Romero Defends PEMEX’s Environmental Record

PEMEX CEO Octavio Romero took to social media to defend his company’s environmental record. In a Twitter video, Romero provided commentary from a helicopter flying over a platform belonging to PEMEX’s star Ku-Maloob-Zaap field cluster, refuting the claims made by a report that the NOC caused an ultra-emission event.

“We are here at Ku-Maloob-Zaap, at the processing center for Zaap-C to be more precise. A few days ago, a very irresponsible report was published that huge quantities of methane were emitted right here at this processing center which contributed to high levels of pollution. We want to put the record straight: this record is totally false. According to the businesses we contract that are dedicated specifically to measuring these types of phenomena, we have been able to confirm that methane emissions did not reach even 5 percent of what was reported,” Romero claimed.

Romero also suggested that the Spanish university that carried out the analysis confused nitrogen with methane: “We can tell by looking at the flare at this installation, which has to be lit at all times to protect the installation, that the flame is blue. This means that the levels of methane being burned are very little and it is really nitrogen, a gas that does not harm the environment, making up most of the gas compounds being burned. This goes to show once and for all that we are not involved in irrational flaring and polluting the environment as that publication would have you believe.” 

The team of scientists that published their findings the past week responded to Romero’s dismissal by insisting they could not possibly have confused nitrogen with methane, since the sensors they used can only detect the latter. In a conversation with Reuters this week, Itziar Irakulis-Loitxate and Luis Guanter, both of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, commented that "there is no way of mistaking one for the other. The startling emissions we reported were 100 percent methane, plain and simple."

As MBN reported last week, satellite footage appeared to depict yet another major methane leak from Mexico’s top-producing oil field cluster. The three satellite images, taken across six days between Aug. 5 and Aug. 29, 2022, displayed huge methane plumes mapped from space with high resolution. Irakulis-Loitxate, the lead author of the paper, estimated that some 44,064 tons of methane were released into the atmosphere during the time in question, equivalent to 3.7 million tons of CO2.

In June 2022, another peer-reviewed research paper by the same Spanish academic institution revealed detailed evidence of a previous leak from an offshore platform in the Zaap field in December 2021, which emitted 4Mt of methane across what was described as a “17-day ultra-emission event,” equivalent to 3 percent of Mexico's annual emissions from oil and gas production. PEMEX dismissed this previous report by insisting the flare was darkened for only a matter of hours because of extreme weather conditions. The ongoing study forms part of a wider European Space Agency-funded project to detect and quantify human-made emissions from space.

Methane is the main component of natural gas and is considered a key contributor to the greenhouse effect since it is twenty-five times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere. Natural gas flaring, the process by which natural gas associated with oil extraction is routinely burned-off as a waste product, is not technically illegal. However, venting, or the releasing of natural gas directly into the atmosphere, is a direct violation of Mexico’s hydrocarbon law if not done for safety reasons. Irakulis-Loitxate noted that unlike in December, when PEMEX was “venting gas constantly for 17 days” when the flare was not lit, this time around the NOC had been “venting and flaring gas intermittently during the whole month.” From an environmental standpoint, venting is more polluting than flaring, since flaring results in the oxidation of the methane released through combustion to produce carbon dioxide and water.

This latest breach of environmental protocol has renewed calls for PEMEX, as well as the Mexican government more broadly, to do more to address methane emissions. In recent years, PEMEX has been ranked the most polluting company in Latin America and among the global Top 20. In June meanwhile, following a meeting with US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, President López Obrador promised to do more to tackle methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. That same month, López Obrador also addressed the world’s major economies at the Global Methane Pledge Energy Pathway, announcing that PEMEX was to invest US$2 billion to reduce upstream methane emissions by 98 percent.