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A University of California report ranks an Energy Transfer facility as the top methane super-emitter
Tanager-1 logged 1,097 methane plumes across the Permian, Appalachian and Haynesville basins between January 2025 and June 2026, and researchers matched about a third of them to a named operator using public Carbon Mapper data.
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What happened
- The University of California published a report naming 15 of the highest-emitting methane sources in the Permian, Appalachian and Haynesville basins, the three that send the most US natural gas to Europe.
- It draws on Tanager-1 satellite passes over those basins from January 2025 through June 2026, a window in which the satellite detected 1,097 methane plumes.
- Researchers were able to name the operator responsible for about a third of those plumes using publicly available data from the non-profit Carbon Mapper.
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Why it matters
- constraint Attribution at one plume in three limits what a buyer can put in writing. Most detections stay basin-level facts.
- exposure Energy Transfer now carries a published hourly emission rate tied to a named parish, produced by third parties from satellite passes and public data.
- decision With the federal fee gone, anyone who wants a cost attached to these rates has to be the customer, and the customer has to decide whether detection language belongs in a purchase agreement.
- capability Ranking a site against the EPA's super-emitter definition no longer needs the operator's cooperation, and the list can be refreshed on the satellite's schedule.
Anyone on a gas buyer's sustainability team will read the University of California list the same way, searching it for names that appear on their own contracts. Researchers matched an operator to about a third of the 1,097 plumes Tanager-1 saw between January 2025 and June 2026 [2][3]. Round it out and roughly 366 detections carry a name; the other 731 or so are unattributed [1].
The report identifies 15 high-emitting sources [1]. The ranking that was published covers ten sites [4], so it leaves five of those sources out of what a buyer can read [5].
At the top is a Shreveport facility in Red River Parish, Louisiana, operated by Energy Transfer [5]. Its detected plumes average 1.56 metric tonnes of methane an hour [6]. The EPA treats a source as a super-emitter at 0.1 metric tonnes an hour, and the report puts Shreveport at 15 times that rate [7]. Held at the same average for a full year, it would release about 13,700 tonnes [2]. The report's comparisons, 974 million miles of driving and the annual energy use of 51,000 homes, both rest on that if-continuous assumption and on EPA conversion factors [8].
The 1,097 figure is a count of detections, and a count is not an emissions total. Over the 18-month window it averages about 61 plumes a month across three basins [4].
Naming an operator does not establish that a release broke a rule. The report describes methane leaving the supply chain through intentional venting during certain operations as well as through equipment leaks and incomplete combustion [12].
Production is moving the other way. The EIA expects US output to average about 122.5 billion cubic feet a day this year against the 2025 record of 118.5 [9], and more than 70 percent of that four-billion-cubic-foot increase comes from the Permian and Haynesville [10][3], two of the three basins in the study [1].
Meanwhile the federal methane fee has been repealed and the Trump administration is revising oil and gas emissions requirements [11]. The report does not link any ranked site to a specific LNG cargo, buyer or contract [13].
For a buyer, each detection sorts on two questions. Does the plume have a named operator, and is that operator a counterparty. Only the detections that answer yes twice can support a contract term or a supplier conversation. Named but not a counterparty is intelligence about a basin you may buy from next year. The unnamed ones stay basin-level facts, and they are the bigger pile here, about 731 of 1,097 detections [1].
What to watch
- Whether the University of California team publishes the five identified sources missing from the top-10 ranking, or the plume-level attributions behind it.
- Whether Energy Transfer responds to the Shreveport figure or disputes the plume attribution.
- Whether any European buyer or LNG marketer cites the ranking in a supplier audit or a purchase agreement term.