Originally published December 10, 2010. Updated August 27, 2026.
US oil and gas operations leak at least 13 million metric tons of methane a year, according to a five-year measurement series led by the Environmental Defense Fund, about 60% more than the EPA’s estimate of 8 million tons. That gap matters, because the share of gas that leaks between the wellhead and the burner decides whether gas still beats coal on climate. The EPA publishes one count, and independent trackers like the IEA and Carbon Mapper publish their own, using different tools. Washington’s rules on that leak keep changing too.
How much methane escapes from US oil and gas
The wells and pipelines built during the shale gas boom are the infrastructure this whole question is about.
The EPA keeps its own official count in the Greenhouse Gas Inventory. The most recently finished edition covers data through 2022 and was published in April 2024, and a newer draft covering data through 2023 was already out for public comment as of the same reading. So the government’s own number keeps moving as more data comes in.
Industry and environmental groups sometimes talk past each other on this topic because “leak rate” isn’t one fixed thing. It’s conventionally measured as a share of gross gas production, meaning everything pulled out of the ground, a much bigger number than what reaches a customer’s meter. The same volume of leaked gas looks like a bigger problem against one denominator than the other. That kind of disagreement goes back years. A 2011 Los Angeles Times piece described EPA’s leak numbers at the time as data the agency had itself acknowledged were flawed.
That’s also the number that satellite projects and independent nonprofits keep trying to check with a different kind of measurement.
The satellites and instruments trying to check that number
The International Energy Agency published its latest worldwide count, the Global Methane Tracker 2025, on May 7, 2025. Separate from any government inventory, a nonprofit called Carbon Mapper flies its own Tanager satellites and says its public tracker has logged more than 36,000 methane plumes worldwide, plus close to 7,800 carbon dioxide plumes in total, working alongside the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Methane Emissions Observatory on efforts to cut methane from oil and gas.
A dedicated methane-hunting satellite called MethaneSAT, built by the Environmental Defense Fund and New Zealand’s space agency, launched in March 2024. It lost contact with ground control in June 2025, and its operators declared it unrecoverable the following month. Satellite monitoring of individual leaks now runs mostly through the projects still flying, Carbon Mapper included.
Why a 20-year leak looks worse than a 100-year one
The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, published by the panel’s Working Group I in 2021, measured methane’s warming power against carbon dioxide’s over two different time frames. Over 20 years, a ton of fossil methane, the kind that comes from wells and pipelines, traps about 83 times as much heat as a ton of carbon dioxide. Over 100 years, the same ton of fossil methane traps about 30 times as much, according to Wikipedia’s summary of the panel’s figures. Non-fossil methane, the kind that doesn’t come from drilling, is rated a little lower on both counts: about 80 times over 20 years and about 27 times over 100, the same IPCC dataset shows.
| Time horizon | Fossil methane vs. CO2 | Non-fossil methane vs. CO2 |
|---|---|---|
| 20 years | about 83 times | about 80 times |
| 100 years | about 30 times | about 27 times |
Source: IPCC AR6 (2021), via Wikipedia.
Which of those two time frames you pick changes which number sounds worse for the same leak, and that choice is why two people looking at identical figures can walk away with opposite conclusions about whether gas is still the cleaner fuel.
Does gas still beat coal on climate
So does gas still beat coal? It depends on which time frame you use. Measured over 100 years, a given methane leak counts for less, which is the basis for calling gas the cleaner fuel. Measured over 20 years, the same leak counts for close to three times as much, using the IPCC figures above, and gas’s case for being cleaner than coal gets a lot shakier. If you’ve heard natural gas pitched as a bridge away from coal, this is the math underneath that pitch, and it also turns on how much methane escapes between the wellhead and the power plant. That gap is a big part of why the “bridge fuel” label for gas depends on keeping that leak low.
It’s also the question sitting under the broader case for the decline of coal as a power source, a case that leans on gas burning cleaner. The US carries more of that stake than any other country, since it’s already the world’s top source of oil and gas methane. Nobody involved, the EPA included, has settled on the leak rate happening right now.
What Washington’s methane rules require now
Federal policy on methane from oil and gas has swung twice in about a year. The EPA finalized a fee on excess emissions, the Waste Emissions Charge required under the Inflation Reduction Act, on November 12, 2024. Congress repealed it under the Congressional Review Act, and President Trump signed that repeal on March 14, 2025.
The agency’s separate emissions standards for oil and gas equipment, known as OOOOb and OOOOc, went through a reversal of their own. The EPA announced it would reconsider the Biden-era rule on March 12, 2025, then finalized narrower technical changes to two parts of it on April 4, 2026. A separate deadline meant to phase out routine flaring at new wells was set for May 7, 2026, but the EPA clarified on May 1, 2026 that flaring is still allowed in limited circumstances.
Read together, the fee that would have made leaking expensive is gone, and the equipment rule survived in a narrower form than regulators first finalized in 2024. That leaves producers with less federal cost tied to their methane and a standard that regulators are still rewriting.
What could still change this answer
The EPA’s technical revisions in April 2026 touched only two parts of the 2024 rule, and the broader reconsideration the agency announced in 2025 hasn’t finished working through the federal rulemaking process. On the measurement side, MethaneSAT is gone, and satellite tracking of individual leaks now runs mostly through projects like Carbon Mapper. A rule change from Washington, or a hard number from a working satellite, could still tip the gas-versus-coal answer either way, and either one will eventually decide what you’re told about the fuel heating your home or backing up your grid.
