Satellite quantification of oil and natural gas methane emissions in the US and Canada including contributions from individual basins

Shen, Lu; Gautam, Ritesh; Omara, Mark; Zavala-Araiza, Daniel; Maasakkers, Joannes D.; Scarpelli, Tia R.; Lorente, Alba; Lyon, David; Sheng, Jianxiong; Varon, Daniel J.; Nesser, Hannah; Qu, Zhen; Lu, Xiao; Sulprizio, Melissa P.; Hamburg, Steven P.; Jacob, Daniel J.

doi:10.5194/acp-22-11203-2022

Cited by 44 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 57 publications

(74 reference statements)

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“…Accurate estimates of average emissions at the basin level are insufficient for developing target-based policies such as methane fees, methane border adjustments, or low leakage certification frameworks. Individual transactions involving natural gas, even at high volumes, can be sourced from a small number of high-producing assets, and there can be significant design, operational, and maintenance variations that impact emissions even within a basin or sub-basin. ,− In this context, multiscale measurements of methane emissions have demonstrated the need for a robust approach to improve emissions inventories.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Individual transactions involving natural gas, even at high volumes, can be sourced from a small number of high-producing assets, and there can be significant design, operational, and maintenance variations that impact emissions even within a basin or sub-basin. 16 , 50 − 52 In this context, multiscale measurements of methane emissions have demonstrated the need for a robust approach to improve emissions inventories.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Multiscale Methane Measurements at Oil and Gas Facilities Reveal Necessary Frameworks for Improved Emissions Accounting

Wang

Daniels

Hammerling

et al. 2022

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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Methane mitigation from the oil and gas (O&G) sector represents a key near-term global climate action opportunity. Recent legislation in the United States requires updating current methane reporting programs for oil and gas facilities with empirical data. While technological advances have led to improvements in methane emissions measurements and monitoring, the overall effectiveness of mitigation strategies rests on quantifying spatially and temporally varying methane emissions more accurately than the current approaches. In this work, we demonstrate a quantification, monitoring, reporting, and verification framework that pairs snapshot measurements with continuous emissions monitoring systems (CEMS) to reconcile measurements with inventory estimates and account for intermittent emission events. We find that site-level emissions exhibit significant intraday and daily emission variations. Snapshot measurements of methane can span over 3 orders of magnitude and may have limited application in developing annualized inventory estimates at the site level. Consequently, while official inventories underestimate methane emissions on average, emissions at individual facilities can be higher or lower than inventory estimates. Using CEMS, we characterize distributions of frequency and duration of intermittent emission events. Technologies that allow high sampling frequency such as CEMS, paired with a mechanistic understanding of facility-level events, are key to an accurate accounting of short-duration, episodic, and high-volume events that are often missed in snapshot surveys and to scale snapshot measurements to annualized emissions estimates.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiscale Methane Measurements at Oil and Gas Facilities Reveal Necessary Frameworks for Improved Emissions Accounting

Wang

Daniels

Hammerling

et al. 2022

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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“…The column-averaged dryair methane mixing ratio (XCH 4 ) is retrieved with a fullphysics algorithm (Butz et al, 2011) together with surface and atmospheric scattering properties. We use the recently updated TROPOMI version 2.02 retrieval from the Netherlands Institute for Space Research (Lorente et al, 2021; http://www.tropomi.eu/data-products/methane, last access: 10 October 2021), filtering out low-quality retrievals ("qa_value" < 0.5) and surfaces above 2 km where the stratospheric contribution to the column is large (Shen et al, 2022). We further adopt the "blended albedo" filter suggested in Lorente et al (2021) to remove snow-or icecovered scenes identified by blended albedo exceeding 0.8 from October to April.…”

Section: Tropomi Observationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methane emissions from China: a high-resolution inversion of TROPOMI satellite observations

