Howdy and Happy New Year!  2025 was a big year of growth for our team. We added Charlie and Jack to the team and we expanded our working area to include Japan, Europe, Mexico and Canada.

“It’s Really There. And It’s Bad.”

Tim went to Canada to document methane emissions from oil and gas including on Teresa’s farm. Teresa explains her story in this video including the moment that Tim shows her the invisible emissions using our camera.

"This spring a fellow came out with a camera. He just looks at me and he points at the camera and he said you better look at this. And there it was, just coming off the lease...and right then and there the secret seemed to come to life...I'm not crazy, I'm not crazy. It's really there. And it’s bad."

Our Work in the Media

An op-ed in Canada’s National Observer which calls for a moratorium on new LNG development quotes Sharon and Justin.

“From well to customer, LNG operations are in reality more fragile and have weaker oversight and monitoring, making significant methane reductions difficult despite industry promises and emerging detection technologies.”

Inside Climate News published an article on LNG emissions in Peru that quotes Justin.

“The idea that LNG is presented as a ‘non-polluting fuel’ in the documents is total madness and obviously completely untrue,” said Mikulka. “The fact that this is written down in the documents shows that they have been put together without any rigor or commitment to ensuring proper standards.”

Charlie was quoted in a story about air pollution from the Artesia refinery fire.

“Families in Artesia deserve to know what’s in the air they’re breathing – not days later, not filtered through corporate PR, but in real time,” said Charlie Barrett, thermographer for Oilfield Witness.

Our work and quotes were also mentioned in Net Zero Investor, The Invading Sea, the CBC, the CBC again, Climate and Capital Media and on Bluesky.

Fieldwork

Sharon and Jack were in the field in December working with a journalist and visited the Energy Transfer compressor where Sharon documented a blowdown. This is the same site that Sharon visited while working on a documentary by a Japanese film crew in 2024 when they also found a blowdown in progress. Blowdowns are when pipeline and system gas is vented or "blown down” to the atmosphere. These are intentional releases of methane.

Charlie did field work in New Mexico and Oklahoma in December. He also visited a compressor station and while it wasn’t blowing down like the one Sharon and Jack documented, it was still emitting a lot just under normal operating conditions.

Our Newest Thermographer

Jack became a certified optical gas imaging (OGI) thermographer in December and has already been out doing some fieldwork. We now have three thermographers and two OGI cameras which means we can respond better to the many requests for our work.

Our Writing

Justin wrote about how the Bakken oil field will not come close to delivering on the promises of its biggest promoter and how this is also true of the larger U.S. oil and gas industry as the Permian in Texas peaks.

"I’ve yet to see one acknowledgement in the major financial press about how badly the Bakken performed compared to how it was sold. Why should this happen?  Because the average American still thinks there is endless oil and gas in the U.S. shale. They are going to pay the price for the industry fraud in multiple ways. First, with higher electricity and heating prices as natural gas supplies become scarce. Secondly, they don’t realize how the current administration’s attempts to block renewable energy and electric vehicles in America is based on the lie that there is plenty of cheap oil and gas to use instead.”

Justin’s piece from November on the global oil demand was translated into Spanish and published in Spain.

Our team researched and wrote about the latest developments in the EU methane regulation process.

The current negotiations around EU/US methane regulations are being sold to the public based on a major unproven assumption which is being repeated by many of the largest “green” NGOs in Europe and the US.

The Assumption: There is already more than enough natural gas (methane) produced in the U.S. that has emissions below the proposed EU limits of 0.2% of produced gas.

There is no peer reviewed science to back up this claim and all of the peer reviewed basin-level emissions data shows much higher emissions than would be required for the EU standards.

- Till the end of oil

The Oilfield Witness Team