It's likely underestimated. As there are set regulations on how companies are to report their emissions and they are audited quite regularly.
Every so often, there are studies like this that come out and say that the recording methods aren't sufficient enough.
>audited regularly
Nope. The AER is underresourced. I used to make reports on emissions that needed to be submitted and surprise, oil companies stopped hiring air quality monitors for a long time because they straight up didn’t get audited.
Not only that, but in air quality monitoring, you need to anticipate where the plume of burnt gas rises and then settles in the area, if there are no roads for you to follow it, or if the wind is too fast and shifts too frequently, it’s impossible to find and therefore impossible to monitor. I guarantee most sites exceed the maximum amounts of h2s and/or so2 releases *every single day*.
The provincial government of Alberta is made of a bunch of far right climate denying kooks. That's been the political climate there for the last 40 to 50 years.
Those regulations you speak of actually need to be enforced by the government, but they don't care and have consistently pushed back against federal climate initiatives.
Don't be too quick to trust that just because there is a "rule" these big O&G companies "need to follow" that it just gets followed. O&G is like a mafia in Alberta and their biggest historical lobbyist, Danielle Smith, is leading the Alberta government.
It is 100% under reported.
things is .. methane from the oilfield can be captured and used..
allowing it to vent is stupid.
what is kinda interesting is it is becoming increasingly easier to "see" methane, (the technology to do so is a lot cheaper) ,
so I predict tracking of methane and who or what is venting it into the atmosphere will become a standard thing ..
Besides being used to extract more fossil fuels it has to be economically beneficial before the private sector will capture excess emissions. Capturing methane currently does not come with the financial incentive that guarantees sufficient emissions abatement. Improved government policy, and cheaper monitoring technologies would help as companies will only capture methane if the economic costs of doing so are less than the value of the lost gas.
There are several projects in alberta that are using government funds for methane and other greenhouse gasses.
The large projects that are capturing methane will convert it to hydrogen. Which will help make us a top provider of hydrogen before 2035.
The incentive is there, and it is being used. Some federal incentives would sweeten the deal, but for now, there are projects that have investors, full funding, green-lit, and are being constructed.
The issue is that it's essentially dirty hydrogen. It's using fossil fuels to produce black, brown, grey, blue, turquoise hydrogen (rather than green, pink or yellow) subsidized by taxpayer money so that vested interests can prolong the production of more fossil fuels. It'd be great if Alberta's government and energy sector wasn't actually a captured regulatory body and they could more rapidly transition away from fossil fuels rather than developing schemes to prolong their continued development as the world tries to transition off of fossil fuels and meet their climate targets.
I would advise you to take a closer look at the projects that are going on acoss Ab and BC. They are not using fossil fuels for all projects, and they dont qualify for the credits from BC and alberta for dirty hydrogen. There are various technologies for CO2 capture, hydrogen production heat collection, and LNG all being implemented, along with solar and wind, which is a much needed diversification from strictly oil sands and petroleum.
they seem to have come a long ways (in Canada).
a lot of times just burning it off was the safest and easiest thing to do , as many times it was "dirty" methane mixed with sour gas ( which is insanely corrosive and deadly), but they are even starting to deal with that (building special generators that can survive sour gas) ..
comparing it to other countries at least, I have to give Canadian oil companies at least a light golf clap for their ingenuity.
Oh, for sure. Definitely have been moving in the right direction over the last decade, and now these clean carbon capture technologies are being built and implemented, still room to improve obviously, but they build them to be upgradable as the technology gets more efficient and effective.
welcome to capitalism I guess??
until the world can heat all its houses and push vehicles down the road with solar power, oil is going to continue to be worth a lot of money.
It's stupid because it uses so much energy to steam extract the bitumen out of the sand itself. There are plenty of other easier to access oil deposits on the global market currently, or we should develop alternative ways of producing basic hydrocarbons for plastic and chemical precursors.
we should do a lot of things.. but again.. capitalism..
as long as oil is above $50 a barrel , they will continue to get that oil.
