Shitstain Pimps "Clean" TX Gas Production; State Approved Methane Flaring/Release For 99.6% Of 12,000 Permits In 3.5 Yrs

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Texas regulators tout their efforts to curtail oil field emissions by requiring drillers to obtain permits to release or burn gas from their wells. Yet a first-of-its-kind analysis of permit applications to the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s main oil and gas regulator, reveals a rubber-stamp system that allows drillers to emit vast amounts of natural gas into the atmosphere. Over 40 months—from May 2021 to September 2024—oil companies applied for more than 12,000 flaring and venting permits, while the Railroad Commission rejected just 53 of them, a 99.6 percent approval rate, according to the data.

Natural gas is composed mostly of climate-warming methane but also contains other gases such as hydrogen sulfide, which is deadly at high concentrations. Gas escapes as wells are drilled and before infrastructure is in place to capture it. It also can be intentionally released if pressure in the system poses a safety risk or if capturing and transporting it to be sold is not profitable. Typically, drillers burn the gas they don’t capture, converting the methane to carbon dioxide, a less potent greenhouse gas, in a process called flaring. Sometimes, they release the gas without burning it, in a process called venting.

The permit applications showed oil companies requested to flare or vent more than 195 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year, enough to power more than 3 million homes and generate millions of dollars of tax revenue had the gas been captured. Those emissions would have a climate-warming impact roughly equivalent to 27 gas-fired power plants operating year-round, even if the flares burned every molecule of methane released from the wells. “It’s a gargantuan amount of emissions,” said Jack McDonald, senior analyst of energy policy and science for the environmental group Oilfield Witness. “Because so much of this gas is methane and so much of it is either incompletely combusted or not combusted at all through the venting process, we see a huge climate impact.” Oilfield Witness gathered and studied the Railroad Commission data on exemptions to the state’s flaring rules and shared it with Inside Climate News and ProPublica. The news organizations verified the data, including by soliciting input from professors at universities in Texas.

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The Railroad Commission also approved more than 7,000 flares within areas where the gas reservoir being drilled was known to be high in hydrogen sulfide, increasing the likelihood that the toxic gas could escape into the air. Of those flares, 600 were within a mile of a residence, the agency’s data showed. Minimizing flaring permits is “not a priority in any sense” for the Railroad Commission, said Gunnar Schade, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “The priority is oil produced, and that means revenue for the state. Oil and gas is a priority, so who cares about the flaring?”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03092025/texas-oil-wells-methane-emissions/