Extracting that part here because it's really buried:
> Satellite imaging of methane leaks across the Permian basin, a vast geological feature at the heart of the US oil and gas drilling industry, show that sites in Texas have emitted double the amount of the gas than in New Mexico, per unit of production, since 2019.
> Methane is emitted from various activities, such as from the raising of livestock, but oil and gas production is the biggest source of the pollutant in the US ...
The other confounder that came to mind quickly is that Texas is generally hotter than New Mexico. Even though methane is a gas regardless, I would expect this to have an effect, since diffusion processes generally happen faster when it's warmer.
in addition there is a scaling factor. it's easy to control mistakes when you have 1 well. hard to control mistakes when you have 10,000,000 wells. thus the regulation has to be mapped appropriately.
also, I'd be interested in seeing p90, p99, etc. to see if outliers affect the average that is reported -- because as texas probably has larger 100x production, average is exposed to more large incidents.
i would be MOST interested to compare against other similar "sovereign entity" with comparable production scale and comparable challenges e.g. geography and infra.
the US has a huge environmental benefit in producing oil vs entity's like China, Saudi Arabia, because as a transparent democracy we are able to hold our producers accountable to regulation where offshore producers have no transparency and accountability.
