At night, the Lázaro Cárdenas refinery – Mexico‘s oldest, built in 1906 – lights up the city of Minatitlán, in the southern oil-producing state of Veracruz. Gas flaring turns night into day, inhabitants say, while a mix of industrial smells in the air reminds visitors they have arrived in Mexico’s oil and gas heartland.
“It is like Mordor,” said one resident, referring to the volcanic realm in the fantasy novel “The Lord of the Rings” with a tone between humour and resignation. “There are no more dark nights in Minatitlán,” said another local interviewed by Climate Home.
The refinery is a key pillar of Mexico’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicano (Pemex), and a testament to the firm’s problems with climate-heating methane gas. Pemex has struggled for years to control its rocketing methane emissions despite promises to the contrary and has failed to find an efficient way to use the gas – instead venting or flaring it, which releases methane into the atmosphere.
While its oil production went down in the decade from 2013 to 2023, Pemex now has one of the highest methane footprints per barrel of oil in the world, about eight times that of ExxonMobil and 83 times Saudi Aramco’s, according to local think-tank Mexico Evalúa.
Methane is a greenhouse gas that is around 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after it is emitted. Experts say cutting methane emissions is “low-hanging fruit” in tackling climate change.
To that end, a coalition of 160 countries – among them Mexico – have signed a global methane pledge, aiming to reduce emissions by 30% globally by 2030 with respect to 2020 levels. The initiative was first launched in 2021 at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
Pemex has also joined voluntary initiatives like the Oil and Gas Methane Partnership (OGMP) in 2014, under which ten oil and gas giants – including BP, Shell and TotalEnergies – promised to track and evaluate ways to reduce their emissions. Pemex left the partnership when it was ratcheted up in scope and relaunched in 2020. Meanwhile, the company’s emissions have continued to go up.
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Pemex’s rising methane emissions, even as its oil and gas production fell, could put Mexico’s ambitious climate goals at risk, analysts warned. The government recently announced at COP29 it will set a net zero greenhouse gas emissions target for 2050, making it the last G20 country to adopt a net zero pledge.
“This new ambition from the Mexican state to reach net zero by 2050 needs to consider the country’s energy policy and Pemex in particular,” said Fernanda Ballesteros, Mexico country manager at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI).
Like many of the world’s largest economies, Mexico is still due to submit a new nationally determined contribution (NDC) – a climate plan with a 2035 target to cut emissions of all greenhouse gases including methane. Countries are expected to file their new NDCs before September.
Mexican environment secretary Alicia Bárcena has called this round of climate plans “our last hope” to keep global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial times.
But the country’s new NDC will need to address Pemex’s emissions and show a clear plan for change, Ballesteros said. “[Pemex] is a very relevant actor for Mexico to achieve this [net zero] goal,” she added.
Fugitive methane
Minatitlán is a small city of just over 144,000 inhabitants, including a large floating population from neighbouring states like Oaxaca and Tabasco. Mexico’s southern region made headlines in 2021 when a pipeline rupture caused a gas leak that set fire to the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico.
Around the time of that incident, Pemex promised to reduce flaring (where gas is burned off), as well as venting (where it is released directly) and other types of fugitive emissions such as leaks, as outlined in its 2021-2025 business plan.
A Climate Home analysis of the company’s last four sustainability reports shows that Pemex did manage to reduce flaring, but gas venting and leaks kept growing. And over the past decade, methane emissions still followed an upward trend.
Many methane leaks from Pemex-run facilities – some major – have occurred in recent years, with one in the Deer Park refinery, located in Texas, leaving two dead in 2024.
Climate Home has identified another large leak of methane emissions from a Pemex plant in Minatitlán.
On April 28, 2024, methane monitoring platform Carbon Mapper detected one of the largest methane plumes in the Americas coming from a Pemex plant located right in the heart of the city. Climate Home confirmed that a second satellite data provider, Kayrros, also recorded this plume.
The plume released more than 16 tonnes of methane per hour into the atmosphere, a rate higher than any other single plume detected in oil-producing countries on the continent such as the US or Venezuela over that same year.
Both Kayrros and Carbon Mapper recorded the plume only once, meaning it is not possible to know how long it was active and thus the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.
The plume was detected over Pemex’s Cosoleacaque petrochemical complex, located 5km from the centre of Minatitlán, near a university and a hospital. The complex contains four ammonia plants, of which only one is currently operational, according to six Pemex workers interviewed.
