Global Assessment of Oil and Gas Methane Ultra-Emitters

TL;DR

This study quantifies the contribution of ultra-emitters to global methane emissions from oil and gas operations, highlighting their significant impact and the potential for cost-effective mitigation strategies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of ultra-emitters using satellite data, revealing their distribution, scale, and potential for mitigation across major oil and gas regions.

Findings

Ultra-emitters account for 8-12% of global O&G methane emissions.

Detection follows a power-law relationship with regional variations.

Mitigation of ultra-emitters offers substantial economic and environmental benefits.

Abstract

Methane emissions from oil and gas (O&G) production and transmission represent a significant contribution to climate change. These emissions comprise sporadic releases of large amounts of methane during maintenance operations or equipment failures not accounted for in current inventory estimates. We collected and analyzed hundreds of very large releases from atmospheric methane images sampled by the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) over 2019 and 2020 to quantify emissions from O&G ultra-emitters. Ultra-emitters are primarily detected over the largest O&G basins of the world, following a power-law relationship with noticeable variations across countries but similar regression slopes. With a total contribution equivalent to 8-12% of the global O&G production methane emissions, mitigation of ultra-emitters is largely achievable at low costs and would lead to robust net benefits in billions of US dollars for the six major producing countries when incorporating recent estimates of societal costs of methane.