Trump States America’s Oil Industry Cleaner, Data Suggests Otherwise

American President Donald Trump stated that America’s oil industry is cleaner than other countries. Counternarratively, new data suggests that Texas wells register massive amounts of emissions. While the oil industry vouches for Texas as a success story in controlling climate-warming methane emissions, the state’s regulatory agencies, however, are granting nearly every request to burn or vent gas directly into the atmosphere.

While working to expand the nation’s oil and gas production, President Donald Trump’s administration has maintained that drilling in the US is comparatively cleaner than in other countries due to environmental restrictions. The White House marked this year’s Earth Day by stating that increased natural gas exports meant that the US would be “sharing cleaner energy with allies” and reducing global emissions.

According to a first-of-its-kind analysis of permit applications to the Railroad Commission of Texas by international agencies, the state’s main oil and gas regulator operates under a rubber-stamp system that allows drillers to emit large amounts of natural gas into the atmosphere. For over 40 months, between May 2021 and September 2024, oil companies applied for more than 12,000 flaring and venting permits, while the Railroad Commission rejected just 53 of them. This means the approval rate was 99.6%.

Natural gas is composed mostly of methane, a greenhouse gas, along with other gases such as hydrogen sulphide. These gases escape as wells are drilled if infrastructure to capture them is not in place. The gas can also be intentionally released into the atmosphere if pressure in the system poses a safety risk or if capturing and transporting it for sale is not profitable. Usually, drillers burn the gas they don’t capture, converting the methane to carbon dioxide and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. This process is typically called flaring. Sometimes, however, the gas is released without even being burned, and this process is called venting.

According to the permit applications, oil companies requested to flare or vent more than 195,000,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas per year. This amount is enough to power more than 3 million homes and generate millions of dollars in tax revenue if the gas were captured. Further, these emissions would have a climate-warming impact roughly equivalent to 27 gas-fired power plants operating year-round.

“It’s a gargantuan amount of emissions… because so much of this gas is methane, and so much of it is either incompletely combusted or not combusted at all. Through the venting process, we see a huge climate impact,” says Jack McDonald, Senior Analyst in Energy Policy and Science for the environmental group Oilfield Witness.