Cosoleacaque produces ammonia from gas, which is then sold to make fertilisers. This is a business Pemex has recently resuscitated with support from President Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist, in a bid to boost the domestic agriculture sector.
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Pemex plans to invest almost $400 million in reactivating petrochemical plants that were dormant for more than two decades. Cosoleacaque is one of the plants that was restarted in 2023 after operating at minimum levels for years. Workers said there are plans for all four ammonia plants in the complex to come back online, with a second one due to restart around March.
When asked about the leak there, workers suggested it could have gone undetected, because it was active on a Sunday. “If the leak happened on the weekend, there is no way we could have known, because we just work from Monday to Friday,” said one Pemex worker who requested anonymity.
Climate Home contacted Pemex for comment on its growing methane emissions and the plume detected over the Cosoleacaque complex, but did not receive a response.
Soaring emissions
Pemex received a boost from the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018, as he vowed to “rescue the national oil industry again”. Up to then, the company had struggled through years of high debt and plummeting production. Nonetheless, Mexico’s former president described oil as “the best business in the world”.
As the company started to drill more oil under the new mandate to increase production, it found itself with a lot of excess gas it could not take advantage of, mostly due to a lack of suitable infrastructure, analysts said. It resorted to flaring and venting the gas instead.
“Deliberate gas flaring and venting was a problem in the past, but it really worsened during the previous government’s six-year term,” said Adrián Duhalt, a Minatitlán-born energy researcher at US-based think-tank the Texas-Mexico Center.
As deliberate methane releases soared and accidental leaks continued, Pemex’s methane emissions rocketed, almost doubling between 2018 – when López Obrador was elected – and 2022, according to Pemex statistics.
The country’s current president, Sheinbaum, has doubled down on the previous administration’s spending on new oil and gas projects, with the goal of making Mexico self-sufficient in gasoline consumption.
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Health impacts unknown
While flaring is the most obvious source of emissions, leaks are frequent in Minatitlán, according to residents – but most are only perceptible when ammonia is emitted, because of its distinct smell. The oil and gas industry’s toll on the public health in the area remains largely unknown, analysts said.
Neighbours of the plant interviewed by Climate Home – most of whom have worked in the oil and gas industry themselves – raised concerns over ammonia leaks from the Cosoleacaque complex, which they said caused headaches, dizziness and allergies.
The city was ranked among the top 30 industrial cities in Mexico with worsening health indicators due to air pollution and other types of contamination, according to a 2023 multidisciplinary study sponsored by the Mexican government. Researchers reported rising cases of cancer, kidney failures, birth defects and spontaneous abortions.
In La Oaxaqueña, a neighbourhood immediately adjacent to the ammonia plants, people have learned to live with the chemical smell in the air, which they describe as “that of a public restroom” or “hair dye”.
“Coughing and sneezing is nothing – sometimes you want to run away. I once had to carry my daughter in the middle of the night to the hospital because she was vomiting,” said one woman, describing the effects of an ammonia leak incident. She wished to remain anonymous.
While experts say there is a research gap on the health impacts of oil and gas infrastructure in southern Mexico, a group of NGOs reported similar symptoms last year in the neighbouring state of Tabasco, where they found headaches, nausea and nosebleeds to be common among people living near Pemex plants.
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On the other side of Minatitlán, flaring at the Lázaro Cárdenas refinery adds to the air pollution, locals said. As the city relies on northern winds to blow away air pollutants from the refinery, the situation worsens when those winds shift or stop.
“Whenever the North [wind] is not blowing, you can really see the cloud of gases on the horizon, and sometimes also perceive the smell,” explained Ramón García, a lawyer who has worked on cases of health complications blamed on the local oil industry.
García said such legal cases are common in the region, especially those related to environmental damage and health impacts – but they almost never reach local administrative courts, as Pemex often settles early in the process, he added.
The details of the cases are also kept secret, García said. In one, involving an oil spill in the region of Papantla, north of Veracruz, the National Agency for Safety, Energy and Environment (ASEA) ordered Pemex to implement an 11-point plan to clean up the spill. When García asked for details of the case in January, he was told they were confidential.
Researcher Duhalt said such issues haven’t “affected the loyalty from the community to the company”.
From an academic standpoint, the Minatitlán-Coatzacoalcos corridor might be considered a sacrifice zone, “but from the standpoint of the head of family, it is just your source of employment,” he added.
