The Permian Basin Climate Bomb Video Transcript

In the past decade, the Permian Basin emerged as the world’s single most prolific oil and gas field. Located in west Texas and southeast New Mexico, the basin was producing as much oil in early 2020 as Iraq, over six million barrels per day. Only Russia and Saudi Arabia produced more oil on a daily basis.

In the decade ahead, as the world grapples with the impacts of COVID-19 while tackling the mounting climate crisis, oil and gas production in the Permian Basin is still projected to grow substantially, to become one of the world’s largest sources of climate pollution. 

The Permian Basin is exploited using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, a method that requires intensive drilling, and massive quantities of water, sand, and toxic chemicals.

As oil production in the basin grows, so does the production of methane gas and gas liquids, a mixture of ethane, propane, butane, isobutane, and pentane. These are the toxic and climate-potent byproducts of the basin’s oil boom that impact peoples’ health and lives. The scale of the basin’s potential to produce this wide range of hydrocarbons not only marks the basin as a carbon hotspot, but as a major source of plastics, one of the world’s other 21st century environmental crises.

Spread over a mostly remote area the size of Kansas or Britain, drilling in the basin is barely regulated. Tens of thousands of wells have been drilled and fracked in the past decade, covering an area of nearly 6,000 square miles or 15,000 square kilometers.

The drilling frenzy has led to waste on a massive scale. Methane gas, which accelerates climate change at over 80 times the rate of CO2, is vented and flared at unprecedented rates—a recent study estimated that a stunning 3.7% of all oil production in the Permian Basin is venting directly into the atmosphere in the form of methane flares, placing it among the heaviest-polluting fossil fuel production in the world. This venting multiplies the climate impact of the basin’s production, creating a toxic legacy in a vast mountain desert landscape with extraordinary biodiversity. 

The Permian Basin’s scale and unregulated growth has overwhelmed U.S. markets for its products. Most of its oil and gas is exported to global markets. To facilitate its growth, a massive build-out of gas processing plants, pipelines, export terminals and petrochemical complexes has emerged, creating a network of industrial pollution from southeast New Mexico to the Gulf Coast of Texas. This has intensified existing environmental injustice and racism across this vast region, and spread it to areas yet to experience it.

As the world grapples with the COVID-19 crisis, it faces an even bigger challenge to build a fairer, healthier, and more sustainable and resilient economy. This puts the Permian Basin and Gulf Coast at a crossroads: we can either manage a phase-out of the toxic reliance on hydrocarbon production and processing, one that supports workers and communities through this difficult but necessary transition, or we can have communities continue to experience pollution, environmental injustice, fear and boom-bust cycles, along with the inevitable and devastating reality that climate change will surely bring. 

Throughout this website, we track the Permian Basin’s oil and gas developments, impacts, and possible futures. We explore the climate impact of the Permian boom, the public health, environmental, economic, and social impacts of fracking, the Permian Basin’s link to environmental injustice and petrochemical expansion on the Gulf Coast, and the flow of Permian hydrocarbons to export markets. We highlight the development of expansion-enabling infrastructure, such as pipelines and export terminals, and lift up the people confronting the assault this infrastructure places upon communities.

The climate impacts, the exports and infrastructure, the petrochemical expansion, the lack of regulations and the impacts on frontline communities in the region are, in themselves, strong enough reasons to stop extraction in the Permian. Together, they form something even more terrifying - The Permian Climate Bomb.