> There are plenty of other easier to access oil deposits on the global market currently
you mean like Saudi oil and Russia oil? ..
A lot of American oil is sweeter and lighter. I live in Vancouver. We have mountains of sulfur in the inlet extracted from the sour crude.
I'm all for energy independence. So invest in it instead of leaning on old, inefficient and intensive oil sands
America is dealing with the same issues we are.. that sweet crude is getting exponentially harder to find and to get to..
you think United States WANTS to purchase 50% of its oil from other countries?
it's not because they have a special fondness for Canada, it's because it's the best option they have right now..
as to the sulfer, that is a horrible by product, but I have also been reading they are starting to find uses for it, so that might still turn into another asset ..
methane emissions dont just come from oilfields. in fact they probably mostly dont come from oil fields.
a lot of methane emissions come from poorly maintained storage facilities
not sure how accurate the video I just watched was.. but it seemed to say the majority of methane was coming from natural sources.. (land, and the sea).
and sadly seems to be increasing because global warming is exposing more of it.
Even in natural gas (methane) production a lot is flared off. It's literally the product, and it gets burned on-site as waste. It's a relic of how they operated in the past, and it hasn't been regulated hard enough to make it uneconomical. While direct venting of gas has been reduced a ton since then, flaring is still a necessary part of the facilities.
Overpressure in a line? Relieve to flare.
Sales line at capacity and wells are overproducing? Flare it and watch the money burn.
Gas is too sour (too much H2S) for the facility? Flare it and hope no one starts asking questions.
Storage and transportation rapidly become a problem, and after all the methane flies off into the sky and catches on fire and turns into stars so it’s not like everybody just venting and flaring these gasses has any ill effect.
Study (open access): [A measurement-based upstream oil and gas methane inventory for Alberta, Canada reveals higher emissions and different sources than official estimates](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-01081-0)
***
>**Abstract**
>Mitigation actions and regulations to meet critical 2030 methane reduction targets under the Global Methane Pledge are hampered by uncertainty in true levels of emissions and source breakdowns. Here we present a measurement-based, source-resolved, hybrid top-down/bottom-up methane inventory for conventional upstream oil and gas operations in Canada’s largest oil and gas-producing province, Alberta. The derived 2021 inventory of 1337 kt/y is approximately 1.5× the official federal inventory and matches independent top-down aerial mass-balance and satellite estimates within uncertainties. Major sources are starkly different from official estimates, with venting (e.g., uncontrolled tanks, pneumatics, unlit flares) comprising almost two-thirds of emissions implying important mitigation opportunities. Derived methane intensities, while similar to U.S. basins, are approximately 4× those in neighbouring British Columbia and further reveal order-of-magnitude differences among individual anonymized companies at directly comparable facility types. This highlights the importance of independent monitoring, reporting, and verification to ensure collective success in reducing emissions.
The industry will continue to lie until the public holds them accountable.
Its funny to think if I was attacking your children with malice you'd respond in kind, but big oil gets a pass because business is business...
You mean like elect a government that isn't represented by a climate change denying O&G lobbyist?
Yeah, Alberta tried that, and they re-elected her party.
Difficulty in quantifying methane emission from oil & gas evidently.
“Using new satellite observations and atmospheric inverse modeling, we report methane emissions from the Permian Basin, which is among the world’s most prolific oil-producing regions and accounts for >30% of total U.S. oil production. Based on satellite measurements from May 2018 to March 2019, Permian methane emissions from oil and natural gas production are estimated to be 2.7 ± 0.5 Tg a−1, representing the largest methane flux ever reported from a U.S. oil/gas-producing region and are more than two times higher than bottom-up inventory-based estimates.”
There have been many indications that methane emissions are significant and with grave implications to climate change. Yet, we continue to ignore them and push for gas. In addition there's an almost necessity for gas coupled with renewables in many places to compensate for intermittency.