Aging infrastructure
Pemex has struggled to control its methane emissions partly due to aging infrastructure and a lack of political will, analysts told Climate Home.
“There are already corporate procedures and technological changes for Pemex to [be able to] emit much less methane. It has been in their plans for years,” said Viviana Patiño Alcala, an energy researcher at think-tank México Evalúa. “But this has not translated into meaningful (emissions) reductions,” she added.
Ballesteros from NRGI noted that the company has focused most of its investments on new projects rather than maintaining existing ones.
In Minatitlán, one worker interviewed near the Cosoleacaque complex said, “it’s all messed up inside, but we are working to fix it”, while a neighbour said it was common to see fires and hear ambulances heading to the plant.
Ballesteros noted that the poor state of Pemex’s infrastructure is reflected in the number of leakage and spill events, which have increased since 2018, rising from 912 recorded events in 2018 to 1,211 incidents in 2023, according to the company’s annual statistics.
It may also be contributing to the high number of worker accidents. In 2023, Pemex reported 129 injuries and 11 fatalities. Its index for accident frequency in that same year was 57% above the industry standard set by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP).
A 2024 report by Reuters showed that the company put off urgent repairs to two of its offshore platforms, causing key components to fail and forcing it to flare large amounts of gas as a result.
“It’s very difficult for this trend [of rising methane emissions] to change soon,” said Patiño Alcala. “If this current administration has been clear in something it is that the environment is important, but it’s more important to provide Pemex with a market.”
Meanwhile, in Minatitlán, residents seem resigned to living with the clouds of gas and the light of the refinery’s flares painting the sky orange.
“With the leaks, even if we don’t see clearly, we know what is in the breeze,” said Irving, a 27-year-old oil worker who lives near the Cosoleacaque plant. “We know how this is, but that’s life for us.”
The post Oil giant Pemex fails to control methane emissions, threatening Mexico’s net zero goal appeared first on Climate Home News.
Oil giant Pemex fails to control methane emissions, threatening Mexico’s net zero goal
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein wants state lawmakers to rethink tax breaks for data centers. The industry’s opacity makes it difficult to evaluate costs and benefits.
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year into from state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral fund that provides climate and nature finance to developing countries, has raised $3.9 billion from donor governments in its last pledging session ahead of a key fundraising deadline at the end of May.
The amount, which is meant to cover the fund’s activities for the next four years (July 2026-June 2030), falls significantly short of the previous four-year cycle for which the GEF managed to raise $5.3bn from governments. Since then, military and other political priorities have squeezed rich nations’ budgets for climate and development aid.
The facility said in a statement that it expects more pledges ahead of the final replenishment package, which is set for approval at the next GEF Council meeting from May 31 to June 3.
Claude Gascon, interim CEO of the GEF, said that “donor countries have risen to the challenge and made bold commitments towards a more positive future for the planet”. He added that the pledges send a message that “the world is not giving up on nature even in a time of competing priorities”.
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Donors under pressure
But Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental non-profit Campaign for Nature, said the announcement shows “an alarming trend” of donor governments cutting public finance for climate and nature.
“Wealthy nations pledged to increase international nature finance, and yet we are seeing cuts and lower contributions. Investing in nature prevents extinctions and supports livelihoods, security, health, food, clean water and climate,” he said. “Failing to safeguard nature now will result in much larger costs later.”
At COP29 in Baku, developed countries pledged to mobilise $300bn a year in public climate finance by 2035, while at UN biodiversity talks they have also pledged to raise $30bn per year by 2030. Yet several wealthy governments have announced cuts to green finance to increase defense spending, among them most recently the UK.
As for the US, despite Trump’s cuts to international climate finance, Congress approved a $150 million increase in its contribution to the GEF after what was described as the organisation’s “refocus on non-climate priorities like biodiversity, plastics and ocean ecosystems, per US Treasury guidance”.
The facility will only reveal how much each country has pledged when its assembly of 186 member countries meets in early June. The last period’s largest donors were Germany ($575 million), Japan ($451 million), and the US ($425 million).
The GEF has also gone through a change in leadership halfway through its fundraising cycle. Last December, the GEF Council asked former CEO Carlos Manuel Rodriguez to step down effective immediately and appointed Gascon as interim CEO.
