Small emission sources in aggregate disproportionately account for a large majority of total methane emissions from the US oil and gas sector

Williams, James P.; Omara, Mark; Himmelberger, Anthony; Zavala-Araiza, Daniel; MacKay, Katlyn; Benmergui, Joshua; Sargent, Maryann; Wofsy, Steven C.; Hamburg, Steven P.; Gautam, Ritesh

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-1513-2025

Articles | Volume 25, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-1513-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-1513-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 25, issue 3

Research article

|

04 Feb 2025

Research article |

| 04 Feb 2025

Small emission sources in aggregate disproportionately account for a large majority of total methane emissions from the US oil and gas sector

James P. Williams, Mark Omara, Anthony Himmelberger, Daniel Zavala-Araiza, Katlyn MacKay, Joshua Benmergui, Maryann Sargent, Steven C. Wofsy, Steven P. Hamburg, and Ritesh Gautam

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-1513-2025-supplement

Data sets

Estimated individual methane emission rates for oil and gas facilities from the continental United States in 2021 James P. Williams et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13314532

MethaneAIR L4 Area Sources 2021 Earth Engine Data Catalog https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/EDF_MethaneSAT_MethaneAIR_L4area

MethaneAIR L4 Point Sources v1 Earth Engine Data Catalog https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/EDF_MethaneSAT_MethaneAIR_L4point

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Short summary

We utilize peer-reviewed facility-level oil and gas methane emission rate data gathered in prior work to estimate the relative contributions of methane sources emitting at different emission rates in the United States. We find that the majority of total methane emissions in the US oil and gas sector stem from a large number of small sources emitting in aggregate, corroborating findings from several other studies.