Oil & Gas Watch News has covered a huge variety of stories over the past year, with stories taking us from Puerto Rico to North Carolina and detailing topics as diverse as carbon capture and storage, fertilizer made from natural gas, and the EPA’s efforts to crack down on climate-polluting laughing gas.  

However, of all the topics covered in our 44 articles published this year, a few rose to the top as fan favorites – according to you, our readers. Below, we have ranked the stories that drew the most readers to the site.

Of the top five stories published this year, three have ties to Texas. That comes as no surprise, given that the state is No. 1 for oil and natural production in the U.S. and is a hotbed of new pipelines, refinery expansions, and petrochemical facilities. Texas is also ground-zero for newer oil- and gas-related technologies, such as carbon capture and sequestration, hydrogen fuel, and liquefied natural gas (LNG).  

Texas did not hold all the spots at the top of the list, though. Readers also favored articles about how Donald Trump’s presidency will impact gasoline prices (or not), as well as a controversial carbon sequestration project in Illinois.  

Here are our top 5 most popular articles from 2024:

1. Company’s plans for natural gas pipeline would affect thousands of landowners in Texas, Louisiana

A massive pipeline that would move gas from West Texas to export facilities in Southwest Louisiana will affect more than 3,000 properties and landowners in the states. The total pipeline route now adds up to 809 miles, including a 645-mile main line and seven new laterals totaling around 164 miles.  

According to company filings, the pipeline would help satisfy a growing demand for gas to export from LNG terminals in Southwest Louisiana.  The developers of the pipeline, Houston-based Moss Lake Partners, would benefit because the project would deliver gas to the company’s proposed Hackberry terminal to export natural gas liquids from Cameron Parish, Louisiana.

But to some residents who live along the path of the pipeline, the massive construction project is a threat to the peaceful life they have been trying to build in rural Texas.

The pipeline, called the DeLa Express, is the latest in a wave of new pipelines transporting gas out of West Texas and eastern New Mexico. These include the Gulf Coast Express and Permian Highway pipelines, completed in 2019 and 2020, and the Matterhorn Express, which began moving gas in October. All were built to convey gas eastward from the Permian Basin in West Texas to industrial areas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.

2. Texas program that subsidizes fossil-fuel electricity turbo-charges 72 power plant applications

A new Texas law that offers taxpayer-subsidized, low-interest loans to encourage developers to build gas-fueled power plants – but not clean energy, like solar and wind – drew 72 applications before the deadline last year.  

Following widespread power outages during a winter storm in 2021, Texas voters in November 2023 approved the low-interest loan program proposed by the Texas Legislature in an effort to increase generation capacity and avoid blackouts.  

In August, the Public Utility Commission of Texas selected 17 gas-fired power plant projects to receive state-backed loans at a 3 percent interest rate. If all are approved, it would add up to $5.4 billion in loans.  

Many environmentalists question whether new gas generators are the right answer because they contribute to climate change, and some consumer advocates and energy analysts say it will not address the need to modernize the Texas grid to prevent more outages.

“Voters wanted a stable grid, but all the Texas Energy Fund can promise is a massive corporate giveaway,” said Adrian Shelley, Texas director of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. “For years, state lawmakers have ignored cheaper strategies like energy efficiency and distributed generation. But when big businesses put their hand out, Texas lawmakers step up.”

3. Why Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ policies will not reduce U.S. oil and gasoline prices

Donald Trump won a return to the White House in part by convincing American voters that he would unleash more oil and gas production, which would reduce fuel prices, curb inflation and cut grocery prices. But petroleum industry experts doubt this will work in a global market.

Even if Trump opens more federal lands and offshore areas to drilling and slashes Environmental Protection Agency regulations on methane pollution, American companies will not simply produce more petroleum and sell fuel at a lower price. This is because competing nations like Saudi Arabia could simply reduce their own production and keep global prices high for their own financial or political reasons, said Gordon Kaufman, a petroleum industry expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  

“The change in administrations will have minimal to nil effect on short term or intermediate term prices [of oil and gasoline],” said Kaufman.  “Oil is an internationally fungible commodity that is subject to the behaviors of multiple actors.”

Another complicating factor is that ramping up production could create a glut of petroleum on the market, if such a trend is not counteracted by OPEC nations shifting in the opposite direction.  Before any such increase in supply trickled down through the economy to benefit consumers in the form of lower fuel prices, the glut would undermine the profitability of U.S. oil and gas companies, which would remove financial incentives for these companies to invest in expanded oil exploration and drilling.

“Let’s say President Trump is successful in his efforts to increase drilling, and let’s say that increased drilling does increase global supply,” said Robert K. Kaufmann, an expert on the oil industry and climate change at Boston University, in an interview with Oil & Gas Watch News.  “If that happens, oil prices are going to decline, drillers will drill less, and that will move prices back up pretty quickly.”

4. In deep-red Texas, neighbors fight gas power plant next door – one of scores proposed across U.S.

Neighbors of a proposed gas plant in Blue, Texas, east of Austin, are fighting back after learning of a company’s plans to build a massive gas-fired power plant. Sandow Lakes Energy, a company affiliated with a Dallas real estate development firm, says the plant will be capable of providing enough power for 800,000 homes.

 Even in this deep-red county where many people support fossil fuels, many residents oppose the Sandow company’s plans to build a power plant within a few thousand feet of several homes. They cite fears about air and water pollution, noise, heavy traffic, harm to their livestock, and the likely decline in their property values.

Sandow Lakes Energy’s proposed plant is one of scores of new natural gas-fired power plants planned across the U.S., with the surge driven by cheap gas from hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling and compounded by increased demand from artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency computer centers.

In Texas alone there are currently over 150 proposed projects to build new or expand existing gas-fired power plants, according to Environmental Integrity Project research based on data from state and federal agencies. The increased burning of fossil fuels – instead of using clean energy, like solar or wind – to satisfy this growing hunger for electricity threatens U.S. climate goals.

5. In Illinois, a massive taxpayer-funded carbon capture project fails to capture about 90 percent of plant’s emissions

In 2023, the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory celebrated what it called “the largest demonstration of its kind in the United States” at an ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois, where carbon dioxide (CO₂) is being captured and permanently stored deep underground.  

The project, a partnership led by ethanol producer Archer Daniels Midland, received $281 million in taxpayer dollars via Department of Energy grants. According to the department, it has stored more than 2.8 million metric tons of CO₂ since 2011; EPA records put the figure at 3.94 million metric tons. In a January 2023 article, Energy Department officials said the project “marks a crucial step forward in efforts to decarbonize the U.S. economy and power sector by 2050.”

However, EPA records also show that the plant over the last decade has captured only 10-12 percent of the plant’s total emissions each year at most – including from manufacturing ethanol and processing grains -- allowing the rest of the carbon dioxide to escape into the atmosphere. This raises questions about whether industrial-scale carbon capture technology can be a meaningful solution to global warming. 

Also raising questions was an incident in October, when a suspected leak of carbon dioxide from an underground storage area near a drinking water aquifer prompted the company to suspend the carbon capture operations.

Lead photo by Garth Lenz.