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New guidelines
As part of the upcoming funding cycle, the GEF has approved a set of guidelines for spending the $3.9bn raised so far, which include allocating 35% of resources for least developed countries and small island states, as well as 20% of the money going to Indigenous people and communities.
Its programs will help countries shift five key systems – nature, food, urban, energy and health – from models that drive degradation to alternatives that protect the planet and support human well-being by integrating the value of nature into production and consumption systems.
The new priorities also include a target to allocate 25% of the GEF’s budget for mobilising private funds through blended finance. This aligns with efforts by wealthy countries to increase contributions from the private sector to international climate finance.
Niels Annen, Germany’s State Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development, said in a statement that the country’s priorities are “very well reflected” in the GEF’s new spending guidelines, including on “innovative finance for nature and people, better cooperation with the private sector, and stable resources for the most vulnerable countries”.
Aliou Mustafa, of the GEF Indigenous Peoples Advisory Group (IPAG), also welcomed the announcement, adding that “the GEF is strengthening trust and meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities” by placing them at the “centre of decision-making”.
The post GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget
Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify when passing over marine heatwaves can become “supercharged”, increasing the likelihood of high economic losses, a new study finds.
Such storms also have higher rates of rainfall and higher maximum windspeeds, according to the research.
The study, published in Science Advances, looks at the economic damages caused by nearly 800 tropical cyclones that occurred around the world between 1981 and 2023.
It finds that rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones that pass near abnormally warm parts of the ocean produce nearly double – 93% – the economic damages as storms that do not, even when levels of coastal development are taken into account.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new analysis is a “step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future” in an increasingly warm world.
As marine heatwaves are projected to become more frequent under future climate change, the authors say that the interactions between storms and these heatwaves “should be given greater consideration in future strategies for climate adaptation and climate preparedness”.
‘Rapid intensification’
Tropical cyclones are rapidly rotating storm systems that form over warm ocean waters, characterised by low pressure at their cores and sustained winds that can reach more than 120 kilometres per hour.
The term “tropical cyclones” encompasses hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, which are named as such depending on which ocean basin they occur in.
When they make landfall, these storms can cause major damage. They accounted for six of the top 10 disasters between 1900 and 2024 in terms of economic loss, according to the insurance company Aon’s 2025 climate catastrophe insight report.
These economic losses are largely caused by high wind speeds, large amounts of rainfall and damaging storm surges.
Storms can become particularly dangerous through a process called “rapid intensification”.
Rapid intensification is when a storm strengthens considerably in a short period of time. It is defined as an increase in sustained wind speed of at least 30 knots (around 55 kilometres per hour) in a 24-hour period.
There are several factors that can lead to rapid intensification, including warm ocean temperatures, high humidity and low vertical “wind shear” – meaning that the wind speeds higher up in the atmosphere are very similar to the wind speeds near the surface.
Rapid intensification has become more common since the 1980s and is projected to become even more frequent in the future with continued warming. (Although there is uncertainty as to how climate change will impact the frequency of tropical cyclones, the increase in strength and intensification is more clear.)
Marine heatwaves are another type of extreme event that are becoming more frequent due to recent warming. Like their atmospheric counterparts, marine heatwaves are periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures.
Previous research has shown that these marine heatwaves can contribute to a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification. This is because the warm ocean water acts as a “fuel” for a storm, says Dr Hamed Moftakhari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who was one of the authors of the new study. He explains:
“The entire strength of the tropical cyclone [depends on] how hot the [ocean] surface is. Marine heatwave means we have an abundance of hot water that is like a gas [petrol] station. As you move over that, it’s going to supercharge you.”
However, the authors say, there is no global assessment of how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves interact – or how they contribute to economic damages.
Using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) – a database of tropical cyclone paths and intensities – the researchers identify 1,600 storms that made landfall during the 1981-2023 period, out of a total of 3,464 events.
Of these 1,600 storms, they were able to match 789 individual, land-falling cyclones with economic loss data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and other official sources.
Then, using the IBTrACS storm data and ocean-temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the researchers classify each cyclone by whether or not it underwent rapid intensification and if it passed near a recent marine heatwave event before making landfall.
The researchers find that there is a “modest” rise in the number of marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones globally since 1981, but with significant regional variations. In particular, they say, there are “clear” upward trends in the north Atlantic Ocean, the north Indian Ocean and the northern hemisphere basin of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
‘Storm characteristics’
The researchers find substantial differences in the characteristics of tropical cyclones that experience rapid intensification and those that do not, as well as between rapidly intensifying storms that occur with marine heatwaves and those that occur without them.