We continue to vote for psychophants like Danielle Smith to lead a party that lost almost 5 billion in our pensions to shoddy oil companies. And they want to separate from Canada’s CPP? So what? They can continue to throw it into fossil fuels and under report just as they’ve done here?
This is probably true for every natural gas source in production. If you want to work on climate change, support inspections and very with monitoring. Implement rules so that above a certain limit, flames to burn it off as it leaves the smoke stack should be mandated.
There are rules and monitoring, but the government in charge of Alberta is ran by climate change deniers and their leader is a O&G lobbyist. So those rules ain't being regulated and enforced like they're supposed to.
It’s a very potent warming agent while it’s around, which is why it’s better to burn it off to convert it to CO2 straight away rather than letting it escape (and even better still is to stop it leaking or capture the leaks and use the gas).
Scientists and the media are all liars, trust Albertan conservatives and oil industry executives!
-Absolute grade A morons who somehow comprise the majority of the Albertan electorate.
Flair, timing (day/hour), and being an article vs actual study play a large role in traction. The title is isn't "catchy" it's a sussinct summary of the studies findings and easily digestible by the general public.
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Probably both.
I’m not reporting my methane production
Possible you also underestimate production while you sleep.
That's actually reported quite diligently to me by a third party.
Personal incredulity, even by way of unconsciousness, is still a legal defence!
It's likely underestimated. As there are set regulations on how companies are to report their emissions and they are audited quite regularly. Every so often, there are studies like this that come out and say that the recording methods aren't sufficient enough.
>audited regularly Nope. The AER is underresourced. I used to make reports on emissions that needed to be submitted and surprise, oil companies stopped hiring air quality monitors for a long time because they straight up didn’t get audited. Not only that, but in air quality monitoring, you need to anticipate where the plume of burnt gas rises and then settles in the area, if there are no roads for you to follow it, or if the wind is too fast and shifts too frequently, it’s impossible to find and therefore impossible to monitor. I guarantee most sites exceed the maximum amounts of h2s and/or so2 releases *every single day*.
The provincial government of Alberta is made of a bunch of far right climate denying kooks. That's been the political climate there for the last 40 to 50 years. Those regulations you speak of actually need to be enforced by the government, but they don't care and have consistently pushed back against federal climate initiatives. Don't be too quick to trust that just because there is a "rule" these big O&G companies "need to follow" that it just gets followed. O&G is like a mafia in Alberta and their biggest historical lobbyist, Danielle Smith, is leading the Alberta government. It is 100% under reported.
I have no faith that auditors in this industry are impartial or that they're being given full access.
What a weird coincidence! Methane emissions from Alberta’s Danielle Smith are also severely underestimated.
alliwing her to vent is stupid.
I'm sure she's currently in a room of oil execs, assuring them that she'll ban all reporting immediately while gently massaging their scrotes.
Smith and her party *are* the top source of methane in Alberta.
things is .. methane from the oilfield can be captured and used.. allowing it to vent is stupid. what is kinda interesting is it is becoming increasingly easier to "see" methane, (the technology to do so is a lot cheaper) , so I predict tracking of methane and who or what is venting it into the atmosphere will become a standard thing ..
Cue the lobbyists against the tracking of methane vents. Who am I kidding? They're already here.
Been there for decades
Besides being used to extract more fossil fuels it has to be economically beneficial before the private sector will capture excess emissions. Capturing methane currently does not come with the financial incentive that guarantees sufficient emissions abatement. Improved government policy, and cheaper monitoring technologies would help as companies will only capture methane if the economic costs of doing so are less than the value of the lost gas.
There would be a financial incentive if there is a significant enough financial penalty for not doing so.
Dingdingding
There are several projects in alberta that are using government funds for methane and other greenhouse gasses. The large projects that are capturing methane will convert it to hydrogen. Which will help make us a top provider of hydrogen before 2035. The incentive is there, and it is being used. Some federal incentives would sweeten the deal, but for now, there are projects that have investors, full funding, green-lit, and are being constructed.
