News from September

Sharon and Miguel filming methane emissions.

Howdy, yall! We had another busy month with work in Texas, New Mexico and Louisiana. Unfortunately, there are many places to hunt oil and gas industry methane emissions.

Our Work in the Media

Rolling Stone published Justin Nobel’s article on the tragic story of oil industry worker Jeff Springman being poisoned by toxic hydrocarbon emissions while manually gauging storage tanks.

“I learned of Jeff Springman via a desperate call from Sharon Wilson, director of Oilfield Witness, a certified optical-gas-imaging thermographer who has spent years documenting the harms Texas’ oil-and-gas industry has wrought on the Texas environment and its own workforce. Springman’s case was different.”

The Texas Tribune and Inside Climate News published a story on the problem of deadly hydrogen sulfide gas pollution from the oil and gas industry.

“Sharon Wilson of the nonprofit Oilfield Witness has researched compliance with the Railroad Commission’s hydrogen sulfide rules. In a previous report, she found that many companies fail to submit the H9 form reporting the hydrogen sulfide level at wells.

“Texas has a gas problem. We have a hydrogen sulfide problem and it's putting people at risk,” Wilson said. “We see the high levels of hydrogen sulfide from the few air monitors there are in the Permian Basin.”

Fieldwork

It was a busy month for fieldwork.

Sharon went to New Mexico to work with the Center for Biological Diversity to show New Mexico legislators the invisible pollution of the oil industry and then she testified at a hearing about the need for larger setbacks to try to protect frontline communities from oil and gas production.

Image: Sharon talking to New Mexico representatives.

The whole team went to Louisiana to support the critical work of FISH, Habitat Recovery Project and For a Better Bayou, who are all working together to stop the expansion of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry that is a climate and environmental disaster. We spent time on boats of several of the local shrimp fishermen who are fighting the air pollution from these massive LNG projects and the damage to the waters that are producing far less shrimp than before they built the first LNG export terminal. They now want to build a second one right there as well.

Image: Sharon on Captain Tad’s shrimp boat talking to him about methane emissions from the Venture Global LNG export facility that has decimated the local shrimp fishing industry.

Oilfield Witness Observations

Justin wrote about the study that identified methane and hydrogen sulfide pollution from oil wells in Texas (the same study featured in the Texas Tribune article).

In May we explained in an op-ed in Scientific American how economics are driving the methane pollution crisis. For a good portion of 2024, the price of Permian natural gas (aka methane) has been negative. So oil producers have a choice to make: pay someone to take it away or dump it in the atmosphere. It’s the same choice that was made for the oil wells in this recent study and they always choose whatever path makes a bit more money.

“Residents reported that after the gas processing company left the community, collection pipes were removed or disconnected from wells, and the site of the gas processing plant was remediated.”

Optical Gas Imaging Video

On September 27th Bloomberg published an article about methane regulations and Cheniere’s desire to write them.

“Cheniere Energy Inc.’s top executive Jack Fusco wants the biggest gas exporter in the US to set the rules to measure the environmental impact of liquefied natural gas, using a fleet of methane tracking technologies and the company’s clout as the nation’s top consumer of the fuel.”

On September 30th, Sharon narrated this video of a Cheniere compressor station venting methane.

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- Till the end of oil

The Oilfield Witness Team

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