>> I don't believe royalties are paid at the pad but rather further down the line
That's not true in any regime I'm aware of. Ownership and royalties are accounted for at the zone, which is well before the wellhead, let-alone downstream. Any loss between where the gas is produced and the final sale is known as "shrinkage" which can be allocated to different buckets, most commonly fuel and flaring. I'm not sure where leakage would be accounted for, probably "Transmission" or "Distribution".
What's criminal is that unaccounted for gas (known as UAF) is widely measured on the end-user distribution network, so I'd be very surprised if Oil Co. didn't have all the information they need to figure out loss from the wellhead. They either can't be bothered to amalgamate the data or just don't want to know the answer (or do and keep it secret).
That's not true in any regime I'm aware of. Ownership and royalties are accounted for at the zone, which is well before the wellhead, let-alone downstream. Any loss between where the gas is produced and the final sale is known as "shrinkage" which can be allocated to different buckets, most commonly fuel and flaring. I'm not sure where leakage would be accounted for, probably "Transmission" or "Distribution".
What's criminal is that unaccounted for gas (known as UAF) is widely measured on the end-user distribution network, so I'd be very surprised if Oil Co. didn't have all the information they need to figure out loss from the wellhead. They either can't be bothered to amalgamate the data or just don't want to know the answer (or do and keep it secret).