Almost 90 per cent of satellite-detected methane leaks flagged to governments and oil and gas companies are not being acknowledged, the UN said Wednesday ahead of next month’s COP30 climate talks.
The International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO), which integrates over 17 satellites to observe plumes, got a 12 per cent response rate from 3,500 alerts from leaks detected across the oil and gas sector, the report said, marking limited progress from last year’s response rate, when only one per cent of alerts resulted in action to prevent them.
Although methane stays in the atmosphere for less time than carbon dioxide, which is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, it is much more effective at trapping heat.
As a result, scientists consider cutting methane emissions to be the fastest way to tackle climate change in the near term. More than 150 countries have signed a 2021 pledge to cut methane emissions by 30 per cent this decade.
“Actions remain too slow,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, which oversees the observatory’s Methane Alert and Response System, which remotely detects leaks of the colourless gas.
“We are talking about tightening the screws in some cases,” Anderson said, referring to methane leaks from the oil and gas sector from venting and flaring. “We can’t ignore these rather easy wins.”
Stephane Germain, president of GHGSat Inc., with a life-size model of a satellite in their offices in Montreal. (Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press)
Montreal-based GHGSat is a leading provider of methane monitoring, with 13 satellites in orbit right now — 12 of which are dedicated to methane. The company, through a partnership with Ottawa, has been providing data to the IMEO since 2020, and its president says the current response rate represents an opportunity for companies.
“You can do something that actually is profitable because your methane is natural gas and you can convert the gas into something you can sell into a market,” Stéphane Germain told CBC News.
“Methane really is the quick win. It’s a huge opportunity, both because you can fix it fast and actually generate a profit from it, and because it has a greater impact on global warming in the short term than carbon dioxide so it gives us an opportunity to buy more time in the fight against climate change.”
The report said it has documented 25 instances when a notification led to a large emissions event being fixed. At the start of this month, investors representing over 4.5 trillion euros ($7.3 trillion Cdn) of assets urged the European Union not to weaken its methane emissions law following concerns the EU might relax the rules to facilitate increased LNG imports from the U.S., as part of the bloc’s efforts to smooth trade tensions.
Methane leaks from the oil and gas sector offer the most potential for mitigation, the IMEO says.
But it also plans to expand its detection work to include emissions from other major sources, including metallurgical coal for steel production, waste and agriculture, says IMEO head Giulia Ferrini.
Germaine says he sees momentum growing ahead of the COP30 summit, especially on methane emissions from the agricultural sector, which account for 40 per cent of humanall -caused methane emissions.
