The world’s energy watchdog has warned that Fossil fuel companies must pay tens of billions to reduce the emissions of methane from their operations or it will be almost impossible to meet global climate targets.
The US is said to be the biggest source of methane emissions from oil and gas extraction, as a result of the massive expansion of its oil and gas sector, while China is the biggest emitter of methane from coal mining. Russia also continues to be a major emitter as its fossil fuel operations are poorly run.
According to data published on Wednesday by the International Energy Agency (IEA), leaks from coalmines and oil and gas wells are the biggest sources of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that has caused about 30% of the temperature increases seen to date.
About 170bn cubic metres of methane was emitted from fossil fuel operations around the world last year, which is more than the entire natural gas production of Qatar. Yet many of these leaks could easily be plugged if the best practices developed in some countries – such as Norway, which has low methane leaks from its oil and gas drilling operations – were adopted around the world.
Currently, the least efficient operations are about 100 times worse than the most efficient, with Turkmenistan and Venezuela the worst offenders. One well blowout in Kazakhstan last year produced large quantities of methane for more than 200 days.
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In a global survey of methane published on Wednesday, the IEA calculated that $170bn would be needed to reduce global methane emissions by 75%, of which $100bn was needed in oil and gas and $70bn in the coal industry. That would give the world a much-improved chance of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, the report found.
The spending required from fossil fuel companies to clean up their operations would be the equivalent of about 5% of the enormous profits they made last year, the IEA estimated.
Reacting, Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser now with American University in Washington, said the US must ensure all producers followed best practice.
“Now that the US is the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, its industry must finally commit to near-zero methane emissions by the end of this decade, even as the Biden administration regulates methane more strictly, or face a consumer backlash,” he warned. “At the same time, Russia continues to have the highest rate of methane leakage, another reason for the EU and others to continue boycotting the gas that is funding Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. And China must shut down many of its coalmines, as methane adds to CO2 to produce the most greenhouse gas-heavy fossil fuel in the world.”
Despite a pledge of action on methane from more than 200 countries, emissions of the gas remained near to the record high set in 2019, according to the IEA report. The energy adviser’s Global Methane Tracker also found that real world emissions were far higher than countries or companies were reporting.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
