Methane Hunting in West Texas
Sharon Wilson turns a special lens on the oil patch.
We’ve been touring the south of the U.S. looking at some of the biggest, and most controversial, data center projects in the world. That’s included xAI’s Colossus, Meta’s Richland Parish project in Louisiana, OpenAI’s projects in Abilene, Texas and Google projects in the Panhandle.
All of these data centers, and many, many more, crave natural gas, which for now their owners have decided is the fastest, best fuel to produce artificial intelligence. Other energy technologies may play a role, from solar and batteries in the near term to nuclear and geothermal beginning in a decade or so.
But for now, they’ve deemed gas the cat’s pajamas.
That means the first big result of the rush to build so many data centers so fast will be a massive expansion of the already-expansive U.S. natural gas industry. A decade from now, the U.S. could be using and additional gas equivalent to that Europe uses today if you believe one industry estimate. That may help address the artificial intelligence industry’s challenge in powering battalions of data centers.
It will also mean far more methane in the atmosphere to accelerate global warming. To better understand just why that is, I got a close look at oil and gas infrastructure through a very special lens thanks to anti-fossil fuel activist Sharon Wilson.
The great West Texas oil and gas industry buildout over the past two decades has been explained mostly from on high, at a great remove from its dusty, dirty reality.
Love it or hate it, the story of the “fracking revolution” — which has grown oil production in West Texas 10-fold and natural gas production 5-fold — has been told as a tally of drilling rigs, accountings of crude oil barrels and cubic feet of gas, parts per million calculations of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, surveys of drillable acres, and reams of fossil fuel reservoirs assessments.
These accountings usually take place behind glass-paned office conference rooms and hotel ballroom room stages flanked by powerpoint slides and slick videos.
This has not been Sharon Wilson’s view of the revolution.
Wilson comes at the oil and gas from the ground up, finding and filming the many and varied installations of the Permian Basin with a high-tech “Optical Gas Imaging Camera” that can “see” hydrocarbon emissions. This includes methane, a particularly pernicious greenhouse gas that is the focus of her and other climate activists and, indeed, even the oil and gas industry itself.
It is not a pretty picture.
Wilson founded Oilfield Witness, a group that advocates against fossil fuel use, a major source of methane emissions. She regularly criss-crosses West Texas — journalists, academics and other activists in tow — to document the particularly acute environmental threat emissions of methane from oil and gas installations pose.
I recently accompanied her through the area, which is not too far from the last few stops on my recent data center tour. She worries the proliferation of data centers in Texas — nearly all of which are looking first to natural gas to power their operations — will be another setback for efforts to stem global warming.
Methane, the main component in natural gas, is both a product and pollutant.
In some cases drillers bring natural gas to the surface with the express purpose of selling it. It’s used as a heating fuel for homes, as well as the source of heat to fire gas generators, the backbone of the U.S. power system and provider of half the electricity in Texas.
But more often, especially in West Texas, natural gas comes to the surface as a byproduct alongside the millions of barrels of oil that have made the Permian Basin America’s premier oil patch.
Companies drilling specifically for gas send it through a network of designated pipelines to sales hubs or directly to power plants. Oil drillers sometimes do the same with the “associated” gas that comes along with their mainstay product.
More often, though, they send it up through a stack and light it on fire. These flares dot the West Texas landscape.
Wilson points them out every few minutes as we drive from Midland, the oil and gas capital of West Texas depicted in the recent streaming series Landman.
When it comes to climate change, methane is the Jekyll and Hyde of fossil fuels.
Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, emitting about half the carbon dioxide. Expanded use of gas in the U.S. over the past three decades has helped drive coal use down, especially in Texas. That has significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions, one the reason the gas industry likes to call itself a “clean” fuel.
Still, burning methane at scale can release a lot of climate warming CO2. But methan is even more problematic when released into the atmosphere without being combusted. And, unfortunately, methane regularly finds its way into the atmosphere uncombusted, often in large quantities. The gas sometimes accidently leaks from wells and pipelines for long periods, either without detection or due to negligence. But companies also routinely, intentionally — often perfectly legally — release lots of methane while repairing equipment or to relieve pipeline pressure during storms and cold snaps that shut down the flow of gas from well to market.