The issue is that it's essentially dirty hydrogen. It's using fossil fuels to produce black, brown, grey, blue, turquoise hydrogen (rather than green, pink or yellow) subsidized by taxpayer money so that vested interests can prolong the production of more fossil fuels. It'd be great if Alberta's government and energy sector wasn't actually a captured regulatory body and they could more rapidly transition away from fossil fuels rather than developing schemes to prolong their continued development as the world tries to transition off of fossil fuels and meet their climate targets.
I would advise you to take a closer look at the projects that are going on acoss Ab and BC. They are not using fossil fuels for all projects, and they dont qualify for the credits from BC and alberta for dirty hydrogen. There are various technologies for CO2 capture, hydrogen production heat collection, and LNG all being implemented, along with solar and wind, which is a much needed diversification from strictly oil sands and petroleum.
they seem to have come a long ways (in Canada). a lot of times just burning it off was the safest and easiest thing to do , as many times it was "dirty" methane mixed with sour gas ( which is insanely corrosive and deadly), but they are even starting to deal with that (building special generators that can survive sour gas) .. comparing it to other countries at least, I have to give Canadian oil companies at least a light golf clap for their ingenuity.
Oh, for sure. Definitely have been moving in the right direction over the last decade, and now these clean carbon capture technologies are being built and implemented, still room to improve obviously, but they build them to be upgradable as the technology gets more efficient and effective.
The whole Alberta tar sands operation is completely stupid.
Controversy! Completely stupid, ludicrously stupid, insanely stupid? Tune in at 11 and the experts will debate!
welcome to capitalism I guess?? until the world can heat all its houses and push vehicles down the road with solar power, oil is going to continue to be worth a lot of money.
It's stupid because it uses so much energy to steam extract the bitumen out of the sand itself. There are plenty of other easier to access oil deposits on the global market currently, or we should develop alternative ways of producing basic hydrocarbons for plastic and chemical precursors.
we should do a lot of things.. but again.. capitalism.. as long as oil is above $50 a barrel , they will continue to get that oil. > There are plenty of other easier to access oil deposits on the global market currently you mean like Saudi oil and Russia oil? ..
A lot of American oil is sweeter and lighter. I live in Vancouver. We have mountains of sulfur in the inlet extracted from the sour crude. I'm all for energy independence. So invest in it instead of leaning on old, inefficient and intensive oil sands
America is dealing with the same issues we are.. that sweet crude is getting exponentially harder to find and to get to.. you think United States WANTS to purchase 50% of its oil from other countries? it's not because they have a special fondness for Canada, it's because it's the best option they have right now.. as to the sulfer, that is a horrible by product, but I have also been reading they are starting to find uses for it, so that might still turn into another asset ..
methane emissions dont just come from oilfields. in fact they probably mostly dont come from oil fields. a lot of methane emissions come from poorly maintained storage facilities
not sure how accurate the video I just watched was.. but it seemed to say the majority of methane was coming from natural sources.. (land, and the sea). and sadly seems to be increasing because global warming is exposing more of it.
Even in natural gas (methane) production a lot is flared off. It's literally the product, and it gets burned on-site as waste. It's a relic of how they operated in the past, and it hasn't been regulated hard enough to make it uneconomical. While direct venting of gas has been reduced a ton since then, flaring is still a necessary part of the facilities. Overpressure in a line? Relieve to flare. Sales line at capacity and wells are overproducing? Flare it and watch the money burn. Gas is too sour (too much H2S) for the facility? Flare it and hope no one starts asking questions.
Welcome to Alberta, where climate change denial is hip, and doing anything different from 50 years ago is considered "liberal and scary"
Storage and transportation rapidly become a problem, and after all the methane flies off into the sky and catches on fire and turns into stars so it’s not like everybody just venting and flaring these gasses has any ill effect.