For example, tropical cyclones that do not experience rapid intensification have, on average, maximum wind speeds of around 40 knots (74km/hr), whereas storms that rapidly intensify have an average maximum wind speed of nearly 80 knots (148km/hr).
Of the rapidly intensifying storms, those that are influenced by marine heatwaves maintain higher wind speeds during the days leading up to landfall.
Although the wind speeds are very similar between the two groups once the storms make landfall, the pre-landfall difference still has an impact on a storm’s destructiveness, says Dr Soheil Radfar, a hurricane-hazard modeller at Princeton University. Radfar, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Hurricane damage starts days before the landfall…Four or five days before a hurricane making landfall, we expect to have high wind speeds and, because of that high wind speed, we expect to have storm surges that impact coastal communities.”
They also find that rapidly intensifying storms have higher peak rainfall than non-rapidly intensifying storms, with marine heatwave-influenced, rapidly intensifying storms exhibiting the highest average rainfall at landfall.
The charts below show the mean sustained wind speed in knots (top) and the mean rainfall in millimetres per hour (bottom) for the tropical cyclones analysed in the study in the five days leading up to and two days following a storm making landfall.
The four lines show storms that: rapidly intensified with the influence of marine heatwaves (red); those that rapidly intensified without marine heatwaves (purple); those that experienced marine heatwaves, but did not rapidly intensify (orange); and those that neither rapidly intensified nor experienced a marine heatwave (blue).
Dr Daneeja Mawren, an ocean and climate consultant at the Mauritius-based Mascarene Environmental Consulting who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new study “helps clarify how marine heatwaves amplify storm characteristics”, such as stronger winds and heavier rainfall. She notes that this “has not been done on a global scale before”.
However, Mawren adds that other factors not considered in the analysis can “make a huge difference” in the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, including subsurface marine heatwaves and eddies – circular, spinning ocean currents that can trap warm water.
Dr Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that, while the intensification found by the study “makes physical sense”, it is inherently limited by the relatively small number of storms that occur. He adds:
“There’s not that many storms, to tease out the physical mechanisms and observational data. So being able to reproduce this kind of work in a physical model would be really important.”
Economic costs
Storm intensity is not the only factor that determines how destructive a given cyclone can be – the economic damages also depend strongly on the population density and the amount of infrastructure development where a storm hits. The study explains:
“A high storm surge in a sparsely populated area may cause less economic damage than a smaller surge in a densely populated, economically important region.”
To account for the differences in development, the researchers use a type of data called “built-up volume”, from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Built-up volume is a quantity derived from satellite data and other high-resolution imagery that combines measurements of building area and average building height in a given area. This can be used as a proxy for the level of development, the authors explain.
By comparing different cyclones that impacted areas with similar built-up volumes, the researchers can analyse how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves contribute to the overall economic damages of a storm.
They find that, even when controlling for levels of coastal development, storms that pass through a marine heatwave during their rapid intensification cause 93% higher economic damages than storms that do not.
They identify 71 marine heatwave-influenced storms that cause more than $1bn (inflation-adjusted across the dataset) in damages, compared to 45 storms that cause those levels of damage without the influence of marine heatwaves.
This quantification of the cyclones’ economic impact is one of the study’s most “important contributions”, says Mawren.
The authors also note that the continued development in coastal regions may increase the likelihood of tropical cyclone damages over time.
Towards forecasting
The study notes that the increased damages caused by marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones, along with the projected increases in marine heatwaves, means such storms “should be given greater consideration” in planning for future climate change.
For Radfar and Moftakhari, the new study emphasises the importance of understanding the interactions between extreme events, such as tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves.
Moftakhari notes that extreme events in the future are expected to become both more intense and more complex. This becomes a problem for climate resilience because “we basically design in the future based on what we’ve observed in the past”, he says. This may lead to underestimating potential hazards, he adds.
Mawren agrees, telling Carbon Brief that, in order to “fully capture the intensification potential”, future forecasts and risk assessments must account for marine heatwaves and other ocean phenomena, such as subsurface heat.
Lin adds that the actions needed to reduce storm damages “take on the order of decades to do right”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“All these [planning] decisions have to come by understanding the future uncertainty and so this research is a step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future.”
The post Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones
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