Howdy y’all! Sharon was in the Texas Permian to support a European media project, Charlie wrapped up work for a new New Mexico documentary, our new report on our work in Japan is out, we did a webinar on methane regulations in Europe and Jack McDonald joined the team.

Our Work in the Media

Our work documenting emissions from the xAI facility in Memphis got more coverage this month including in WIRED.

In May, Sharon Wilson, a certified optical gas imaging thermographer, traveled to Memphis to film emissions from the site with a special optical gas imaging camera that records usually invisible emissions…

“I expected to see the typical power plant type of pollution that I see,” she says. “What I saw was way worse than what I expected.”

In These Times wrote about the work we are doing with Truckers Movement for Justice.

On June 4, the driver advocacy group Truckers Movement for Justice and Ohio Valley Allies, Earthjustice, Oilfield Witness and several other environmental groups sent a letter to Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and top officials at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. They made a simple request: that regulations around the transportation of hazardous materials be enforced.

The emissions video we took in Memphis at the xAI facility also got a lot of views on various Instagram accounts.

Report on Japanese LNG Emissions

We worked with Oil Change International and Friends of the Earth Japan to release a new report on our findings on emissions from the Japanese LNG industry in Tokyo Bay.

Fieldwork

Sharon was in the oilfields of west Texas and eastern New Mexico working with a journalist on a project about methane emissions from U.S. oil and gas production that will be out later this year.

On the trip Sharon documented emission from the Energy Transfer Keystone Gas Plant (video). Sharon notes that this event — like all the rest before it — was never reported to the state and says, “I don’t know how they get away with this.”

Here is a Carbon Mapper image showing a methane plume at that site in 2024.

Education

Sharon and Justin were on the  EU Calling webinar “The Methane Backdoor: Is Europe Undermining Its Green Deal to appease Trump?” to talk about attempts to claim that US gas production has low methane emissions.

Our Writing

Charlie wrote about the distraction of dark skies certifications for oil and gas companies.

While conserving dark skies is a critical consideration in reducing negative impacts to human health and natural ecosystems, applauding a company like Franklin Mountain Energy for their dark sky certification distracts from not only their history of violating New Mexico’s environmental rules and regulations, it distracts from the toxic reality of the oil and gas industry as a whole. Franklin Mountain Energy (FME) was inspected by federal officials last year.

Justin wrote a piece for Climate and Capital Media about our trip to Memphis to document emissions at the xAI facility.

The OGI camera doesn’t lie. The evidence is clear: the xAI facility in Memphis is polluting, unchecked, and unaccountable, while communities are left to fight for the most basic right — to breathe clean air.

AI may be invisible, but its pollution is not. It’s time to see it, name it, and demand better from our tech companies, our regulators, and ourselves.

Hiring Jack McDonald

Jack is back. After working with us last summer, Jack McDonald is joining Oilfield Witness as the Senior Analyst of Energy Policy and Science. Jack is a Texas native who became interested in oil and gas issues while his family lived on the Barnett Shale. His family experience there informed the testimony he has given before the EPA on methane regulations going back as far as high school. His work primarily focuses on highlighting failures of environmental regulators using government generated data. He has researched and published multiple reports detailing these failures in Texas which have elicited responses from both regulators and industry insiders as well as national media coverage. While attending the University of Chicago, he received the Richard P. Taub prize for original research in public policy for his thesis, “Natural Gas Flaring in Texas: A Regulatory Capture Study.”

– Till the end of oil

The Oilfield Witness Team