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An environmental organization says it has documented significant releases of pollution from a natural gas facility near Laredo.
Earthworks says the emissions of methane and other possible hazardous chemicals were captured using a specialized infrared camera at the facility on Monday, Nov. 9, at Howard Energy Spears natural gas facility near Encinal. The facility is primarily owned by Howard Energy Partners, based in San Antonio. They are one of the largest privately held midstream infrastructure companies in the country.
Andrew Klooster is the senior thermographer at Earthworks who took the images of the emissions from the ground. He uses a specially designed Optical Gas Imaging, or OGI camera.
“It allows us to visualize certain pollutants that are invisible to the naked eye, and in particular, the pollutants that we're looking for when we are training our OGI camera on an oil and gas facility, are methane, which is the primary component in natural gas, but is also a major greenhouse gas that's released directly into the atmosphere, and then other volatile organic compounds, like benzene, toluene, which are often co-pollutants with, methane and are harmful to human health.”
Klooster says the information Earthworks gathered has been handed over to The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
“It's something that needs to be investigated further, but it's always concerning when you see these sorts of emissions because, again, they're harmful to the environment, potentially harmful to human health,” Klooster added.
Earthworks says satellite imaging shows previous emissions from the plant eight times since 2025.
Tanager-1 is a space satellite deployed in 2024 that is specifically designed to detect and track methane and CO2 super-emitters with state-of-the-art imaging capability.
The Tanager-1 satellite documented pollution from space emitting from this facility each of the five times it was observed in 2025 and again twice in August and once in September of 2026.
Edgar Villaseñor is advocacy campaign manager at the Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo. RGISC has formed partnerships and alliances with a diversity of groups to improve the environmental health of the area.
Villaseñor says he believes the oil and gas industry in the area doesn’t follow the rules.
“What concerns me the most is that there's not enough oversight on them. So even though they have rules to follow and they're supposed to follow certain procedures, there's nobody really overseeing these facilities," he told TPR.
Villaseñor says the TCEQ has not been much help.
“I would like to see them be a legit regulation agency because as of right now, it feels like they're very industry-in-favor-of-industry. And so it doesn't make sense to have this agency that's supposed to take care of our quality of life, and they're not doing much. I really want them to hold these industries more accountable.”
Earthworks believes the emissions captured on Nov. 9 may be considered a so-called super-emitter event, which the Environmental Protection Agency defines as having an emissions rate of 100 kilograms per hour or greater. Evidence of the recent emissions from the Spears facility has been turned over to TCEQ.
Howard Energy Partners did not respond to TPR's request for comment.
