Seasonality and declining intensity of methane emissions from the Permian and nearby US oil and gas basins

We quantify weekly methane emissions and trends from oil and gas production in the US Permian Basin for 2019–2023, and from nearby basins for 2022–2023, by analytical inversion of TROPOMI satellite observations at 25-km resolution with the Integrated Methane Inversion (IMI). Permian oil and gas emissions averaged 4.0 ± 1.1 Tg a-1 over 2019–2023, with large seasonal variation but little interannual variability. Methane intensity fell from 5.2% to 3.2% as production surged. Intensity in the New Mexico Permian fell from 5.7% to 2.6%, approaching the state’s 2026 target of