Closing the methane gap in US oil and natural gas production emissions inventories

Rutherford, Jeff; Sherwin, Evan D.; Ravikumar, Arvind P.; Heath, Garvin; Englander, Jacob G.; Cooley, Daniel; Lyon, David; Omara, Mark; Langfitt, Quinn; Brandt, Adam R.

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-25017-4

Cited by 126 publications

(119 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Lu21 find higher oil-gas emissions for the US and Canada compared to GFEI v1 with high averaging kernel sensitivities for both countries. Many past studies in the US have found an underestimate of oil-gas emissions in the US national inventory (Alvarez et al, 2018;Cui et al, 2019;Maasakkers et al, 2019Rutherford et al, 2021), and similar underestimates have been shown for Canada's national inventory (Johnson et al, 2017;Atherton et al, 2017;Baray et al, 2018Baray et al, , 2021Chan et al, 2020;Scarpelli et al, 2022;MacKay et al, 2021;Tyner and Johnson, 2021). These underestimates are not addressed in the more recent versions of the national inventories as used in GFEI v2 (Table 2).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 56%

Updated Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory (GFEI) for methane emissions from the oil, gas, and coal sectors: evaluation with inversions of atmospheric methane observations

et al. 2022

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Abstract. We present an updated version of the Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory (GFEI) for methane emissions and evaluate it with results from global inversions of atmospheric methane observations from satellite (GOSAT) and in situ platforms (GLOBALVIEWplus). GFEI allocates methane emissions from oil, gas, and coal sectors and subsectors to a 0.1∘ × 0.1∘ grid by using the national emissions reported by individual countries to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and mapping them to infrastructure locations. Our updated GFEI v2 gives annual emissions for 2010–2019 that incorporate the most recent UNFCCC national reports, new oil–gas well locations, and improved spatial distribution of emissions for Canada, Mexico, and China. Russia's oil–gas emissions in its latest UNFCCC report (4.1 Tg a−1 for 2019) decrease by 83 % compared to its previous report while Nigeria's latest reported oil–gas emissions (3.1 Tg a−1 for 2016) increase 7-fold compared to its previous report, reflecting changes in assumed emission factors. Global gas emissions in GFEI v2 show little net change from 2010 to 2019 while oil emissions decrease and coal emissions slightly increase. Global emissions from the oil, gas, and coal sectors in GFEI v2 (26, 22, and 33 Tg a−1, respectively in 2019) are lower than the EDGAR v6 inventory (32, 44, and 37 Tg a−1 in 2018) and lower than the IEA inventory for oil and gas (38 and 43 Tg a−1 in 2019), though there is considerable variability between inventories for individual countries. GFEI v2 estimates higher emissions by country than the Climate TRACE inventory, with notable exceptions in Russia, the US, and the Middle East where TRACE is up to an order of magnitude higher than GFEI v2. Inversion results using GFEI as a prior estimate confirm the lower Russian emissions in the latest UNFCCC report but find that Nigeria's reported UNFCCC emissions are too high. Oil–gas emissions are generally underestimated by the national inventories for the highest emitting countries including the US, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Canada, and Turkmenistan. Offshore emissions tend to be overestimated. Our updated GFEI v2 provides a platform for future evaluation of national emission inventories reported to the UNFCCC using the newer generation of satellite instruments such as TROPOMI with improved coverage and spatial resolution. This increased observational data density will be especially beneficial in regions where current inversion systems have limited sensitivity including Russia. Our work responds to recent aspirations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to integrate top-down and bottom-up information into the construction of national emission inventories.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 56%

Updated Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory (GFEI) for methane emissions from the oil, gas, and coal sectors: evaluation with inversions of atmospheric methane observations

et al. 2022

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“…3 A, 4 A). From previous studies, CH 4 emissions in oil/gas production regions have been traced to a variety of sources: storage tanks 13 , 51 , dehydrators 22 , liquid unloading 52 , gathering stations 53 , pneumatic controllers 54 , or other equipment such as connectors or pipelines 55 . Higher gas production has been suggested to subject the aforementioned equipment to more throughput and thus higher pressure, thereby leading to CH 4 emissions that track production 56 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…CH 4 emissions from oil and gas infrastructure in the U.S. have attracted growing scientific and policy attention as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing significantly boosted U.S. production of oil and natural gas since the early 2000s, revolutionizing the nation’s energy production capabilities 10 . The past decade’s worth of research have revealed that: (a) Emissions can be dominated by a small number of sources (“super-emitters”), often associated with abnormal conditions or malfunctioning equipment 11 – 13 ; and (b) inventories underestimate CH 4 emissions, primarily in the production sector of the oil/natural gas supply chain 14 . Estimates point to emissions from the U.S. oil and natural gas supply chain to be 2.3% of the U.S. gas production 14 and a significant fraction (over 30%) of the entire anthropogenic U.S. CH 4 emissions 15 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Declining methane emissions and steady, high leakage rates observed over multiple years in a western US oil/gas production basin

