Texas Shale Refineries Release "Unimaginable" Amounts of Methane Emissions

Drilled

Pushkin Industries

Earth Sciences, True Crime, Science

4.6 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2020

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Field investigator Sharon Wilson has spotted a troubling increase in methane emissions from refineries in the Permian Basin, in Texas. Things went from bad to worse in January 2020, and really blew up in early March ... almost as though they knew regulators wouldn't be watching.

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Drill. We're calling this surprise season. There will be fraud. And we're
0:16.3	doing it because the fossil fuel industry is trying to leverage the hell out of a pandemic.
0:21.7	Of course they are. Reporting has really started to pick up on what's happening on this
0:27.7	story at the national level. I highly recommend you follow the reporting that Alex Kaufman and
0:33.9	Kristi Injolo were doing a half post Emily Atkins heated Kate Aranoff at the New Republic
0:40.4	and Justin McCulker at Deesmog. We're covering the national stuff on this podcast and on the Drill
0:46.0	news website too. But one of the things I wanted to try to do with this series is make sure
0:50.9	people know about everything that's happening at the state level and even the local level. In
0:56.2	the last week I've gotten emails from folks in Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts and California.
1:01.8	Each with a different story about what the fossil fuel industry is trying to use coronavirus to
1:07.6	get away with in their backyards. Today we're headed to Texas. So I'm Sharon Wilson and I'm senior
1:16.8	field advocate for earthworks and further back than that I worked for the oil and gas industry. And I was
1:26.0	uncomfortable with the ethics of the industry as a whole. And that was before I knew about any of
1:35.3	the environmental impacts. So eventually despite the fact that they paid very very high salary, I left
1:44.4	the oil and gas industry and moved to Wise County. I bought 42 acres next to the LBJ National
1:53.1	Grasslands and I didn't know that that's where George Mitchell, the father of fracking was experimenting
2:01.5	with how to economically frack oil and gas from shale. And so I had a ringside seat to that
2:10.0	adventure and my air turned brown and my well water turned black. So yeah, that made me mad.
2:22.2	Now years later Sharon takes her optical gas imaging equipment around the Permian basin to
2:29.3	document emissions from oil and gas companies. She's going to tell us what she's been seeing since
2:34.1	this January and why the coronavirus might end up resulting in more methane emissions even if it
2:40.7	temporarily reduces CO2 emissions. That's coming up right after a quick message from today's sponsor.
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