Top 5 Methane Polluters

1. ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP)

Methane emissions = 4,653,752 metric tons of CO2

ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP) is yet another multinational energy corporation with headquarters in Texas, United States. The company ranks first on our list of top 5 methane polluters and it is the largest pure-play exploration and production company in the world. This means that is focused on its activities rather than various other interests.

Founded back in 1875 as the Continental Oil and Transporation Co. in Utah, the company originally dealt in distributing coal, candles, grease, oil, and kerosene. Over the years, it suffered multiple changes and gone through merges until it became ConocoPhillips Corp in 2002.

The company reported revenues of $55.5 billion in 2014, just so you can get a better idea of the size of the company and the money it makes.

Unlike other companies in the business, ConocoPhillips was the first American oil company to join the U.S. Climate Action Partnership back in 2007. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the partnership is an alliance of big businesses and environmental groups that militate toward mandatory emission caps to reduce the levels of various greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Despite this initial intention of joining the “save the planet” group, ConocoPhillips left the group in 2010 and was ranked among the highest corporate air polluter in the United States. As this report shows, it is also the top methane polluter with emissions equaling 4.65 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. This, in turn, is equal to the emissions that would result in burning 24,783 railcars of coal.

ConocoPhillips has been at the top of this list since at least 2011 and ranked 10^th for most methane emissions per well. Even so, with the numbers displayed for 2014, it should be mentioned that things are getting better and that the methane emissions from onshore oil and gas production have been reduced by 40 percent between 2013 and 2014 thanks to some investments made in this direction.

This shows, however, that it is possible, following some investments, to considerably reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere. This is possible not only in new wells, but also in those that are already in use, meaning there’s no excuse for other companies to not implement similar technologies in their own exploitations.

This is, of course, a sad state of affairs and it’s clearly a situation that needs to be dealt with through laws and regulations, something the government needs to cover before things start getting worse than they already are. In short, however, these were the top 5 methane polluters.

Nightman1965/Shutterstock.com