Satellites reveal US oil and gas methane intensity fell 11% as federal methane fee stalled

America’s most consequential climate law promised to put a price on methane, the potent greenhouse gas that leaks from oil and gas wells, pipelines, and storage tanks across the country. Yet when a team of atmospheric scientists pointed satellites at the contiguous United States and asked a deceptively simple question — did emissions actually fall after Congress acted? — the answer was more complicated than the legislative drama in Washington. A new study published in Communications Earth & Environment finds that methane emissions from the US oil and gas sector declined in intensity between 2019 and 2024, but the timing and pattern of that decline offer little evidence that the federal government’s landmark policy push was the driving force.

The research, led by Ao Chen and Scot Miller of Johns Hopkins University together with colleagues at several institutions, used an atmospheric inverse model constrained by satellite observations from the TROPOMI and GOSAT instruments to estimate methane emissions at a daily temporal resolution and a spatial resolution of 0.5 degrees latitude by 0.625 degrees longitude. Inverse modeling works backward from measured concentrations of methane in the air: the model simulates how emissions are transported through the atmosphere and then adjusts emission estimates until the simulated concentrations match what the satellites actually observed. The team blended the two satellite data products, using a machine-learning correction that adjusts TROPOMI retrievals to match the more accurate GOSAT measurements, and ran eight independent modeling scenarios to capture uncertainty arising from different underlying inventories of anthropogenic and wetland emissions.

The headline numbers are striking. Oil and gas methane emissions across the contiguous United States decreased by 0.58 teragrams, with an uncertainty range of 0.30 to 0.96 teragrams, from 2019 to 2023. But then, in the very years following the new federal policy, emissions increased by 0.21 teragrams between 2023 and 2024, with an uncertainty range spanning from a slight decrease of 0.06 teragrams to an increase of 0.53 teragrams. That uptick stands in sharp contrast to what the Environmental Protection Agency had projected: a 0.38 teragram reduction in oil and gas methane emissions from 2023 to 2024 from the combined influence of the Waste Emissions Charge, expected to contribute 0.15 teragrams, and the new methane rules, expected to contribute 0.23 teragrams.

The disconnect between projection and reality, the authors argue, comes down to implementation. The Inflation Reduction Act, enacted in August 2022, represented the first time Congress established a direct statutory framework and fee specifically targeting methane emissions. Its Waste Emissions Charge was designed to create a financial penalty for large emitters, and the law also created the Methane Emissions Reduction Program, allocating 1.36 billion dollars in technical and financial support for the oil and gas sector. In parallel, the EPA finalized rules in 2024 under the Clean Air Act covering both new and existing oil and gas sources. But most implementation details of the charge — conditional exemptions, monitoring requirements, and the EPA’s final regulations — remained unsettled during the study period, and subsequent political developments delayed the measures entirely, keeping the fee effectively inactive through 2026. Congress nullified the EPA’s Waste Emissions Charge rule in early 2025, and the rules for existing facilities did not come into effect until 2024, meaning states were not required to submit implementation plans until 2026.

Industry behavior compounded the regulatory limbo. While a subset of large, forward-looking operators proactively initiated enhanced monitoring and assessment protocols when the law passed, many others maintained a cautious wait-and-see posture as the technicalities of the fee and its alignment with EPA rules evolved. Even some proactive firms implemented strategic pauses in late 2023 to assess how the charge would interact with the new regulations. The authors are careful to note a caveat: they cannot rule out a counterfactual scenario in which emissions would have risen more than 0.21 teragrams in the absence of the legislation and other regulatory activity. But the data show no detectable signature of the 0.38 teragram annual reduction the EPA had anticipated.

Yet the longer arc of the data tells a genuinely encouraging story. Methane emissions intensity — total oil and gas methane emissions normalized by the combined energy equivalent of oil and natural gas production — declined by approximately 11.1 percent, with an uncertainty range of 9.3 to 13.6 percent, from 2019 to 2024, falling from 10.1 to 9.0 in units of ten-to-the-minus-four teragrams per million barrels of oil equivalent. Most of that decline occurred between 2020 and 2022, averaging 2.2 percent per year, and it happened alongside an 8.5 percent increase in production and a 3.5 percent decline in absolute emissions. The study builds on earlier work that found a 32 percent reduction in emissions intensity between 2010 and 2019, suggesting a sustained, multi-year downward trend that predates the recent federal push.

