In the span of less than an hour, the equivalent of a year’s worth of exhaust from 16,000 cars spewed into the air when a gas pipeline owned by Energy Transfer in Webb County sprung a massive leak back in March.
This “ultraemitter” event made the news because of the extraordinary amount of methane released by the leak in such a short period of time. But these types of events are actually quite common, and while individual leaks rarely reach the magnitude of Energy Transfer’s, there are hundreds if not thousands of oil and gas facilities constantly leaking across Texas. A recent Associated Press investigation with researchers from Carbon Mapper, for example, identified more than 500 “superemitting” sites in the Permian Basin using infrared cameras to film methane escaping from flare stacks, pipeline compressors, and other parts of the gas production system.
According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), the governing agency with jurisdiction over these leaks—and where I worked as an investigator from 2015 to 2022—an emissions event is defined as “unauthorized emissions of air contaminants from a single emissions point at a regulated entity.”
