Nearly a tenth of the oil and gas industry’s global methane emissions have been found to come from a group of “ultra-emitter” sites located mostly in Russia and the US
have been run through an algorithm to automatically detect the biggest plumes of methane streaming from oil and gas facilities worldwide.These ultra-emitters were spotted pumping out more than 25 tonnes of methane an hour. That’s “a heck of a lot”, says Steve Hamburg at Environmental Defense Fund , a US non-profit organisation. Collectively, these contribute about 8 million tonnes of methane a year, about a tenth of the oil and gas industry’s total annual emissions for 2019-20.
Turkmenistan was the biggest ultra-emitter, releasing more than a million tonnes of methane between 2019 and 2020. Russia was second at just under a million tonnes, followed by the US, Iran, Algeria and Kazakhstan.The US count is probably low because it excluded a major oil and gas region, the Permian basin, due to monitoring difficulties. By contrast to these countries, other major oil producing countries, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, had very few ultra-emitters.
The study also found that ultra-emitting sites are releasing so much methane, which could be sold, that it should be cost effective to solve. For the six worst countries, tackling those plumes should cost up to $300 less per tonne than it would typically cost to reduce methane from oil and gas facilities in those nations. “Getting rid of these would be very inexpensive,” says Shindell.
The satellite isn’t everywhere all the time, so the findings are based on a snapshot and some ultra-emitters may have gone undetected. Hamburg says that while the global scope of the research is new and welcome, it is worth remembering that ultra-emitters are only a small slice of oil and gas’s methane problem.
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