“We could live with the leaks, if that’s all there were,” Wilson says during a stop at a major gas processing plant. “It’s the intentional stuff that’s the real problem.”
Here’s a video Wilson made showing the gas plant. Not all of what’s pouring from these facilities is methane. Closest to the source, part of what the camera sees is heat. But much of what you see rising beyond that are hydrocarbons, often including methane.
Here’s another gas processing plant where she filmed gas turbines in operation.
Here’s a facility where waste water is being processed.
Meanwhile, the flares intended to combust natural gas released as part of drilling or processing often don’t burn all the methane passing through the stack. Other times, the flame blows out altogether and the gas simply escapes.
Uncombusted methane causes 80 times more global warming than carbon dioxide for the first two decades it floats about. The gas is responsible for about one-third of the nearly 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celcius) warming since the beginning of the industrial age.
The oil and gas industry has increasingly come under pressure to deal with methane releases. Or at least it had been coming under pressure before the second Trump administration.
The Biden administration passed regulations requiring the industry to improve the monitoring and reporting of releases, with significant penalities for failure to do so.
The European Union — which has rapidly increased its purchases of natural gas from the U.S. in the form of LNG, or Liquified Natural Gas that’s shipped on tankers — is implementing rules designed to track and minimize the methane emissions associated with gas purchases. Asian LNG buyers also say they would like to reduce the methane emissions associated with their LNG purchases.
But the Trump administration repealed the Biden-era methane regulations and is now pressuring Europe to water down its rules, or drop them altogether, to ease any burden on the industry.
Still, the oil and gas industry has become sensitive to methane emissions, and some companies have begun to address it. At a global climate summit in 2023, 50 oil and gas companies agreed to reduce global warming gas emissions, including methane in their operations.
The first snag they’ve run into, however, is that it turns out the problem is significantly worse than the industry has acknowledged.
That’s become increasingly obvious as monitoring tools such as Wilson’s specialized camera and an even more ambitious effort by the Environmental Defense Fund to gauge methane emissions from an orbiting satellite have come into use.
Data from a year of the Environmental Defense Fund satellite’s work showed far more methane emissions taking place than was generally understood. In the chart below, “inventories” — on the right — are what the industry and regulators report based on generalized studies of methane releases. “MethaneSat,” on the left, are what the satellite actually observed and measured.
U.S. oil and gas fields — the Permian, Appalachan, Eagleford, Haynesville and Utica regional basins below — are among the world’s biggest methane emitters, according to the EDF data.
Meanwhile, as we’ve seen in our recent look at data centers, the tech industry’s pursuit of computing power for artificial intelligence is creating a tidal wave of new demand for natural gas, in Texas and beyond. The gas industry is scrambling to build new pipelines and gas network connections to data center sites, including West Texas.
Overall, the U.S. saw plans to develop new gas-fired generation capacity almost triple last year over 2024 — a build-out that would double the size of the U.S. gas generation fleet, according to Global Energy Monitor.
Texas is the focus of much of this activity.
With gas production expanding, distribution networks exploding and governments loosening oversight, emissions are almost certain to grow.
”You’re never going to stop this if you keep expanding,” Wilson says.
Wilson worked an oil industry administrative job in Dallas back in the 1990s when she purchased a farm in West Texas. She didn’t know much of anything about the new form of oil and gas drilling that came to be called fracking, but learned fast when a driller set up shop next door to her property and, she says, began to impact her water supply and peace of mind.
Over time, she went from battling over her own property to taking on the industry as an activist. Methane emerged as an urgent issue in recent years, just as the sort of specialized equipment she now deploys came into more common use.
Prior to the specialized cameras and satellites, convincing governments and the public there was even an issue was a challenge.
”You only get a fraction of what really happens out here because methane’s invisible and they often don’t have to report it,” she told me.
It's just a flir thermal camera 🤗 funny how all these "climate scientists" never know the first thing about science