Slashing oil & gas methane waste: A win-win-win opportunity

Every molecule of methane leaked, vented, or flared from oil and gas infrastructure is energy wasted, and money lost. That is to say nothing of the climate cost, with methane accounting for up to 30 percent of warming to date.

The extent of the inefficiencies is staggering. The International Energy Agency has put the sector’s methane leakage at 210 billion cubic meters per year. That represents nearly one-fifth of US gas production and over one-third of the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade. It is on the order of $100 billion dollars per year in foregone revenue — equivalent to over 15 percent of upstream oil and gas investment.

RMI has placed methane mitigation at the core of our work because of the win-win-win opportunity for energy security, energy efficiency, and the climate. For years, industry actors had insufficient motivation to prioritize methane mitigation. Now momentum is gathering as governments, companies, and NGOs are breaking down these barriers. Increasingly reliable data, smarter policies, and more robust standards are strengthening incentives for action.

Addressing the information gap with emissions visibility

For decades, it was difficult to estimate methane leakage, let alone detect, measure, and quantify it. But that is changing rapidly. As last year’s National Petroleum Council (NPC) study Charting the Course: Reducing GHG Emissions from the US Natural Gas Supply Chain showed, technology choices have proliferated in recent years — thanks to a burgeoning methane ecosystem of companies, governments, universities, and NGOs.

Progress started gathering steam about a decade ago, with studies showing that standard estimates dramatically undercounted oil and gas methane emissions and just a handful of leaks — “super-emitters” — could account for as much as half of the sector’s methane emissions. The need for better detection and measurement was becoming clear. The creation of the Methane Emissions Technology Evaluation Center (METEC) in 2017 further propelled research and development, with over 100 detection and quantification technologies tested by METEC since then. Technologies are now far beyond the handheld optical gas imaging (OGI) camera, which long was among the few options available.

Nonprofit satellite programs are at the center of the latest developments. Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Carbon Mapper each sent satellites into orbit last year, addressing critical gaps in global methane mitigation. As a Carbon Mapper consortium member, RMI has experienced firsthand the breakneck speed of progress. Formed in  April 2021 with the lofty goal of deploying a constellation of satellites that could pinpoint super-emitters and provide timely publicly available data, the Carbon Mapper consortium achieved its initial aims in less than four years. Carbon Mapper’s Tanager-1 is a point-source satellite that complements EDF’s aerial satellite, MethaneSAT.

Even as measurement technologies have advanced, stitching all of these snapshots together requires extensive modeling. A great deal of progress is being made in the areas of quantification and lifecycle modeling as well. Case in point is RMI’s pioneering Oil Climate Index Plus Gas (OCI+) tool, which has gone from covering under 50 percent of oil and gas assets to 100 percent across the entire supply chain in the past three years.

Closing the data-to-action gap with market-based incentives

Data is essential but often is not enough to get stakeholders to act. That is why the road from data to methane action is paved with incentives through policies, standards, and voluntary initiatives. Here, too, progress is accelerating, even if there is plenty more work ahead.

RMI is a leader in the creation of climate-differentiated markets — to incorporate emissions into energy purchase decisions. We co-created the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA) and the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance (SABA).

In collaboration with SystemIQ, we established MiQ in December 2020. MiQ is a performance standard designed to accelerate emissions reductions by differentiating gas based on methane leakage. As a technically robust, open-source, independent standard, MiQ provides buyers and sellers across the value chain with the information and incentive to factor methane emissions into transactions. In only four years, MiQ has successfully certified over 20 percent of US gas supply – nearly double the amount of LNG imported by Europe last year.

As a complement to MiQ, policies and international initiatives differentiating gas by emissions have made notable advances. Europe is driving the development of differentiated markets through methane legislation. In the next few years, European buyers will need to demonstrate that their imports meet a low methane intensity threshold, thereby sending signals to suppliers to reduce their emissions. In Asia, the Coalition for LNG Emission Abatement toward Net-zero (CLEAN), established in 2023, aims to boost emissions transparency and abatement across the global LNG supply chain, leveraging Japan and South Korea’s market power.

Corporate action is gaining traction. The wave of oil and gas net-zero commitments started in late 2019 and reached a high watermark in December 2023 with the Oil & Gas Decarbonization Charter (OGDC) announced at COP28. There are currently 55 OGDC signatories — including over 30 national oil companies (NOCs) — which have committed to net-zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2050. They also pledged to slash upstream methane emissions to “near zero” — below 0.2 percent methane intensity — and end routine flaring by 2030. In parallel, signatories to the Oil & Gas Methane Partnership (OGMP) 2.0 have expanded substantially in the past two years to over 140 companies. Such voluntary initiatives build in commitment mechanisms, from raising public expectations around disclosure to stoking competition on emissions performance.

Financial incentives are helping to drive corporate action. The IEA estimates that $100 billion in spending is required to cut oil and gas methane emissions in line with net-zero scenarios by 2030. Cash-strapped NOCs are in particular need of methane-mitigation financing, but financial firms have to date lacked guidance and confidence that such efforts align with climate priorities. RMI, EDF, and other organizations are trying to fill this gap through joint thought leadership on the importance of NOCs and methane abatement finance. We are also engaging across industry and financial institutions to develop tools and guidelines — underpinned by robust data — to catalyze investment in methane mitigation.

Doubling down amid US policy uncertainty

The US has been a key driver of this global methane momentum, but now may roll back or remove federal methane policies. This would be a setback for energy security, energy efficiency, and climate goals. The Waste Emissions Charge (WEC) — requiring operators to pay a fee for high methane emissions — combined with EPA rules that include a focus on advancing emissions detection technologies effectively laid the groundwork for the US to demonstrate its competitiveness as a low-emissions and low-cost source of gas in global markets.

In the shadow of US policy uncertainty, it is even more critical that companies, investors, NGOs, and other governments continue to advance the market-based methane mitigation solutions outlined above. This includes US states, which have an opportunity to assume the mantle of domestic methane leadership, drawing on the work done at the federal level.

This article was made possible with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies. The article reflects the views of the authors and not necessarily those of the supporting organizations.