Air Pollution From Oil and Gas Production Sites Seen From Space

Oil and fuel manufacturing has doubled in some areas of the United States in two years. The production, which leads to air pollution, was seen from space.

In the new research published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists used satellites to see the influences of the trend. Researchers noted a significant increase in the release of the lung-irritating air pollutant nitrogen dioxide and a more-than-doubling of the amount of gas flared into the atmosphere.

Barbara Dix, a scientist of the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author, said the team used satellite data to give feedback to companies and regulators.

Dix and her team researchers set out to see if satellites could assist scientists in understanding better about nitrogen oxides pollution from engines in U.S. Oil and gasoline fields. Combustion engines produce nitrogen oxides, a respiratory irritant, could lead to the formation of other sorts of harmful air pollutants, such as ground-degree ozone.

Co-author Joost de Gouw, a CIRES Fellow and chemistry professor at CU Boulder, noted that there are numerous small and huge combustion engines, drilling, compressing gasoline, separating liquids and gases, and moving gas and oil through pipes and storage containers in oil and gas drilling and production sites. 

The emissions of those engines are not controlled. "Cars have catalytic converters, massive industrial stacks might also have emissions discount equipment..." de Gouw stated. "Not so with these engines."

De Gouw said conventional "inventories" intended to account for nitrogen oxides pollution from oil and fuel websites are frequently very uncertain, underestimating or overestimating the pollutants. And there are few sustained measurements of nitrogen oxides in the various rural regions in which oil and fuel development often takes place, Dix said.

Dix and her colleagues collaborated with NASA and the European Space Agency to obtain nitrogen dioxide data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TropOMI). They additionally looked at gasoline flaring information from an instrument at the NOAA/NASA Suomi satellite system.

The team confirmed previous findings that nitrogen dioxide pollutants degrees throughout most of the United States between 2007 and 2019 dropped due to cleaner cars and energy plants.

The clean air trend in satellite records was most apparent in urban areas of California, Washington, and Oregon and in the eastern half of the continental United States. 

However, numerous regions caught out with accelerated emissions of nitrogen dioxide from various oil and fuel basins in Texas and New Mexico, North Dakota, and Texas.

In those areas, the scientists used a sort of time-series evaluation to determine out wherein the pollutant became coming from: Drilling of new wells vs. longer-time period production. They should do this form of evaluation as drilling interest swings up and down quickly in response to economic forces while production adjusts ways more slowly.

Before a downturn in drilling in 2015, drilling generated approximately 80 percent of nitrogen dioxide from oil and fuel web sites, the team suggested. After 2015, drilling and production produced roughly the same amounts of the pollutant. Flaring is envisioned to contribute as much as ten percent in each time frame.

The researchers also developed a new oil and gasoline emissions inventory, using records on fuel use via the industry, the region of drilling rigs, and properly-stage production data. co-writer Brian McDonald, a CIRES scientist operating in NOAA's Chemical Sciences Division, said the innovation "is a promising development" that looking from space may explain predicted traits in emissions from the oil and fuel industry.

"Scientifically, this is especially crucial: we can do source attribution by using satellite," de Gouw said. "We want to recognize the essential assets to deal with those emissions in the maximum cost-green manner."