Methane Outliers

Combined map →

The top 50 units in each jurisdiction by the one measure that compares honestly — flared+vented gas as a share of production, identical rolling windows — with a slider through four years of aligned history.

Alberta →

~23,000 facilities on a dot map, vented / flared / fuel gas scored separately against subtype-and-size peers. Petrinex publishes a rolling ~5-year window with vent and flare split for every facility.

Texas →

~150,000 leases rolled up to a county choropleth, flared+vented and lease-fuel gas scored against oil/gas-class and size peers. The RRC publishes 33 years of history — but never splits flared from vented in bulk data.

Same lens, different regimes

The method travels. Both pages score the same way: sum a trailing-12-month window per reporting unit, group it with peers of the same kind and size, and rank within the peer group. A unit is an outlier only when it is both extreme (≥95th percentile) and material.

The reporting units differ. Alberta reports against facilities (batteries, gas plants); Texas reports against leases. Both are the operator’s unit above the well — the lens doesn’t care.

The windows differ wildly. Texas publishes monthly data back to 1993; Alberta’s public archive is a rolling ~5 years. Depth vs freshness is itself a policy choice.

So does transparency. Alberta publishes vented and flared volumes separately for every facility. Texas operators have reported the split since 2021 — but every bulk product the RRC publishes folds it back into one “vented or flared” number.

Absolute comparisons are apples-to-oranges. Different rules, different measurement, and both jurisdictions are known to under-report against satellite observation. What compares honestly is the shape: outlier structure, peer distributions, and trends — which is what these pages show.