Lin

Bares

Fasoli

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is the main component of natural gas. Previous research has identified considerable methane emissions associated with oil and gas production, but estimates of emission trends have been inconsistent, in part due to limited in-situ methane observations spanning multiple years in oil/gas production regions. Here we present a unique analysis of one of the longest-running datasets of in-situ methane observations from an oil/gas production region in Utah’s Uinta Basin. The observations indicate Uinta methane emissions approximately halved between 2015 and 2020, along with declining gas production. As a percentage of gas production, however, emissions remained steady over the same years, at ~ 6–8%, among the highest in the U.S. Addressing methane leaks and recovering more of the economically valuable natural gas is critical, as the U.S. seeks to address climate change through aggressive greenhouse emission reductions.

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“…Previous estimates of global CH 4 isotopic signatures from the exploitation of fossil fuels weighted the source signatures from one basin by its fuel production (Schwietzke et al, 2016). Recent work suggest that fuel production is not a reliable proxy to estimate CH 4 fugitive emissions (Zavala-Araiza et al, 2015;Alvarez et al, 2018;Rutherford et al, 2021;Chen et al, 2021;Maazallahi et al, 2021). Thus, the most relevant sampling locations would be ideally related to estimated emission rates from top-down measurements, instead of production or bottom-up emission estimates.…”

Section: Global Data Overview and Representativenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Users need to define the dominant CH 4 sources impacting an area, as well as the relative source type emission rates. Emission inventories provide such estimates, but top-down approaches are essential to identify potential biases and evaluate the bottom-up approaches (Alvarez et al, 2018; Etiope and 300 Schwietzke, 2019;Rutherford et al, 2021;Stavert et al, 2021).…”

Section: Global Data Distributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global inventory of the stable isotopic composition of methane surface emissions, augmented by new measurements in Europe

Menoud

Veen

Lowry

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Abstract. Recent climate change mitigation strategies rely on the reduction of methane (CH4) emissions. δ13CCH4 and δ2HCH4 measurements can be used to distinguish sources and thus to understand the CH4 budget better. The CH4 emission estimates by models are sensitive to the isotopic signatures assigned to each source category, so it is important to provide representative estimates of the different CH4 source isotopic signatures worldwide. We present new measurements of isotope signatures of various, mainly anthropogenic, CH4 sources in Europe, which represent a substantial contribution to the global dataset of source isotopic measurements from the literature, especially for δ2HCH4. They improve the definition of δ13CCH4 from waste sources, and demonstrate the use of δ2HCH4 for fossil fuel source attribution. Results from previous studies were combined in a common database that we updated with our new measurements, as well as with additional literature. We found that microbial sources are generally well characterised. The large variability in fossil fuels isotopic compositions requires particular care in the choice of weighting criteria for the calculation of a representative global value. The global dataset could be further improved by measurements from African, South American and Asian countries, as well as more measurements from pyrogenic sources. The final version of the European methane isotope database coupled with a global inventory of fossil and non-fossil δ13CCH4 and δ2HCH4 source signature measurements, is available at: https://doi.org/10.24416/UU01-4PO56T (Menoud et al., 2021a).

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Closing the methane gap in US oil and natural gas production emissions inventories

Cited by 126 publications

References 40 publications

Updated Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory (GFEI) for methane emissions from the oil, gas, and coal sectors: evaluation with inversions of atmospheric methane observations

Updated Global Fuel Exploitation Inventory (GFEI) for methane emissions from the oil, gas, and coal sectors: evaluation with inversions of atmospheric methane observations

Declining methane emissions and steady, high leakage rates observed over multiple years in a western US oil/gas production basin

Global inventory of the stable isotopic composition of methane surface emissions, augmented by new measurements in Europe

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