It’s Time to Target the Super-emitters

Antoine Halff, Co-founder of Kayrros, says data-driven enforcement should be used to eliminate massive methane dumps.

It’s worth remembering that change takes time. That is the unexciting reality of progress: it is often more a question of hard work, organisation and patience than exuberance. And this is as true for climate action, despite our urgent need to find solutions, as it is for anything else. Policies and strategies must be thought-through and drawn-up. They must be executed. Data must be gathered. Improvements and iterations must be made. It can be months if not years before we start to see their effects. To dismiss too hastily a piece of climate action as worthless, therefore, is misguided.

But we can nevertheless make sound critical judgments on the success or failure of certain actions, or at least make connections between actions and outcomes. One is that on balance, after more than three years, the Global Methane Pledge (GMP) – which was launched in 2021 at COP26 and has accumulated over 156 signatures since – has yet to make a dent on emissions. The signatories, led by the EU and US, set a target of reducing global, man-made emissions of methane by 30% from 2020 levels within a decade. Progress is critical to the battle against climate change because methane is the second largest cause of global warming and the most potent greenhouse gas in the first 20 years. Yet methane concentrations are rising.

What’s concerning is that in Kayrros’ latest study on the GMP, which involved looking at 13 of the most prolific fossil fuel basins worldwide, including in 10 signatories of the GMP, the US was shown to be one of the worst performers. This is a red flag. The US has championed the pledge, and in many other areas has shown genuine climate leadership. But its oil and gas production has been on the rise, and its methane footprint has followed suit – even if the methane intensity of the Permian, its most prolific oil and gas basin, has been edging lower lately.

Taking too long to deliver

Should we abandon the pledge? Of course not. The reasoning behind it is sound. Methane is a super-pollutant. As the International Energy Agency (IEA) has noted, cutting methane emissions is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to limit global warming that is available to us. But satellite monitoring suggests that the current approach is taking far too long to deliver results. We can do better than that. And we can do better by stressing data-driven enforcement.

Contrary to widespread belief, the problem with methane mitigation is no longer detection. Yes, there is a line of argument that we must build very sophisticated, comprehensive monitoring platforms to assess the full methane footprint of the oil and gas sector; but an alternative is that we work from what we can already see: the large-point source emissions, which, though not accounting for the totality of emissions, should not be tolerated regardless.

Large point-source emissions, aka ‘super-emitters’, are not the whole of emissions. Nor does satellite monitoring catch all of them. But those that it catches are indisputable, are comparatively easy to fix, would dramatically reduce our methane footprint if they were fixed, and should never happen in the first place. Rooting out those large methane leaks caused by outdated venting practices would only be a first step. But it would deliver massive, tangible results.

Delaying action and enforcement until we have done a full life-cycle analysis of methane emissions from oil and gas is unwise, because doing those things amounts to an herculean undertaking that runs the risk of being exposed to endless pushback and criticism anyway. Since satellite technology already casts a very clear light on massive methane dumps, policy should be designed and signed into law with the aim of discouraging and even outlawing these practices. We can do this now. And it would start to move the needle on emissions. That would start to transform the vision of the GMP into reality.

Encouraging signs

It’s encouraging to see satellite data guiding progressive climate policy. The EU Methane Regulation, signed into law at the end of May this year, was developed on the basis of geospatial data. It obliges the fossil gas, oil and coal industry in Europe to measure, monitor, report and verify their methane emissions according to the highest standards, then take action to reduce them. Geospatial data ensures such a law can be enforced. In the US, the Inflation Reduction Act, the flagship policy of the Biden administration, will use geospatial data to track which oil and gas companies are over-emitting methane relative to their production volumes and then tax them accordingly.

But, as I‘ve alluded to, policy can reap faster and larger results by first focusing on the low-hanging fruits: the highly concentrated super-emitters and the relatively small number of countries, companies and assets responsible for them .

Climate Week NYC is now behind us. COP29 looms. Floods have devastated central Europe. Wildfires have scarred the north of Portugal. These events can together become a catalyst for further, deeper and bolder action on methane, carried out through policy guided by the satellite data we already have. Then perhaps, by this time next year, the story of the Global Methane Pledge will be a happier one.

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