Exclusive: Fixing a leak can be simple and equivalent to closing a coal power station, making lack of action maddening, say analysts
The world’s worst mega-leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane in 2025 have been revealed by an analysis of satellite data.
The super-polluting plumes from oil and gas facilities have a colossal heating impact on the climate but often result from poor maintenance and can be simple to fix. The assessment found dozens of mega-leaks, each having the same global heating impact as a coal-fired power station.
The researchers said it was “maddening” that such easy action to fight the climate crisis was not being taken, and said people should be angry. Stopping the leaks can even be free, given that captured gas can be sold – methane is the “natural gas” that fires power stations.
I was expecting it to be cow farts.
How does this compare to the methane from beef? (seriously, I’d like to know)
The researchers said it was “maddening” that such easy action to fight the climate crisis was not being taken, and said people should be angry. Stopping the leaks can even be free, given that captured gas can be sold – methane is the “natural gas” that fires power stations.
It’s maddening but expected.
When corporate decisions are based solely on pleasing investors, fixing a leak isn’t a priority. It might be a long-term investment that eventually pays for itself, but it comes with a front-loaded cost that diminishes the profits of the current quarter.
The only way to get them to care about the problem is if it’s actively unprofitable or comes with personal liability for the leadership, and the only way that will happen is with regulations.
In other words: “why about the survivability of the species when we can instead care about making our investor’s loins tingle?”
When corporate decisions are based solely on pleasing investors, fixing a leak isn’t a priority. It might be a long-term investment that eventually pays for itself, but it comes with a front-loaded cost that diminishes the profits of the current quarter.
The shitty thing is the vast majority of the leaks weren’t from investor owned corporations. The vast majority were from state owned and operated entities, mainly turkmenistan. The top 25 list were filled entirely by turkmenistan, Venezuela, Iran, and one corpo from texas.
But make sure you turn lights off, consumer, because it’s all your fault.
Please stop turning this into an either / or.
Where did I do that?
I admit my thoughts on this go far beyond just your comment. This is a widespread narrative about how corporations pollute, therefore consumer footprint is bullshit or an outright conspiracy.
People keep standing up and pointing at commercial polluting and saying “well? Which is it? Should I turn off the lights at home or should corporations stop polluting?” It’s not either / or. It’s both. You should absolutely turn the lights off when not in use.
Here’s how this should go:
- consumers do what they can to conserve
- corporations pollute
- consumers get mad at the corporations and pressure them to stop
Instead, with your now highest-voted comment, here is what’s happening:
- consumers do what they can to conserve
- corporations pollute
- consumers get mad that they ever bothered to conserve
Do you see how this is the wrong outcome?
The thing I never buy about this is that people make out as if someone is going around with a bell crying SHAME SHAME at them every time they don’t recycle. IMO this is a phantasm: we all know what’s the right thing to do - maybe we feel guilty if we don’t do it, but there is no oil company representative going around wracking us all with guilt.
There are 8 billion consumers, with projections of 12 in our lifetimes. It absolutely matters what consumers do. If you want to reduce this to you personally agains the actions of some corporation, that’s simply bad faith. Collectively, consumer action is extremely important, especially in purchase decisions, which put direct pressure back on the companies polluting the worst, and at the ballot box, where we put pressure on our governments to regulate them.
Please stop moaning about the injustice of “personal footprint” every time you see evidence of a corporation misbehaving. It’s not either they have to act or we do. It’s both!
Well these d-bags aren’t operating these oil or gas wells for funzies
What’s your carbon footprint
I get what you’re saying and the “individual carbon footprint” is often used to blame shift to regular people just living their lives, but we do still have a carbon footprint. It may be a tiny, rodent-sized footprint compared to the Kaiju-sized ones of big industries, but our actions and choices do have an effect (especially collectively).
I just don’t like dismissing the individual carbon footprint as total propaganda because it’s not wrong (though I acknowledge it is abused). Dismissing it like that just puts out a defeatist “nothing I do matters” message when our individual choices do matter and add up.
