Who Are the Big Ten in the Carbon Pollution Business?

Oil and gas operations have come under scrutiny for their climate impacts primarily because they leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas.  The fossil fuel sector is the second-biggest emitter of the gas, which is 86 times as bad as carbon dioxide for the climate on a 20-year time scale.  Where carbon dioxide works over centuries to wreak climate havoc, methane is its speedier cousin, working much more rapidly before decaying into less virulent gases.  For climate change, both gases matter.  Assuming the company doing the drilling is responsible for the inefficient operation, ClimateWire ranked the companies.  The emissions data were from U.S. EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, a database to which companies annually report emissions from the fields they operate. Production data were obtained from the U.S. Energy Information Administration through a Freedom of Information Act request.  The data and calculations were cross-checked with some of the companies for verification and refined based on their feedback.
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The worst offenders have little in common when it comes to the scale or nature of operations. The implication is that companies do not all tackle the methane problem with equal seriousness, especially in the absence of comprehensive regulation. In the current regime, companies can choose to do better or worse.

A policy under study

This is significant now because the Obama administration is contemplating whether the methane leaks should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

If regulations do happen, companies will have to invest to plug leaks and make well pads more efficient.  That would increase expenses at a time when U.S. drillers are spending more money than they are earning back at their wells, as reported by Bloomberg last month.

The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, has opposed regulations, saying the industry is capable of policing itself.

But, as the ClimateWire analysis shows, self-policing does not work uniformly well across the industry.

Who Are the Big Ten in the Carbon Pollution Business?