Recent Articles
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New Satellites Alone Won’t Stop the Methane Climate Crisis

In March, a SpaceX rocket launched MethaneSat, a joint U.S.-New Zealand endeavor, which joined a satellite network already detecting methane emissions from oil and gas production on Earth. The new satellite circles the Earth 15 times a day, detecting releases of the greenhouse gas from drilling sites and pipelines worldwide.

However, on the ground in the oilfields of Texas, we see that the promise of this technology will fall short of the rapid reductions of methane emissions needed to slow climate change.

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Oil Industry Methane Pollution Is Business as Usual, Not Accidental

The oil industry is once again winning the messaging war to mislead the public about the true nature of its business. Methane is getting significant media attention these days due to the launch of a new methane-detecting satellite and new U.S. methane regulations that may require some companies to pay fines for large methane emissions. However, almost all of the media coverage is making the mistake of talking about methane “leaks” or “fugitive emissions” being the main problem, when that is far from the truth.

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U.S. Oil Industry Peaks as “the days of easy oil are over”

In October, shortly after Exxon and Chevron announced over $100 billion in combined acquisitions, oilfield services company Halliburton’s CEO Jeff Miller warned about the reality of producing oil in the U.S. shale industry.
“The reality is you have to do more work in order to stay flat.”This is an acknowledgement of the dreaded Red Queen effect for shale oil production. This is the situation where you have to do more just to keep production flat (aka running faster just to stay in place) because fracked shale oil wells decline much faster than conventional oil wells. This isn’t a new concept. Reuters reported on it in 2013 saying, “Shale production has been likened to Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen Race, in which more and more new wells will need to be drilled just to offset rapidly declining output from existing holes.”

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Touring Ground Zero of the Methane Emergency

March 12 – Flying into Midland, Texas on my quest to see the source of the Permian’s high methane emissions, I was greeted by familiar images. As the plane descends into Midland, you see endless shale oil wells in grid formation across the Texas desert. I’ve used similar images for my articles over the years but it was the first time seeing it in person. The only thing that surprised me was the amount of waste water pits. The only standing water in this part of the Texas desert is toxic oil field wastewater. It’s everywhere. They are creating so much toxic wastewater producing oil in the Permian that they have nowhere to put it. I first wrote about this issue in 2018 and it continues to be a big problem for the fracking industry. And the “solutions” they have, like injecting the toxic water back into the ground, definitely have consequences.

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Exxon’s $20 Billion Fraud Lawsuit Continues

In March of 2019, U.S. oil major Chevron announced it planned to make investments in its Permian oil operations that would increase its production of oil and other liquids to 900,000 barrels per day (bpd) by 2023. Approximately 95 minutes later, Exxon announced that it planned to reach one million bdp by 2024. Was Exxon responding to Chevron’s plan with a hasty public relations stunt not based in the reality of its Permian acreage? Now that it is 2024, it seems worth evaluating. Along with reviewing the status of the ongoing fraud lawsuit focused on that one million bpd prediction which looks at the question of whether, “ExxonMobil portrayed its oil and gas assets in the Permian Basin as more valuable than they were.”
Exxon’s optimism about its Permian operations didn’t stop in 2019. In March of 2020, Neil Chapman, the head of Exxon’s oil and gas division told the audience at the annual Investor Day conference that, “For our largest resource, which is in the Delaware Basin [located in the Permian], we’re only just about to unleash the hounds.”

Mentions in the Media

“Despite this, U.S. oil majors have not written down or retired Permian assets or otherwise disclosed assumptions about project breakevens in their SEC filings. Instead, as analyst Justin Mikulka has shown, they have effectively used the media to disseminate an unsupported claim that their Permian assets will be among the world’s low-cost producers.”

Seb Kennedy is a must read on LNG markets. If you want to sign up for my newsletter he recommends, you can do that for free right here. https://powering-the-planet.ghost.io/#/portal/signup

And, Justin Mikulka in “Great News for Clean Power and Storage” at The Daily Kos can probably relate as much as anybody and perhaps understands more than most. He writes: “There is a lot of great news in the clean energy space. We have the tools and technologies we need to transition to clean energy and eliminate carbon dioxide and methane emissions. That said, it isn’t enough yet. Emissions are still rising, including the potent greenhouse gas methane, and climate impacts are getting impossible to ignore. We need to get our politicians to do a lot more, a lot faster.”

I second that.

“Justin Mikulka writes how great it is that the Biden administration is considering scrapping its plans to encourage natural gas plants to burn hydrogen.”

“Justin Mikulka is a great reporter who’s been on the energy beat for more than a decade and this piece draws attention to the incredibly important point that in addition to using the atmosphere as its dumping ground, the fossil fuel industry uses the literal earth as its dumping ground too, leaving taxpayers to clean up the mess of abandoned and idle wells that dot the country.” Amy Westervelt, Drilled

“While the trains are still burning, they’re rebuilding the rails,” Mikulka told Grist. “It’s again an excellent example of how they put profit over public safety.”

“Every potential opportunity to exploit oil and gas reserves in this country has been looked at in detail by experienced professionals,” said Justin Mikulka, a research fellow at the energy-transition think tank New Consensus. “We now have some people with no experience who are looking for a lot of public money to do this project, which raises a red flag. They will get paid handsomely if they are able to pull it off — that doesn’t mean it’s a good financial investment.”

“Economically, as a long-term investment, you want to be in green hydrogen,” said Mikulka of New Consensus. “And so I think that there’s a lot of risk in pursuing these blue hydrogen projects.” 

“Getting the world to use blue hydrogen made from natural gas gives the oil and gas industry a way to lock in decades of natural gas demand via blue hydrogen,” Mikulka said.

I was on Democracy Now to discuss my Intercept op-ed on the need for the U.S. to build a green steel industry and stop relying on imports from Russia and Ukraine.

The Intercept writes about how the rail lobbying group (Association of American Railroads) targeted me and my work and submitted it to security agencies. The truth is apparently a real threat to them.

My articles and op-eds have also appeared in Scientific American, In These Times, The Intercept, DeSmog, Drilled News, EcoWatch, Real Clear Markets, Truthout, Energy Post (Europe) and Nation of Change.

Contact: mikulka@gmail.com