More than Meets the Eye: Exposing the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Invisible Methane Gas in the Texas Permian
“When I look through the OGI camera, I see what is all too often invisible to our naked eyes: not only the pollution created by the oil and gas industry but the inequality of our society too.”
Miguel Escoto looks through an optical gas imaging (OGI) camera in West Texas. (Credit: Oilfield Witness)
On a late summer’s day in September 2020, I saw the climate crisis, truly, for the first time.
I was standing on Shaw Road, just off the I-20, south of Pecos, looking at an oil and gas site named “Special Effort.” With my naked eye, I could see nothing coming out of it into the clear blue West Texas sky. But once I looked through an optical gas imaging (OGI) camera, the atmosphere became a nauseating swirl of colors and shapes. Suddenly, the invisible poison pumping into the air was there for me to see.
My colleague Sharon Wilson, a certified optical gas imaging thermographer, explained that the lurid plume I could see through the lens, rising out of Special Effort’s tank, was an emission of methane gas and volatile organic compounds (VOC). This happens all the time at plants across the Permian Basin, North America’s biggest oil field, which covers most of West Texas and much of southern New Mexico. These emissions fill the air with harmful toxins and more greenhouse gases like methane, which causes global warming. In fact, the West Texas Permian Basin is the number-one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.
Special Effort production tanks through the naked eye. (Credit: Oilfield Witness)
OGI image of Special Effort production tanks (Credit: Oilfield Witness)
As I looked at the plume, a flow of images and emotions coursed through me. I saw the islanders of Kiribati in the Pacific drowning as the oceans rose above them. I saw images of sandals melting into the pavement in Southeast Asian heat waves; fires in California and Greece; waves of refugees fleeing desertification in the Middle East, North Africa, and just across the border in Mexico. It was something of a religious epiphany: I understood that what I was looking at was the root cause of all the above, this plume coming out of the tank, invisible to the naked eye.
I felt fear about the effects of climate change on humanity and how my generation would have to bear it. I was only 23 at the time, recently graduated from college, and thinking about my own future as well as that of our people and our planet. What kind of adult life would I have? What about my children?
I felt anger at the lies of the oil and gas industry, which continues to insist it is doing everything in its power to control emissions and that those emissions are occasional regrettable leaks rather than part of the system design.
And I felt the weight of responsibility to bear witness to what is happening in my own backyard – and to let the world know about it. When I drove the three hours home to El Paso that day, through the desert and mesquite, I thought about how banal and ugly the oil and gas infrastructure was. We can see with the naked eye how it has ruined our landscape. But it takes the OGI camera to see what it’s doing to our health, to our atmosphere, and to our future.
It came to me, on that drive home, that my mission would be to look this beast in the eye, unblinking, and to show others too. This is why Sharon Wilson and I have set up our frontline organization, Oilfield Witness. This is why we now spend our days looking through an OGI camera and trying to get as many people as possible to look at the evidence too: fellow West Texans, the authorities, other environmental activists, and the industry itself. It’s only once you see the evidence with your own eyes that you can’t turn away from it.
Sharon has others looks through the OGI camera towards a large plume coming from XTO's Coyote Compressor Station site in Pecos County Texas. (Credit: Oilfield Witness)
What I saw on Shaw Road that day is terrifyingly common and deliberate: a pressure release from an oil and gas tank. Our fieldwork proves that pollution is baked into the system of oil and gas production. Whether it’s a vapor recovery unit failure, a malfunctioning flare, a compressor station that is improperly combusting, or a pipeline “blowdown,” extraction cannot happen without pollution. The oil and gas industry cannot fix the problem of climate harming methane emissions by tweaking things or by adding any number of technical doodads and gizmos the way it proposes. There is only one solution: to keep the fossil fuels in the ground.
On that drive home that September, I was following the route of the Kinder Morgan pipeline that carries methane from the Permian Basin into the El Paso Refinery, right in the heart of my hometown. As a little boy, I grew up in the shadow of this facility. I called it “Star Wars Land” and loved how it lit up at night. I would beg my parents to drive us past it. I also suffered from constant, debilitating asthma, like so many in my community, but it was only years later that I came to understand that the cause of all this was “Star Wars Land” itself.
In my adolescent years, I began to pay attention to the climate crisis. But at first, it felt like a nebulous cloud hanging over me – something I couldn’t really build a relationship with. Instead, I became involved with migrants’ rights. My own family had fled from the violence in Ciudad Juarez, a violence caused by the militarized war on drugs where both US and Mexican governments failed to limit the power of the narcotics cartels. I understood very personally how people will flee their homes to survive, and I became committed to helping them do this and advocating for migrants’ rights.
