?
[388]
All they can do is come at us
[391]
on their four-wheeler, with a rifle.
[396]
I didn't know whether we
would find any methane.
[400]
I mean, most of these emissions
[403]
are evidence of something going wrong.
[405]
Maybe we'd strike out.
[408]
But you know, Sharon has done this a lot,
[410]
she was pretty confident,
[412]
and we found lots of events every day.
[416]
Methane, it's just kind of everywhere.
[419]
So we're out here in the
Permian Basin at night.
[423]
We're not far from Pecos, Texas,
[425]
and across the street
from us is a well site.
[431]
To the unaided eye, it
looks pretty normal.
[434]
Give you a look.
[437]
Now we'll show you what Sharon Wilson sees
[440]
through her optical gas imaging camera.
[444]
That's what the camera sees.
[447]
Just coming up from the top of the flare,
[450]
an unlit flare.
[454]
It's confounding because,
of course, natural gas
[456]
is a useful fuel that
people pay money for.
[458]
It's not really in anyone's
interest to waste it,
[463]
but gas is very difficult to handle.
[466]
It's hard to store.
[467]
It's hard to transport.
[468]
It's easy for pressure
to build up somewhere
[470]
and you have to release it somehow.
[473]
So in places like the Permian Basin,
[475]
you see a lot of giant flares
that are burning natural gas.
[480]
It sounds kind of like a jet engine.
[487]
If you burn the gas,
[488]
obviously that's not
great for the environment
[491]
because you're putting
carbon dioxide into the air,
[494]
but releasing it without burning it
[496]
is something like 16 times as bad,
[499]
because then you're releasing
methane rather than carbon.
[502]
When a flare goes out, it
just becomes a big vent pipe
[507]
and it vents methane
gas to the atmosphere.
[512]
We found leaks both from
places she'd been to before
[515]
that were still problematic
[516]
and new places we just stumbled across.
[519]
There's pretty significant emissions
[521]
coming from the top of this row of tanks
[524]
that you see behind me.
[526]
Volatile organic
compounds and methane gas.
[530]
I wouldn't want to live downwind.
[534]
So we put a lot of miles on today,
[536]
drove around to a lot of sites
[537]
and it turns out it's actually pretty easy
[540]
to find these emissions
[542]
if you just look around
this part of the country
[545]
with a camera that can see them.
[550]
Once we have the footage,
[551]
we submit complaints to the TCEQ,
[555]
the Texas regulatory agency.
[558]
I've made over 240 complaints,
[562]
and, even if they take
action, it doesn't last.
[567]
But until something changes,
we'll keep doing this.
[573]
Sharon has probably done
more than anyone else
[575]
to publicize the problem in the Permian.
[579]
But Sharon's work is kind
of scattershot in a way
[583]
because her goal is to find
problems and publicize them.
[587]
A lot of other people out there
[589]
are focused on what can
we do to clean it up.
[595]
So Environmental Defense Fund,
[597]
you could think about what
they're doing in the Permian
[600]
as like dispatching like
1,000 Sharon Wilsons,
[604]
hitting hundreds and hundreds
of sites in a systematic way
[607]
to try to put some kind
of scientific credibility
[611]
behind their findings.
[612]
So in this case, it potentially
could be a safety hazard
[615]
in addition to...
[616]
So I went to Austin,
Texas, to visit David Lyon,
[619]
who's running EDF's Permian project.
[623]
What have you found so far?
[625]
We found that emissions in
the Permian are very high.
[629]
We find that about 5% of these flares
[632]
are unlit and venting all
the methane to the atmosphere
[635]
and about another 5%
have combustion problems.
[639]
I did expect some flares to be unlit,
[641]
but was shocked that, consistently,
[644]
we're finding at least
5% are unlit and venting.
[647]
So showing that this is a ubiquitous
[649]
major problem in the basin.
[652]
What's the hope that you'll
be able to accomplish?
[654]
So really we have two goals.
[656]
One is to have the data inform regulators
[660]
so they can design effective policies.
[662]
We also want to have
actions by the operators
[665]
in the Permian, so they would
make changes to their sites,
[668]
which would minimize the occurrence
[670]
of those kinds of issues in the future.
[675]
The industry is kind of under attack
[678]
from all sides right now.
[680]
Last year, the French government
[681]
essentially vetoed a $7 billion deal
[684]
to import liquefied natural
gas from the Permian
[687]
because of concerns about
the greenhouse gas profile.
[691]
And that really sent a shockwave
[693]
through the energy industry.
[696]
And at the same time,
[697]
these companies are catching it
[699]
from their investors and lenders.
[701]
So Wall Street banks and asset managers
[704]
are really pushing these companies
[706]
to do something about
their emissions profile.
[710]
If you look at what oil
companies are saying publicly,
[713]
they are saying, almost uniformly,
[716]
that they're very focused on this problem.
[718]
We're wide awake about the
dangers of climate change.
[721]
We've put very stringent
targets on methane.
[723]
It's absolutely critical
[725]
that we as a company get this right,
[727]
and frankly, we as an
industry get this right.
[730]
We are ready to curb our emissions
[732]
and we will do it together,
[734]
for a better and sustainable future.
[736]
So BP, they've been doing a lot
[739]
to change up how their whole
infrastructure works there
[742]
to reduce the amount of
methane that they are leaking,
[746]
reduce the amount of gas
that they're flaring.
[749]
They say that this
changeover is going to cost
[751]
upwards of a billion dollars,
[753]
but that it will ultimately pay for itself
[755]
through additional sales of gas.
[758]
For oil and gas, the
pollutant is the product.
[761]
So that's one of the reasons that EDF
[764]
focuses on oil and gas methane emissions.
[766]
It's a win-win situation.
[768]
The planet benefits from less
greenhouse gas emissions,
[770]
but at the same time,
the operators benefit
[772]
because they have more
efficient operations
[775]
and can often sell more product.
[788]
The industry is in a period
of retrenchment right now.
[792]
There was just an absolute
boom times a few years ago
[795]
when people were just drilling like crazy.
[798]
And that kind of rush contributed
to the scale of the waste
[803]
and emissions that we saw.
[805]
The pandemic and lower oil
prices have slowed that down.
[808]
The historic drop in crude oil prices,
[810]
at one point, the price fell
[811]
to a shocking negative $37 a barrel.
[814]
And even as prices now climb back up,
[817]
the industry is pledging
not to go crazy again.
[821]
But in a few years when
the next boom happens,
[824]
either in the Permian or somewhere else,
[827]
and there's real money to be made,
[829]
are they gonna show the same restraint
[831]
that they're pledging right now?
[833]
Or are they gonna focus on
the short term bottom line,
[835]
which is, let's just
drill as fast as we can
[838]
and who cares if some
methane leaks into the air.
[842]
People in the industry
[844]
often say that they're actually
[845]
working on this methane problem.
[847]
Does that make you feel better?
[849]
Do you feel like we're on the right track?
[851]
No, I've been hearing that
for over a decade now.
[853]
I've been hearing their
promises for over a decade.
[858]
It's like forgiving your
cheating lover, one more time.
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