Ringside: Oil Extraction Reduces Methane Seepage

An opinion piece in the Santa Barbara Independent, published last week, heralded the decision by the Santa Barbara County board of supervisors to phase out oil drilling, which as the authors put it, “will save lives, reduce air pollution, and help meet our climate goals.”

Meanwhile, a study about to be publicly released by James Rector, a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, offers a thought provoking perspective on Santa Barbara’s decision to phase out oil drilling.

The title establishes the contrarian premise of the study: “Fugitive Emissions from Natural Seeps and Orphaned Wells are Orders of Magnitude Greater than Fugitive Emissions from Production Equipment in Southern California.”

Before digging into some of the details of this study, consider the two types of pollution caused by the oil economy that are of concern: CO2, and methane. We can dismiss the idea that shutting down California’s oil industry results in less CO2 emissions. Until we don’t import a single barrel of petroleum from sources outside California, it is absurd to restrict in-state oil production and claim it’s doing any good. If our drillers can extract and sell oil at a price competitive with world markets – which is the only circumstances under which they would do so – then there is no good reason to stop them. California’s contribution to global CO2 emissions will be lower if we source it here, because the crude oil won’t have to transit thousands of miles of ocean, and because there is nowhere on earth where the environmental and labor standards for oil drilling and distribution are anywhere near as high as they are here in California.

Everybody knows this, and yet our politicians still want to kill California’s oil industry, along with tens of thousands of good jobs. It makes no sense for us to import more than 75 percent of the oil we depend on when our in-state resources are underutilized.

Which brings us to methane, which is considered a short-lived, but much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. But where is it coming from?

According to a study published by the California Energy Commission in 2020, statewide methane emissions are estimated at 618,000 metric tons per year. Of that, 26 percent is estimated to come from “dairy confined animal feeding operations,” and 41 percent from landfills and composting facilities. Another 2.5 percent comes from wastewater treatment, and 8.3 percent is estimated to come from exclusively natural gas oriented processes – fueling stations, pipelines, processing plants, storage fields, and gas-fired power plants.

What about the other 22 percent? How much of that is from the oil economy?

Here is where it gets difficult. Oil refineries are cited as contributing 2.4 percent, but then CEC estimates 8.7 percent for “oil and gas wells” and 10.7 percent for oil and gas production equipment. If we assume some of those percentages apply to natural gas and not petroleum, and base it on the fact that petroleum still contributes 47 percent of California’s total energy consumption, and natural gas still contributes 33 percent, and apply that ratio to the percentages that reference both sources, we can guesstimate that California’s oil industry is responsible for 14 percent of California’s total emissions of methane. That’s not much, considering oil still delivers nearly half of all energy consumed in the state.

But how much of that 14 percent, identified according to the CEC study by aerial observation of emissions on the ground, is coming from capped wells and natural seeps? This is where Rector’s study becomes relevant, extremely relevant, to energy policy in California going forward. His researchers focused on methane emissions in Los Angeles County, and determined that 48 percent came from dairies, landfills, and wastewater treatment, and 49 percent came from “natural seeps and orphaned wells.” Only 2.1 percent came from natural gas storage and distribution infrastructure leaks, and only 0.6 percent came from oil and gas production.

The first key finding of this study, therefore – and this isn’t news to experts in the industry – is that active wells produce a negligible quantity of methane. The second key finding is equally significant. Rector’s study wasn’t able to differentiate between natural seeps and orphaned wells, but found them to be the source of nearly half of all methane emissions in Los Angeles County. And in both cases, it found the same cause for the leakage. It turns out that California has had natural seepage of oil and methane gas for tens of thousands of years.

In an August 2025 interview with California Insider, Rector described how the Los Angeles Basin has the highest density of oil per square mile in the entire world. A 2013 study by USGS scientists, quoting from the abstract, “assessed the remaining recoverable oil in 10 oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin in southern California. The results of the assessment suggest that between 1.4 and 5.6 billion barrels of additional oil could be recovered from those fields with existing technology.”

All this underground oil, both in Los Angeles County and throughout Southern California, does not stay inert, thanks to the state’s multiple active faults. As Rector explains, the shifting geology in California opens up pathways for the state’s massive reserves of underground oil and gas to find natural vents to the surface. This explains the tar that seeps into the ocean offshore, onto California beaches, and as well the tar and gasses that escape on land; the La Brea tar pits in the heart of downtown Los Angeles being a prime example.

These geologic facts give rise to a provocative hypothesis. If oil extraction was resumed, it would reduce the amount of leakage of methane and other reactive organic compounds, whether the leaks are through naturally occurring vents, or through the thousands of dormant wells – many of which are so old they can’t easily even be found.

The implications of these findings, for which Rector himself urges further study, could represent a tremendous opportunity. Instead of finding and capping literally hundreds of thousands of dormant wells, costing tens of billions of dollars and possibly a futile undertaking, we can revive oil drilling and extraction in Los Angeles County and elsewhere in California. This will not only reduce methane emissions from natural and manmade seeps by reducing the pressure inside these underground reservoirs, but it will create thousands of jobs and reduce our dependence on imports.

Foes of in-state oil drilling, from Santa Barbara to Sacramento, may want to reconsider. More drilling, not less, may be what it takes to “save lives, reduce air pollution, and help meet our climate goals.”