Ben: It’s been a busy couple of years for ExxonMobil ramping up its commitments and positions on methane emissions. What are the benefits to industry of minimizing methane emissions?
As a company in the business of selling natural gas, we also want to minimize waste of that natural resource for ourselves and our resource owners. It is in our economic interest to ensure our product is captured in the pipe and sold to consumers. We continually strive for increased efficiencies in our operations.Finally, our employees as well as the next generation of employees are focused on minimizing our environmental footprint.
We are finding our leak and leak detection and repair programs to be effective. Just 18 months into our voluntary program we’ve achieved nearly a 40 percent decrease in observed leak frequency. Much of that decrease is due to what our field operators learned on effective maintenance practices, operational improvements and which equipment manufacturers perform best and moving to those applications.
Matt: We appreciate EDF’s foresight and action in support of technology development. Our first foray into the research area in terms of understanding unconventional wellsite emission profiles on the ground was the 2013 study led by Prof. David Allen at the University of Texas at Austin in coordination with EDF. Since then we have considerably expanded our research and development activities.
ExxonMobil has been working with EDF and others on demonstrating new technologies with a goal of accelerating broader deployment. We believe it is important for industry to work proactively with governments, academics and NGOs to pave the way for innovative technologies to be validated and, ultimately, used for regulatory compliance where governments have acted.