The researchers propose three explanations for why emissions stayed relatively flat even as production grew. First, earlier federal regulations — the New Source Performance Standards under Subpart OOOOa — instituted systematic leak detection and repair requirements for any facility constructed, modified, or reconstructed after September 18, 2015. These newer facilities are often built with cleaner equipment such as air-driven pneumatics and controlled tanks, yet have very high production volumes, contributing to lower overall intensity. Second, methane measurement technologies have improved dramatically over the last decade, making it easier to detect large emission events, which matter enormously because the biggest leaks account for an outsized share of total emissions. Because these advancements accumulated incrementally, they produced a gradual improvement rather than a precipitous drop in any single year. Third, rapid growth in US liquefied natural gas exports since 2019 has driven a steady increase in the outflow of Permian Basin natural gas to global markets, and the corresponding expansion of regional pipeline capacity has significantly reduced flaring and direct venting of associated gas.

The satellite-based estimates also expose a persistent gap with official accounting. Total contiguous US oil and gas methane emissions from 2019 to 2022 remained, on average, 17 percent higher than the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory, consistent with a decade of independent top-down assessments that have ranged from 12 to 100 percent above the official figures. The study concludes that the inventory captures the right directional trend in intensity but likely underestimates the absolute magnitude of emissions — capturing, as the authors put it, the right trend for the wrong reason.

Perhaps the most provocative finding concerns the states. In the three highest-emitting states with statutory greenhouse gas reduction targets — New Mexico, California, and Colorado — official oil and gas inventories aligned closely with the satellite-derived estimates, with a group average ratio of 1.0. New Mexico showed near-perfect agreement, while Colorado and California remained closely aligned. In the three highest-emitting states without such targets — Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma — inventories were substantially lower than the inverse model estimates, with a group average ratio of 3.7, reaching 5.8 in Oklahoma. States with targets tend to fund methane measurement campaigns and use custom emission factors, whereas states like Texas and Oklahoma often extrapolate emission factors from large, well-regulated facilities to smaller operators, even though low-producing wells have disproportionately high methane intensity.

But accurate accounting did not translate into faster reductions. The inverse model ensemble revealed no substantial difference in oil and gas methane emission trends between states with and without greenhouse gas targets during 2019 to 2024, with overlapping reduction rates. Texas — the largest emitting state, with no target — showed a 14 percent decline in oil and gas methane emissions, from 3.50 teragrams in 2019 to 3.02 teragrams in 2024, likely aided by new pipelines such as the Gulf Coast Express, Whistler Express, and Matterhorn Express that move Permian gas to market instead of flaring it, and by a rising gas-to-oil ratio that makes captured gas more valuable. Meanwhile California, despite its aggressive statutory mandate of a 40 percent reduction by 2030, would need to cut an additional 0.51 teragrams — dwarfing the 0.12 teragram reduction achieved over the preceding decade. The lesson, the authors suggest, is that emissions reduction is a complex process: infrastructure, technology, and economics may matter as much as the laws written on paper, and simply dividing states into those with targets and those without is insufficient for predicting who will actually cut methane fastest.

Subject of Research: Satellite-based estimation of US oil and gas methane emission trends and the impact of federal methane policy from 2019 to 2024

Article Title: U.S. oil and gas methane emission intensity declined 2019–2024 with little indication of federal policy impact

Article References: U.S. oil and gas methane emission intensity declined 2019–2024 with little indication of federal policy impact. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-04039-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s43247-026-04039-0

Keywords: methane emissions, oil and gas, Inflation Reduction Act, Waste Emissions Charge, satellite observations, inverse modeling, TROPOMI, GOSAT, emissions intensity, EPA regulations, Permian Basin, state climate policy