Can you live a totally carbon-neutral life in the modern age? No, probably not. But we also shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and do nothing.
I saw last week the Gas Leaks Project published some more data on this subject. The largest leak they found was something like 50-60 times higher than the EPA definition of a ‘super emitter’. Incredible really.
When compared to coal, methane is obviously much more efficient at energy generation. But this is true when we measure only the material burned, not when we look at the supply chain. With methane being 80-90 times more damaging to the atmosphere than the byproducts of burning coal, the end result is very tight once these leaks are accounted for.
So tight that, given the reporting requirements for methane leaks are ‘we trust you to use the honour system’, it’s more likely than not methane is doing more damage per resulting kilowatt than coal ever has. The equivalent ‘leaking’ for the coal supply chain is a lump of it falling off a train car and becoming a rock, to the benefit of only one guy. Rocks don’t tend to destroy the air, only naughty children’s Christmas mornings.
Of course this isn’t to suggest we build more coal infrastructure, just to point out that with these methane leaks being so prevalent, it’s not remotely as useful an energy source as has been believed. Remember a decade ago when ‘bridge fuel’ was mentioned in every conversation about clean energy? Honestly it’s shocking that these companies have deemed it cheaper to not even look for leaks than to keep the product they sell from floating away.
Here's an interesting quote from former Exxon mechanical engineer, Dar-Lon Chang:
"When they were marketing natural gas as clean energy, they didn’t really know what they were talking about because they were fixated on the idea that natural gas, when burned, produces half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal.
The industry was not monitoring methane leakage, so they did not have data about how much was leaking, and there wasn’t much appetite for management to measure methane leakage because if they found out there was a problem they would have to do something about it."
Source (I lost the timestamp, but it’s in part three, apologies)
I know YT shorts are bunk, but for anyone who partakes and wants to curate their stream, may I present climate town on this issue:
It’s a miracle we didn’t get extinct yet
There are people that can fix that any day at this point.
It’s started, it’s just unevenly distributed among the poorer populations
Link to analysis - https://law.ucla.edu/news/spotlight-top-25-methane-plumes-2025-oil-gas
The problem will solve itself once fewer fossil fuels are consumed overall, there’s less fuels to transport around and therefore fewer leaks … also the companies are losing money on the leaks so they already have an incentive to fix shit today.
Yeah. It’ll solve itself when the habitability of the planet declines enough to prevent the continuation of a high-tech global economy.
Bro, just let me have my sex bots first
One could argue the quest for sex bots is a root cause
If they had any incentive, they would test regularly for leaks. They don’t and never have.
It’s in the article:
The researchers said it was “maddening” that such easy action to fight the climate crisis was not being taken, and said people should be angry. Stopping the leaks can even be free, given that captured gas can be sold – methane is the “natural gas” that fires power stations.
Gas that does not leak is gas that can be sold.
Certainly. I too commented on that. They’re letting profits literally float away. However what those researchers feel is maddening, to the capitalists is justifiable.
Why spend a dollar to retain a kilogram of methane from escaping, when that same dollar could be used to extract ten kilograms of methane? Repairing the infrastructure would be a lower return on investment, and that’s all that matters to them. They serve the bottom line.
If it were more profitable to repair and maintain the infrastructure, the infrastructure would be repaired and maintained. Alas it isn’t, and so the leaks continue.
yeah that makes sense actually
Except greenhouse effect will keep warming the earth for decades after we consume less fossil fuels. It’s like shitting on the rug and saying the problem will solve itself when you stop shitting in the rug.
We have consumed roughly half of the planet’s fossil fuels that are known and not too difficult to access.
If we continue and consume the other half it won’t matter one shit by then if the problem of leaks have ‘fixed themselves’ because most of humanity will be dead, those that remain will live in a world with so much CO2 in the atmosphere that they’re in permanent cognitive impairment.