I decided I would become an immigration lawyer. But in 2019, before applying to law school, I took a gap year and interned with an environmental lawyer, David Baake, who worked on pollution reduction. It was in this year, aged 22, that I learned the extent of El Paso Refinery’s pollution and its health impacts. I realized that this was the cause of my asthma and the ill health of so many of my neighbors. I learned that El Paso was one of the United States’ most polluted cities – in terms of the ozone pollution that causes respiratory disease – because of how gas was piped from the Permian to be processed within our city limits.
Suddenly, the climate crisis shifted into something tangible. The cloud no longer hovered over me in a nebulous way. I could feel how it had settled in my lungs, the cause of all my wheezing and coughing.
I understood personally how important it is to feel the impact of the climate crisis in your lungs rather than trying to grasp the nebulous cloud. And I’ve seen how powerful this approach is in building a movement. Earlier this year, at a community meeting in Pecos, I showed OGI-generated images we had taken of methane and VOC plumes around the city. A woman named Claire, who has lived there all her life, responded, “Now I can see the smell! Now I understand why it always smells like rotten eggs outside my house.”
Claire is one of many West Texans who have joined our group, Texas Permian Future Generations (TPFG). TPFG is organizing around the issues that affect people the most – such as air and water quality and work conditions in the oil and gas industry. The case of a worker named Jeff Springman exemplifies the need for this sort of organizing. Jeff contracted a terminal illness after having been exposed to hydrocarbon emissions when he was compelled to do the highly unsafe task of “manual gauging” – which involves going up to the tank catwalks and manually measuring the fluids inside them. Permian residents and workers deserve better.
The OGI camera has played its role in setting up another movement, this time back home in El Paso. We began by using the camera as part of a campaign to prevent El Paso Electric – owned by JPMorgan Chase – from expanding its gas plants. To mobilize the community and gather data, we set up the camera in residential backyards near the plant. With this data, we managed to gain concessions that included a reduction of pollution, a commitment never to expand the plant, and a payout of $400,000.
Miguel speaks at a rally in El Paso, Texas. (Credit: Oilfield Witness)
When the utility welched on its commitment not to expand the plant, we converted our anger into a campaign – and decided to use the payout towards the El Paso Climate Charter, a ballot initiative that would have made our city one of the most progressive in the country: from hiring a climate director to preventing city water from being used for fracking to creating jobs through climate programs so that El Pasoans would not be forced to work as migrants in the Permian Basin’s oil industry.
Although we gained 40,000 signatures, we were defeated by an opposition funded by the oil and gas industry, which threw millions of dollars at the campaign. It was an intense and disheartening experience, certainly one of the hardest things I have ever done. But we forged a movement out of it – the Amanacer Peoples’ Project – that is stronger, more sophisticated, and far more trained and disciplined.
We have established a dues-paying membership system and are – as with TPFG – focusing once more on bread-and-butter issues that El Pasoans really care about, such as our campaign for more efficient air conditioning in schools, given the rising temperatures. We call it “Escuelas Frescas” – “Cool Schools.”
So much of this work is a way of countering the “apocalypse” narrative that has, in my opinion, been too dominant in the climate movement. It leads people of my generation to exclaim, “Well, if the end is coming, we might as well just enjoy the rest of our lives.” It doesn’t work to give the world an expiration date – and if you are in your twenties, as I am, you plan to be around for a while. This means we must summon the political imagination to think about changing the system so that we can adapt in ways that don’t annihilate whole groups of people.
Sharon and Miguel proudly represent Oilfield Witness at the 2023 Climate March in New York City. (Credit: Oilfield Witness)
But the first step toward forging a vision for the future is to clearly see what is before us right now. When I look through the OGI camera, I see what is all too often invisible to our naked eyes: not only the pollution created by the oil and gas industry but also the inequality of our society. This is an inequality that maximizes profit for the wealthy by forcing working-class people, and people of color, into dangerous and poorly paid work – or to live in “sacrifice zones” that destroy their health and quality of life.
This is the beast we need to bear witness to and confront. This is what the climate crisis is really about.
Miguel Escoto looks through an optical gas imaging (OGI) camera for the first time. (Credit: Oilfield Witness)
Miguel Escoto is a founder of Amanecer People’s Project (formerly Sunrise Movement El Paso) – a membership-based, power-building climate organization in El Paso, Texas. He is also a founder of the only climate organization in the Permian Basin: Texas Permian Future Generations. He is 27 years old and is based in El Paso, Texas.
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