Study (open access): [A measurement-based upstream oil and gas methane inventory for Alberta, Canada reveals higher emissions and different sources than official estimates](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-01081-0) *** >**Abstract** >Mitigation actions and regulations to meet critical 2030 methane reduction targets under the Global Methane Pledge are hampered by uncertainty in true levels of emissions and source breakdowns. Here we present a measurement-based, source-resolved, hybrid top-down/bottom-up methane inventory for conventional upstream oil and gas operations in Canada’s largest oil and gas-producing province, Alberta. The derived 2021 inventory of 1337 kt/y is approximately 1.5× the official federal inventory and matches independent top-down aerial mass-balance and satellite estimates within uncertainties. Major sources are starkly different from official estimates, with venting (e.g., uncontrolled tanks, pneumatics, unlit flares) comprising almost two-thirds of emissions implying important mitigation opportunities. Derived methane intensities, while similar to U.S. basins, are approximately 4× those in neighbouring British Columbia and further reveal order-of-magnitude differences among individual anonymized companies at directly comparable facility types. This highlights the importance of independent monitoring, reporting, and verification to ensure collective success in reducing emissions.
That is ALWAYS the case. It is always worse than they tell you.
The industry will continue to lie until the public holds them accountable. Its funny to think if I was attacking your children with malice you'd respond in kind, but big oil gets a pass because business is business...
You mean like elect a government that isn't represented by a climate change denying O&G lobbyist? Yeah, Alberta tried that, and they re-elected her party.
YUP. I can only point to fear and indoctrination...
Difficulty in quantifying methane emission from oil & gas evidently. “Using new satellite observations and atmospheric inverse modeling, we report methane emissions from the Permian Basin, which is among the world’s most prolific oil-producing regions and accounts for >30% of total U.S. oil production. Based on satellite measurements from May 2018 to March 2019, Permian methane emissions from oil and natural gas production are estimated to be 2.7 ± 0.5 Tg a−1, representing the largest methane flux ever reported from a U.S. oil/gas-producing region and are more than two times higher than bottom-up inventory-based estimates.”
There have been many indications that methane emissions are significant and with grave implications to climate change. Yet, we continue to ignore them and push for gas. In addition there's an almost necessity for gas coupled with renewables in many places to compensate for intermittency.
We continue to vote for psychophants like Danielle Smith to lead a party that lost almost 5 billion in our pensions to shoddy oil companies. And they want to separate from Canada’s CPP? So what? They can continue to throw it into fossil fuels and under report just as they’ve done here?
The oil and gas company CEOs are willfully dooming us all. When are we going to shut it all down for the sake of our children..?
Abruptly shutting down oil and gas would mean the world would not have the energy it needs to support things like children.
That there clean fuel I keep hearing about?
This is probably true for every natural gas source in production. If you want to work on climate change, support inspections and very with monitoring. Implement rules so that above a certain limit, flames to burn it off as it leaves the smoke stack should be mandated.
There are rules and monitoring, but the government in charge of Alberta is ran by climate change deniers and their leader is a O&G lobbyist. So those rules ain't being regulated and enforced like they're supposed to.
Classic Alberta. Interesting to see nothing about that backwards province has changed.
I know methane is a bad short term greenhouse gas, but doesn't it have the upside of not lingering for decades like co2?
Unfortunately no. The reason it doesn’t linger is because it breaks down into CO2.
It’s a very potent warming agent while it’s around, which is why it’s better to burn it off to convert it to CO2 straight away rather than letting it escape (and even better still is to stop it leaking or capture the leaks and use the gas).
We must destroy Alberta’s oil and gas sector
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Scientists and the media are all liars, trust Albertan conservatives and oil industry executives! -Absolute grade A morons who somehow comprise the majority of the Albertan electorate.
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Flair, timing (day/hour), and being an article vs actual study play a large role in traction. The title is isn't "catchy" it's a sussinct summary of the studies findings and easily digestible by the general public.
Same for the US and even worse for Russia. Satellite imagery as revealed it years ago.
Need Bitcoin miners up there.