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Many companies do directly drill for and capture natural gas for use. But researchers have warned that drilling for the gas also causes sizable leaks of methane directly into the atmosphere, which is even more damaging for the climate than flaring the gas. Methane can also escape faulty flares, and companies sometimes also deliberately release the gas from wells and pipelines in a practice known as venting.
Methane can trap more than 80 times more heat in the earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide, over the shorter term. Research has shown that methane emissions from oil and gas production are far larger than previously estimated.
“The oil and natural gas industry has a pure economic incentive to prevent every molecule of ‘pollutant’ from escaping to the atmosphere,” wrote James D. Elliott, a lawyer representing a coalition of oil and gas groups led by the Independent Petroleum Association, in a letter to the EPA in 2019.
But speaking a few months earlier, at the June 2019 meeting, Mr. Ness appeared to contradict that argument. There is such a glut of natural gas, he said, that some producers that drill primarily for oil have little use for the gas that comes up with it. Yet “you’ve got to manage your gas to produce your oil.”