et al. 2022

Self Cite

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Abstract. We quantify methane emissions in China and the contributions from different sectors by inverse analysis of 2019 TROPOMI satellite observations of atmospheric methane. The inversion uses as a prior estimate the latest 2014 national sector-resolved anthropogenic emission inventory reported by the Chinese government to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and thus serves as a direct evaluation of that inventory. Emissions are optimized with a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) at up to 0.25∘×0.3125∘ resolution. The optimization is done analytically assuming log-normally distributed errors on prior emissions. Errors and information content on the optimized estimates are obtained directly from the analytical solution and also through a 36-member inversion ensemble. Our best estimate for total anthropogenic emissions in China is 65.0 (57.7–68.4) Tg a−1, where parentheses indicate the uncertainty range determined by the inversion ensemble. Contributions from individual sectors include 16.6 (15.6–17.6) Tg a−1 for coal, 2.3 (1.8–2.5) for oil, 0.29 (0.23–0.32) for gas, 17.8 (15.1–21.0) for livestock, 9.3 (8.2–9.9) for waste, 11.9 (10.7–12.7) for rice paddies, and 6.7 (5.8–7.1) for other sources. Our estimate is 21% higher than the Chinese inventory reported to the UNFCCC (53.6 Tg a−1), reflecting upward corrections to emissions from oil (+147 %), gas (+61 %), livestock (+37 %), waste (+41 %), and rice paddies (+34 %), but downward correction for coal (−15 %). It is also higher than previous inverse studies (43–62 Tg a−1) that used the much sparser GOSAT satellite observations and were conducted at coarser resolution. We are in particular better able to separate coal and rice emissions. Our higher livestock emissions are attributed largely to northern China where GOSAT has little sensitivity. Our higher waste emissions reflect at least in part a rapid growth in wastewater treatment in China. Underestimate of oil emissions in the UNFCCC report appears to reflect unaccounted-for super-emitting facilities. Gas emissions in China are mostly from distribution, in part because of low emission factors from production and in part because 42 % of the gas is imported. Our estimate of emissions per unit of domestic gas production indicates a low life-cycle loss rate of 1.7 % (1.3 %–1.9 %), which would imply net climate benefits from the current “coal-to-gas” energy transition in China. However, this small loss rate is somewhat misleading considering China's high gas imports, including from Turkmenistan where emission per unit of gas production is very high.

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“…The Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico is the largest oil-producing basin in the United States, accounting for more than 40% of U.S. oil production (FRBD, 2022). Bottom-up and top-down estimates of methane emissions from the Permian vary widely, from 0.6 Tg a -1 as reported in the gridded version of the 2012 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) greenhouse gas inventory (GHGI; Maasakkers et al, 2016) extrapolated to 2018 (Shen et al, 2022), to more than 3.7 Tg a -1 as inferred by Shen et al (2022) from 2018-2020 TROPOMI satellite observations. Y. reported combined emissions of 194 t h -1 (1.7 Tg a -1 ) from point sources surveyed aerially across the New Mexico Permian Basin from October 2018 through January 2020, corresponding to 9.4% of the region's gross gas production, a methane intensity more than twice that inferred from basin-wide satellite observations (Zhang et al, 2020;Schneising et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2021; https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2022-749 Preprint.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Continuous weekly monitoring of methane emissions from the Permian Basin by inversion of TROPOMI satellite observations

Varon

Jacob

Hmiel

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Abstract. We quantify weekly methane emissions at 0.25°×0.3125° (≈25×25 km2) resolution from the Permian Basin, the largest oil production basin in the United States, by inverse analysis of satellite observations from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) from May 2018 to October 2020. The mean oil and gas emission from the region (± standard deviation of weekly estimates) was 3.7 ± 0.9 Tg a-1, higher than previous TROPOMI inversion estimates that may have used too-low prior emissions or biased background assumptions. We find strong week-to-week variability in emissions superimposed on longer-term trends, and these are consistent with independent inferences of temporal emission variability from tower, aircraft, and multispectral satellite data. New well development and local natural gas spot price were significant drivers of variability in emissions over our study period, but the concurrent 50 % increase in oil and gas production was not. The methane intensity (methane emitted per unit of methane gas produced) averaged 4.6 % ± 1.3 % and steadily decreased over the period from 5–6 % in 2018 to 3–4 % in 2020. While the decreasing trend suggests improvement in operator practices during the study period, methane emissions from the Permian Basin remained high, with methane intensity an order of magnitude above recent industry targets of <0.2 %. Our success in using TROPOMI satellite observations for weekly estimates of emissions from a major oil production basin shows promise for application to near-real-time monitoring in support of climate change mitigation efforts.

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Satellite quantification of oil and natural gas methane emissions in the US and Canada including contributions from individual basins

Cited by 44 publications

References 57 publications

Multiscale Methane Measurements at Oil and Gas Facilities Reveal Necessary Frameworks for Improved Emissions Accounting

Multiscale Methane Measurements at Oil and Gas Facilities Reveal Necessary Frameworks for Improved Emissions Accounting

Methane emissions from China: a high-resolution inversion of TROPOMI satellite observations

Continuous weekly monitoring of methane emissions from the Permian Basin by inversion of TROPOMI satellite observations

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